We walked to the centre and back. Then we did it again. Then we did it at night. The day after, we went up to the Alcazaba.
Fourteen and a half miles over two days, four Strava activities, the same route from the apartment to the old town covered in different configurations and at different times of day. This is how we travel. Kara and Tom were with us for most of it, which meant that pace varied, diversions were frequent, and the stops were longer, and the whole thing was better for it.
Calle Larios at night. Christmas lights still up in January. The rain turned the pavement into something else entirely.
The first morning
The route in from the apartment runs through El Palmeral — a long corridor of palms between the sea and the city. Down past Muelle Uno and along the harbour, with the Centre Pompidou’s glass cube sitting at the water’s edge looking entirely incongruous and completely at home at the same time. We kept returning to look at it from different angles. It doesn’t resolve into something comfortable. That’s the point.
The superyacht moored alongside — a vessel the size of a small block of flats, surrounded by velvet rope — was something else. The rest of us walked past it like the public we were.
The Centre Pompidou Málaga. A glass cube of coloured panels at the harbour’s edge. Somehow it belongs.
The superyacht at Muelle Uno. Someone’s January is very different to ours.
El Palmeral — the palm walkway from the apartment. Taken four times over two days.
The old city
The old town rewards repetition. Each pass turns up something missed on the last. The Mercado de Atarazanas — iron and glass, 19th-century market hall — has a stained glass window at the far end depicting Málaga’s history in deep reds, golds and blues. It’s extraordinary and it’s at the end of a fish market, and nobody seems particularly amazed by this.
The streets around the cathedral are dense: churches appearing at the ends of alleys, the Bishop’s Palace blazing yellow and red across from the cathedral’s south face, a full-building mural of a woman in a blue dress looking down from a gable above an Argentine empanada restaurant. The narrow pebbled alley beside the cathedral whose pavement is laid in stone spirals. Five bronze fox heads spitting water into a basin in an almost-empty side street.
Mercado de Atarazanas. The stained glass at the far end. Most people walk past it.
Cathedral tower seen down a side street. The yellow building doing its best.
Narrow alley near the cathedral. Stone spiral paving. Barely room for two.
Full-building mural above a side street — 19th-century portrait style, six storeys high, above an empanada restaurant.
The Palacio Episcopal. Yellow and red, baroque. The rain made it look like a film set.
When the weather changed
The afternoon walk started in sunshine and ended in proper rain — the kind that arrives with no warning and soaks you immediately. The streets went dark and reflective. Everyone’s pace changed. The orange trees dripped. The cathedral’s stonework turned from sand to slate.
We kept walking. Kara and Tom were good about it. Calle Granada with orange trees lining both sides, the tower appearing at the top of the street — honestly better in the wet.
Calle Granada in the rain. Orange trees. The tower at the top. Everything improved by weather.
Up the hill
The Alcazaba walk on the 21st — a separate morning, the fourth Strava activity of the trip — is where Málaga shows you what it’s built on. The Roman theatre sits at the foot of the hill, free to enter, open to the sky. Second century. Stone seating, excavated stage, people sitting on the ancient steps eating lunch. The Alcazaba walls begin directly above, the Moorish fortress layered onto the same hillside the Romans used.
You enter through the Puerta de la Bóveda — a low gate of worn brick and cobbles, a water channel running down the centre of the path that has been doing this since the 11th century — and you climb.
The Roman theatre from above. The visitor centre behind it. The city beyond. All of this in one view.
The water channel through the entrance gatehouse. Running since the 11th century. Still running.
Sarah heading through one of the inner gates. The Alcazaba keeps going further than you expect.
Looking back along the rampart walkway toward one of the towers. The city visible beyond the walls.
Inside the fortress the gardens are cultivated between the towers — prickly pear cactus, aloe, an agave that has sent up a single flower spike taller than a person and curved over at the top like a question mark. The agave blooms once, after decades, and then dies. The spike was taller than anyone standing near it. We didn’t stay long. It felt like something that deserved a moment’s silence.
Agave flower spike against the Alcazaba walls. It blooms once. This was it.
A stone fountain in the inner gardens, under a brick arch. Palm fronds. Enclosed and cool.
From the upper terraces, the city opens up below — the Ayuntamiento dome, the bullring, the port with the BAP Unión’s masts visible even from this height, the sea running to the horizon. It’s the kind of view that reorganises your sense of a city. Everything you’ve walked for two days, spread out underneath you.
The view from the upper Alcazaba. The port, the sea, the city. The Peruvian tall ship still visible at the quayside.
The BAP Unión from the quayside on the way back down. Half of Málaga had the same idea.
Night
The evening walk on the 20th — after the afternoon rain — was the one that settled something. The cathedral lit from below in gold. The Palacio Episcopal glowing terracotta. Calle Larios with its Christmas lights still up, crystal columns cascading either side, the wet pavement throwing everything back doubled. Busy and cold and genuinely beautiful.
It wasn’t the Málaga people go to for the beach. It was the other one.
The cathedral at night. The floodlights do something the daytime photographs can’t.
The Cultural centre facade, looking up. Baroque in the dark. January, after the rain.
We walked back to the apartment the way we’d come. The same streets, different again.
Málaga, Andalucía — 14.54 miles combined — 5hrs 03m — 415ft elevation — 29,788 steps