The Cats Who Ignored Me in Spain
And how their glorious indifference helped me get over myself (a little).
Reading time: About 5 minutes.
Sultana the cat glares at my interruption as she bathes next to a brick wall in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.
The cats of the Alhambra didn’t care that I was there.
In fairness, they didn’t care that anyone was there. You could have wheeled in the entire Spanish royal family, set up a tapas buffet with gold-plated sardines, and the cats would’ve blinked once—maybe—then returned to the far more important work of licking between their toes.
I, on the other hand, was having something of a minor identity crisis.
This trip—my long-awaited, sun-kissed, tile-decorated, olive-oil-drenched vacation through Spain—was supposed to be a shared adventure. My husband, Mike, and I had planned it together. There were TripIt entries. There were bulleted lists, carefully arranged tabs, and links to every restaurant we hoped to try. There were whispered moments of glee about mosaic tile workshops. But by the time I arrived in Granada with a tour group full of delightful strangers, I was officially traveling solo.
Not alone-alone, mind you. I was surrounded by friendly, culturally curious, probably-nicer-than-me Americans who had brought their own sketchbooks and watercolors. But the person I had imagined narrating this trip to—my person—wasn’t there. He had been devoured by work, swallowed whole by the Barcelona branch of burnout.
So instead of sharing meaningful eye contact over gazpacho, I found myself making intense eye contact with cats.
(Not metaphorically. Literal, extended eye contact. With cats. Who blinked slowly at me like I was interrupting their centuries-long nap, which I was.)
They were everywhere. Perched on palace ledges. Draped across sun-warmed stone like melted butter. Tucked into corners like ghosts who got bored and decided to stay. Each one an emotional support animal—except their support came in the form of complete and utter disregard. And weirdly, it helped.
Cats enjoying the sun at the tile-making studio I visited in Granada.
Because while I was out here recalibrating my expectations, trying to figure out how to inhabit a story that didn’t look like the one I’d written in my head, the cats were doing what they’ve always done: existing. Indifferently. Impeccably.
And I thought—maybe that’s enough. Maybe being is enough. Maybe I didn’t need to document every bite or caption every fountain or explain the aching quiet I felt walking through centuries-old archways by myself.
Maybe I could just be, too.
So I tried.
Not in a spiritual, capital-B Be kind of way. More like a lowercase-b, slightly jet-lagged, half-committed attempt to exist without narrating it in my head or texting it to someone who wasn’t answering. I put my phone away. I took fewer photos than usual. I stopped trying to chronicle the journey like I was being trailed by a documentary crew from the Women Finding Themselves Abroad channel. I just… looked at things.
I looked at cats.
I looked at stones cut and arranged by people who didn’t live long enough to see the grout dry.
I looked at tourists taking selfies in front of fountains built when the word selfie would’ve sounded like a delicate 19th-century fever.
And I started to notice things I hadn’t noticed in a while. Like the weight of the air. The way the light filtered through a stained glass window in a hotel stairwell. The breeze moving through an orange tree. The quiet.
It turns out, traveling solo in a group is a bit like being the main character in someone else’s sitcom. You’re in the mix, but your storyline hasn’t aired yet. Everyone’s lovely. They include you. They ask about your hometown, your shoes, your favorite type of hummus. You laugh, you nod, you ask thoughtful questions in return. And all the while, there’s a little voice inside you saying, Remember this. Tell him about it later.
Except you can’t.
Because sometimes, telling the story just makes the absence louder. So you shelve it. You become the library of your own experience, dust jacket slightly askew.
And then there’s a cat. Watching you. Judging you. Licking its belly.
And somehow, that’s enough to pull you back into the moment.
A Spanish-style “blep.” Looks pretty much like an American-style “blep.”
By the time we left Granada, I had a handful of photos of architecture, tilework, lacey Arabic archways and window frames—and exactly zero selfies. But I had cat portraits. So many cat portraits. Cats looking bored. Cats looking judgmental. Cats looking like they had better places to be—and also were already there.
I wasn’t trying to turn them into symbols at the time. But now I wonder.
Maybe I kept photographing them because they didn’t perform. They didn’t care how they looked. They weren’t trying to be “present”—they just were. And I wanted to be like that. Unbothered. Unexplained. At home in my body, even when it felt out of place.
Because despite all my gentle affirmations, despite the loneliness I was still negotiating like a tourist map that didn’t match the streets—I was there. Not as the version of myself I’d planned to be, maybe, but still: fully, humanly there.
And the cats? They allowed it.
Without commentary. Without obligation. Without even glancing in my direction more than once.
Honestly? That’s all I needed.
Bonus Cat Footage from the mosaic tile studio I visited in Granada:
