I wanted to visit Granada during John’s and my European adventure because I wanted to see the Alhambra. How could you go to Spain, I thought, and not see the most wondrous palace of Moorish kings? My Rick Steves guidebooks and TripAdvisor (Internet) research, bubbled over with details about the site; its history, tour options, and literary references. What else would Granada have to offer? Additional research, and the enthusiastic endorsement of Lorena, our hotel clerk, got me hooked on the idea of visiting the Hammams de al Andalus, banos arabes, the Arab Baths.

“Muy bueno. Muy tranquilidad,” Lorena gushed and smiled.

While Granada had a population of several hundred thousand, it had an almost small town feel about it. You could get from anywhere to anywhere, except the Sacramonte gypsy area, on foot. There were two main boulevards which were lined with shops (shopping more than soccer, I concluded, had to be considered the national sport as we’d see whole families out shopping together until very late at night). There were several main squares, usually marked by a church or a government building of some kind, and there was a web of winding and narrow alleys which seemed to be full of more shops and tabernas, small restaurants that featured delightfully cheap wine and free appetizers, tapas.

While we had a great introduction to eating tapas and the late night culture of Spain during our two days in Madrid, we understood that how people ate and socialized said a lot about a place, and we were eager to continue our education on Spain in Granada. After giving ourselves a little walking tour of Centro, the city center, after taking pictures of the church from every possible angle, eyeing the motorcycles and scooters parked at every plaza (square), and wondering how so many people seemed to eat at outdoor cafes even though the temperature was only in the fifties, we started checking out Granada’s tapas faire.

In general, we nixed what looked like tourist haunts along Calle Navas, nicknamed Tapas Street, and tended to rely on the vibes we got when we passed a place. We had some hits and some misses using this method. We had some excellent olives and mancheco cheese at one place and were barely spoken to at another. Their bartenders were as cold and unresponsive to us as the sardines overflowing the bowl in the display case behind their bar.

After our initial walk through town, we made our way to the Hammams de Andalus to reserve a two-hour time slot for our baths and massage. We followed modest but well-placed signs through the stone streets and steps of the Albayzin, the millennium old Moorish quarter. The bath experience, we later discovered, was largely an authentic experience, perhaps one upper class Moors enjoyed centuries ago.

For the “bath,” thirty people at a time would enjoy taking dips in three pools of different temperatures. In between dips, we were able to sip hot herb tea. The marketing and reservation system couldn’t have been more modern. I first learned about the hammams in Granada through the Internet. Their web site was quite sophisticated, their patrons represented quite an eclectic mix of ages and nationalities, and they took payment through every kind of credit card imaginable.

After taking our reservations, we began making small talk with Andre, one of the managers. It turned out that he was from Portugal. His English was very good. We asked him how long he had been living in town and whether he had ever been to the States. Then we asked him the question that was probably the biggest one on our minds.

“Where would you recommend we go for tapas?”

He smiled then began an explanation that somehow seemed to have penetrated my foreign tourist, overloaded brain. I found myself coming back to his advice, like a mantra, several times since.

“So many places are good. I don’t know that I could recommend THE place, but I have found that the best tapas bars have these four things. There should be some kind of crowd. You should be able to see some dirt on the floor. There should be a ham hanging from the ceiling, and there should be a saint, a picture of a saint, on the wall.”

The next day, following our tour of the Alhambra, we wandered past the Plaza Nueva and decided we wanted some red wine and tapas. We looked into the window at the Gran Taberna. Let’s see. The place looked busy, clean but with evidence of a steady flow of customers. Several smoked and cured pig legs hung from the ceiling and damn if we didn’t see a picture of a saint on the wall near the door. We ended up spending several hours there, enjoying the low prices on rioja and excellent tasting plates. We felt very fortunate. As tourists, our time was limited and this turned out to be the perfect place for a few hours.

Simple and honest advice given to a traveler is very welcome. It represents a special kind of generosity and creates a real bond of giving and receiving that is no small thing.