🎨 Artwork Journey: Granada, Spain

La Alhambra’s Magnificent Patio de Los Leones

Jan 15, 2023

🎨 Artwork Journey

Artwork Journey is a section of the Emily Lupita ❤️‍🔥 Creativity Series featuring new Lupita paintings I made while reflecting on my world journey - with accompanying short travel essays.

🌎 La Alhambra, Granada, Spain

By Emily Lupita

Title: “Lupita & Delle, Two Spirits”

Medium & Date Painted: Digital Watercolor & Ink, 2022

Location & Date of Event: La Alhambra, Granada, Spain, 1999

About the Painting:

Oh, Granada…que linda. So very beautiful.

That’s how I begin every memory of Granada, Spain. I studied abroad at the Centro de Lenguas Modernas, Universidad de Granada with Central College for the Spring Semester 1999. The architecture, the food, the views, the cultural traditions. I loved and absorbed every moment in Granada and traveling around Spain. But more than all the incredible wonders Spain can offer, my time there was blessed because it introduced me to Delle, my fellow artist-traveler, Iowa-girl, spirit-sister, life-long friend.

Delle and I were placed to live with related Spanish families, our host-mothers were sisters. And so we had the cool experience to travel together to the Spanish countryside to their family home in a small village where they were part of an olive co-op. I remember waking up early with Delle and walking to buy bread at the traditional bakery where they still cooked the bread in a brick-fire oven each morning. Then we got a behind-the-scenes tour of the olive oil factory and had a picnic lunch up on the hills covered with olive trees. The fresh bread and freshly pressed olive oil was like a dream it was so amazing.

Another time we met up at the art studio of her host mom to make ceramic tiles. She taught us how to make the shapes and paint on the designs. Then she fired them in her kiln for us and we got to take them home. One weekend we walked over to the Parque Garcia Lorca next to my host family’s apartment, where we got a private tour of Lorca’s home (now a museum) and were even allowed to play his piano. Afterwards, we talked with two Abuelitas (little grandmothers) while the four of us all walked through the rose garden surrounding the museum. The two grandmas had their arms linked together as they walked, so Delle and I linked our arms together, too. We still walk and talk that same way.

These types of incredible experiences followed us throughout our time in Spain and bonded us together for life. Later on, we would reunite in Delle’s husband’s home city in Mexico, and in our own small hometowns of Winterset and Lovilia, Iowa. For over twenty years now, we’ve been meeting up between various countries and homes, keeping in touch as our children grow and our lives change course in so many different ways.

When it came time to paint about my first experience in Spain, I wanted to include the Patio de Los Leones because it’s magnificent and beautiful in a way that has stayed so vibrantly in my heart all these years. Delle and I toured this magnificent place together and I believe that our friendship was blessed there, in the mystery of this sacred space.