A 40 minute drive from Baeza lies Jaen, a city which doesn’t look as pretty but has a lot going for it nonetheless. We park next to the Ibero museum, which highlights the Iberian culture but also has some Greek, Phoenician and Roman stuff. It’s a small museum so we’re ready for the next one within half an hour. This is the Provincial museum which is a mixture of everything, these museums are seldomly great but can do a good job at explaining the local culture. The history and archeology stuff is ok, and the local art is above average but a bit too religious for our liking.
We have to decide to pick up our car and park in another part of the city or just walk everything. We choose the latter and continue uphill to the Arab baths. When we arrive it doesn’t look like much and we have to check if the baths are in this place, but we’re correct and have to enter the basement. There we are greeted by pretty and mostly intact Arab baths. We seem to be the only ones who forgot to bring their tripod, as every corner we turn, we are greeted by a camera on a tripod taking our picture.
We continue along the small corridors of the old city towards the cathedral. The cathedral dominates the square with its renaissance style facade. We pay to go inside and take the elevator up to the balcony for some marvelous views of both the inside and the outside of the cathedral. There is also a small exhibition of religious art which intrigues the children so we have to explain all the crying Madonna’s and suffering Jesus’s. The interior is huge but not that interesting, the most interesting thing for the children is the VR-tour where they fly up and through the cathedral.
We walk back to our car, looking for restaurants to eat lunch, but none look particularly vegetarian so we go to the supermarket and eat lunch in our car instead. We drive up the hill overlooking the town with the castle om top. The castle seems to be a hotel/restaurant and the parking is full with clients so we head back a bit gobto a picnic spot and enjoy ourselves in the sun while Tim takes some shots of the castle.
Back at our apartment in Baeza the kids have some time to play with their puzzle books and Tim goes out in the evening to shoot the city in the golden, blue hour and night so we can leave with no stone unturned.
