This was our last day in Málaga before taking a train to our next destination, Cádiz. We had a good rainstorm the night before with thunder and lightning in the morning. Our host Eva, was out watering her plants and lawn one day and said she was hoping for rain. Still somewhat overcast when we headed out to walk around in our neighbourhood, Pedregalejo, before taking the bus downtown to go to the Museo Picasso Málaga. Although it is winter here, there are a lot of plants blooming, especially hibiscus, bougangillia, trumpet vine and another very vigorous vine with big yellow flowers that I have yet to identify. I love the colours.
On our walk we noticed what look like old wells in the front yards of some houses. I wonder if they are still in use.
We have been very happy with our choice of neighbourhood. Though mainly residential, there are lots of services a short walk away as is the seafront promenade with its many restaurants, but it is so quiet where we are staying. Buses do run frequently along a main street that parallels the seafront two blocks away and are cheap - 1.40E cash or credit, and less if you buy tickets at a Tabac so you really would not need a car here. And the bikes have allowed us to get everywhere safely and quickly.
On our stroll we stopped for daysayuno at a little cafe we thought looking interesting. It was small and offered a perfect little breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice, cafe con leche, scrambled eggs with cheese and toast for 4E. Here is the menu and these prices are fairly typical - very inexpensive. The cafe was featuring an exhibit of cat paintings.
Then we caught our bus just across the street - there are several buses that would have taken us where we want to go - and they are new buses, immaculately clean and electric. We got off in Malaga Cento and walked to the Museo Picasso Málaga where we lined up for tickets.
They only let so many people in at a time which is great for crowd control and it didn’t take long. The building is the 450 year old Buenavista Palace, converted by the American architect Richard Gluckman, along with the addition of adjacent buildings. The excavation for the museum revealed a few previous uses of the site, the remains of a city wall and towers dating back to the Phoenicians, a Roman factory that produced a fish-based sauce called garum, and the earlier Nasrid palace. I don’t think you can dig here without finding the ruins of some long ago era.
This museum has 285 works donated by Picasso’s family, specifically the widow of his eldest son, Cristina Ruiz-Picasso and her son. Other pieces are on long term loan. The collection ranges from early academic studies to cubism to his late re-working of old Masters.
Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881 though he moved away at age 10, and on our return, we will go to the nearby Museo Casa Natal de Picasso where he lived for his first few years and which houses other works and personal objects of his family, and another Picasso exhibit in the Museum of Malaga. Mucho Picasso. Even though he was probably a narcissist and pretty horrible to the women in his life, I have always loved his work. When I was with my friend Lyn in Madrid in 1971, we went to see his childhood drawings.
Audio guides were included with our 13E each tickets. There were two exhibits - a large one of Picasso painting, sculptures and ceramics mostly displayed in chronological order according to how his work evolved over time - and one called Echo of Picasso, featuring work of other artists who were influenced by him, also very interesting. It was wonderful to be in an art museum again and this was a lovely old building with all the galleries off a central courtyard. We both really enjoyed the several hours we spent there.
Here are some of the interesting photos of Picasso and some of my favourites works from this large exhibit.
This is such a simple but effective sculpture of a bull with two old bike parts he picked up, a seat and handlebars. And I love the clay owl. He apparently had a pet owl.
This was a curious late-in-life series of works - pinup girls taken from magazines overlaid with drawings he did of himself as an lascivious old man.
This is the press used for his prints and a photo of the printer, Picasso and his wife examining a print. My dad, a printer would have been interested in this.
And here are some works I liked by other artists that were in the Echo of Picasso exhibit.
We wandered around the narrow, cobbled streets for awhile, then caught the bus home.
So that was a wrap for Málaga. I hope the blog gave you a sense of the incredible variety, richness and beauty of this place. We really loved our time here, even more than we expected. And we are very lucky we have Eva’s friend Julia’s place to return to at the end of our trip. Julia even agreed to store our hockey bag and bikes boxes which relieves us of the task of getting them from a bike store in Malaga to pack up the bikes for our flight home. The following day, we loaded the panniers we brought in the hockey bag onto the bikes and rode to the train station for our 9 am departure for Cádiz. Our cycle tour in Andalusia really began then!
This featured blog entry was written by Jenniferklm from the blog Cycling in Andalucia.
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