Road trip around Spain

My road trip from Barcelona to Madrid to Granada kept reminding me of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. Not in any literal way—more like a low-frequency hum, a way of moving through space.

I had never really traveled in Spain before. Well–unless you count a very short trip from Lisbon to Tarifa with an overnight stay in Seville to catch a ferry to Tangier. Or that symposium in the famous Galician town of Santiago de Compostela where I saw those unmistakable tall, pointed hats worn by members of brotherhoods during holy week processions. That kind of counts. Barely.

As I had to return to Lisbon one last time to attend the official ceremony. Flying all that way just to turn around and go home after a couple of days felt wrong, so I added a road trip across Spain as a necessary justification. When the ceremony began and the high priests of the University entered in full regalia, I thought thought to myself: nobody expects the Spanish inquisition. But nothing dramatic happened. We listened to long speeches, received our PhD medals, shook hands. With that, my Lisbon story ended, and the next day I landed in Barcelona.

Things improved with every kilometer as I was gradually moving towards Andalusia, where Jarmusch ends his film in a kind of liberating crescendo, somewhere in the Tabernas desert. But first things first. The film opens with a quote, and it felt right to let it echo here, as a reminder that you don’t get anywhere by staying on the main road.

“As I descended into impossible rivers, I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.”

Arthur Rimbaud

After landing in Barcelona I visited the city’s biggest tourist trap: the Sagrada Família. To be fair, tho whole city feels like a tourist trap–worse than Lisbon. But once I got out onto the road, everything changed. Long stretches of emptiness. Wide skies. Endless olive trees. Half of Spain looks like a desert. If you leave the highways, it feels like Mexico, or Route 66–only much safer. Traveling off-season helps too: affordable prices everywhere except the places you should avoid anyway.

Of course, you can’t avoid them completely. Stopping overnight in Zaragoza, I visited the Basilica of our Lady of the Pillar and the Moorish palace of Aljafería.

The basilica is beautiful, dense with history, like flags of all territories that used to be Spanish colonies.

The palace was something else entirely. Its stunning ceilings were ordered by new Catholic rulers but executed in the Mudéjar style—Islamic ornamentation built on repetition and geometry. Mudéjar literally means “those who were permitted to remain”: Moors who stayed after the Christian conquest.

From here on, things loosened. As if the atmosphere itself invited me to enter the void. As if the vast stretchess of emptiness opened me up.

I made a detour to one of Spain’s more remote areas – the village of Albarracín. People became friendlier, lighter, unburdened by the hordes of tourists. A short hike. A night in the village. Things aligned. First at dusk…

…and then in the morning.

Nearby came my first real highlight: prehistoric cave paintings scattered across the Iberian peninsula. A short hike through the Pinares de Rodeno led magnicent paintings of animals–fragile, but stubbornly present.

To reach Madrid I drove through Serranía de Cuenca National Park, so empty of humans that I encountered a family of deer calmly parading on the road. They lingered, unbothered in front of my car, then suddenly decided to vanish leaping up a steep rocky slope.

In Madrid, I barely took photos. The Reina Sofía was the real destination. Not because of Picasso, not even Guernica. It was the early Dalí works and especially Juan Gris that held my attention. In The Limits of Control, the unnamed Lone Man–Isaach de Bankolé–studies Gris’s El violín (1916), and Antonio López García’s Madrid desde Capitán Haya (1987/94). Both were, unfortunately, in storage. So I settled with Gris’s Violín y guitarra (1913) and added Dalí’s early work Figure at the window (1925).

After one night, it was time to head to Andalusia, to Granada. The drive again offerd space and freedom–pulling over in the middle of nowhere to eat incredible food for almost nothing. Somewhere along the way, I had to stop for yet another cave.

In Granada, some of my good friends tried to convince me to visit the Alhambra. They didn’t understand that wandering through another tourist vortex was the last thing I wanted. As the Mexican says in The Limits of control: “For me sometimes the reflection is far more present than the thing being reflected.” So, of course, I went elsewhere, for the villages, desert, silence. Another line from the film, actually, also from the song later in the film, but no spoilers: He who thinks he’s bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is… a handful of dust.

Back in Granada I visited a university faculty at the University on the top of a hill overlooking the city. A local professor gave me advice: go to the towers, go to cafés, wait a couple of days and watch for the violin. I’m, kidding (it’s another quote from the movie :). No, but he did point me to the quieter parts of the city, to have a morning breakfast at a local café there and walk down the narrow alleys.