Having just spent a weekend cruising around the Hudson Valley, in fact visiting the very place that Washington Irving wrote about in his story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I was interested to find this article in the Independent about a writer who heads to Spain to trace Irving’s footsteps in that country.
I lived in Spain several years ago, in the heart of Madrid, and still reminiscent about the late, late nights drinking sangria, and the exhilarating road trips into the Spanish countryside. On several occasions I found myself in places like Cordoba and Grenada, where the influence of 700 years of (relatively peaceful) Islamic rule is apparent everywhere. Like I did, the writer of the piece discovers that the culture of that older Islam still resonates in these places, and he finds that the meshing of the two cultures – Christian and Muslim – makes a fascinating story when examined through the eyes and footsteps of one of America’s most famous writers.