Six thirty and the Albaicín is still deciding whether to wake up. Shutters half open. A woman shaking a rug from a window three floors up, the dust catching the first light before it settles on the cobblestones. I climb. The street tilts, then tilts more, like it’s testing me. Somewhere a dog is having an opinion about all this.
The walls here are the color of old teeth, whitewash gone soft and uneven with age. I put my hand on one just to feel it. Warm already, even at this hour. *Que calor* by noon, I think, and keep going. Every turn is a decision nobody marked for you: left toward a bakery smell, right toward silence. I choose the smell. Always choose the smell.
My calves are burning, properly burning, the kind of burn that makes you question your choices and also feel smug about them. The camera hangs against my chest, doing nothing, judging nothing. It just waits. That’s the deal we have. I stop where the street opens like a mouth and there it is, the Alhambra, sitting across the valley like it’s been expecting me. Red stone catching the sun before the rest of the city does. Somebody built that eight hundred years ago and somebody else is selling churros forty meters from where I’m standing. Granada holds both those facts without blinking.
An old man passes me going the opposite direction, downhill, unhurried, like he’s done this walk ten thousand times and stopped being impressed around year two. Maybe he has. Maybe that’s the secret, that a view stops being a view and just becomes the way home. I envy him a little. I take the photo anyway.
By the time I reach the mirador the tourists haven’t arrived yet, just a few of us who got up for the wrong right reasons. Someone’s playing guitar badly, half a song, stopping to retune. Nobody minds. The city below is still mostly shadow, the Alhambra still holding all the light like it earned it first. I sit on the low wall. My legs thank me by not moving. *Dolce far niente*, except I just worked for it, uphill, both ways it feels like.
The bells start somewhere below. I don’t check the time. Why would I? The street already told me everything I needed to know about morning here: steep, warm, patient with people like me.
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