We rented mountain bikes and road 5 miles out to Medina Azahara (Madinat al-Zahra), which was a Muslim city created in the mid-10th century that was active for all of…70 years. It was destroyed and looted over the subsequent years/centuries, but still has many of the ruins visible and is an active archaeological site to this day. We took a less-than-directly-direct route to the site (at the advice of the fellow at the bike store), which took us along a canal and past various olive orchards with a view into the surrounding mountains. On the way back, we took an even less direct route so that we could ride through some residential areas of Córdoba. Basically, on a day where the temperature hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit and just stayed there… we were out and about for quite a while in that heat.
Our post-siesta activity was a private olive oil tasting (AirBnB Experiences FTW!) with Mari, who was delightful. She was passionate about olive oil (the tasting was in her olive oil shop), including having a university degree in olives and olive oil. Her English was shaky (but wildly better than our Spanish), and that made for some fun with Google Translate along the way. The format was very much like a wine tasting: we were taught the process for making olive oil, the three classes of olive oil (extra virgin, virgin, and… lamp!), how those classes get assessed, and then learned how to taste and tasted/assessed five olive oils. That’s even down to smelling the olive oil (after warming it by rubbing the glass in your palm while covering the glass’s opening) and identifying specific fruit and vegetable smells in it, and then tasting it (slowly… and sometimes tasting it a second time and noting the increased strength of the flavor).
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: The olive oil tasting “dessert” that was (aromatized/infused with orange) extra virgin olive oil mixed with cacao powder.
Tim: Getting the bikes rented—having stopped by the store the previous day and spoken with a fellow who spoke some English who indicated he would be there this morning when we came to actually rent the bikes…and arriving to find only one worker who spoke no English and kept forgetting that we spoke virtually no Spanish. We got it done, though!
