I am sitting in a bar in Spain’s Andalusian state, Granada, where I have been drinking glasses of beer for the last two hours in order to get free plates of food.

I don’t even like beer, and yet I’ve lost count of how many I’ve had — always a bad sign. But it’s been worth the effort. Tapas are mini-snacks, and there are infinite varieties, from calamari rings to spinach with chick peas.

There are two stories about the origins of tapas, which means “lid” in Spanish. The first goes that combining food with alcohol was a way of ensuring people didn’t drink on empty stomachs. The alternative is that drinks were traditionally covered by a small plate of food.

Pampaneira is one of several whitewashed villages in the mountains near Granada.

Whichever it is, it could well be the reason why siestas are so quiet in Granada — everyone is home sleeping it off, or at least the foreign tourists not used to this style of eating are resting. However, I’ve ceased to mull over the origins of the tradition, and I am wondering how I can get off the stool and stagger outside.

The bar attendant has turned the television to a soccer match, and everyone is engrossed in it. So I am sure I can slink by unnoticed past the mess of napkins and toothpicks on the floor at the foot of the bar, the most telltale sign of a tapas feast, and make use of the afternoon light in this picturesque town.

Granada was the capital of the last Moorish kingdom in Spain from the 13th through the 15 th centuries, and the city is full of reminders of its Arabic past, with baths, Arabic teterías (tea shops) and alcaicerías (markets).

Granada houses Spain’s best Moorish constructions, the most magnificent of which is the Alhambra. This old fortress with palaces and gardens perches above the hillside town with a snowy vista of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the background. There are also Baroque churches, Gothic chapels, monasteries, palaces, convents and cathedrals.

I’d spent the morning wandering around the whitewashed houses of the Moorish Sacromonte and Albayzin neighborhoods, noting husky old men peering from doors of the bars. While a group of people gathered around a man fixing a water main offered advice, a dog tried to steal my map.

I’d been hassled by herb sellers, a gypsy woman with badly applied eyeliner who wanted to read my palm for an incredible sum, and hippies who needed soap more than the cigarettes they asked for. In the end I had sat down in the Mirador de San Nicolás Plaza with other tourists and locals who had spilled from local restaurants to enjoy the sun and beauty of this spot overlooking Granada.

There were two grandmothers with enough colored hair clips to keep an army of small girls happy, a man playing a guitar, two gypsy girls pestering tourists, and the hazy panorama of the famous Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada mountains behind. The moment was so surreal I lost myself for two hours, and have only moved since then to this bar where I am almost unable to leave my chair.