Spain & Morocco 2027

March 29—April 11, 2027

When I was a freshman at St. Olaf College 50 years
ago, I played the role of Sancho Panza, the comic
sidekick of the legendary character Don Quixote, who
fought windmills in the musical Man of La Mancha.
The play brought us the beloved song, The Impossible Dream and is set in a prison in Seville in southern Spain during the time of the Inquisition when Jews and Muslim Moors were persecuted and forced to convert to Christianity. I didn’t know the background of the story at the time, but over the next 50 years, I recognized it was the place I wanted to visit for its beauty, its history, its architecture and art and its inspiration.

For centuries, Spain and Morocco were places where the world religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, lived, worked, prayed, and sometimes struggled alongside one another. On this tour we will walk through the Cathedral of Seville, once the site of a great mosque, and stroll through the Santa Cruz Quarter, Seville’s thriving Jewish quarter before the expulsion of 1492. We will stand beneath the horseshoe arches of the Alhambra in Granada, built by Moorish caliphs and later claimed by Catholic kings, and we will gaze upon the towering minaret of the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, one of the largest houses of worship in the world.

There’s much more to this tour than historic
religious sites. We’ll experience the amazing
food and wine, and the superb hospitality of
the Kingdom of Morocco, a former French
colony, which today, though Muslim, is a
western oriented, secular state that is open to
other religions. And then there are the
tantalizing landscapes, including the brilliant
sunlight of Barcelona which inspired Pablo
Picasso and Antoni Gaudí’s iconic cathedral
Sagrada Família, the waters of the
Mediterranean Sea, the mighty and imposing
Rock of Gibraltar, and the pastel colors of
Morocco’s Marrakech against the Atlas
Mountains.

Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque, Winston Churchill, 1943

Come join us and explore Spain & Morocco in 2027. It doesn’t have to be an impossible dream.

Arden & Janna Haug
Peace, Pastor Arden Haug