Granada, Andalusia, Spain
La Alhambra · al-AHM-brah
A red fortress on a hill, and inside it the palace of the last Muslim kingdom in western Europe. Its builders had little money and no stone to speak of. They made it out of plaster, tiles, wood and running water, and covered every wall with poetry.
Photo: Slaunger, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are standing by a long pool of still water. Clipped myrtle hedges run down both sides, and at the far end a square tower of red earth rises forty-five metres and stands upside down in the water. Swallows cross the court. There is almost no sound except a small fountain.
The sultan who built this court ruled from 1333 to 1354. In China it was the last decades of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). The traveller Ibn Battuta, who had seen Hangzhou and Quanzhou a few years earlier, came to Granada in 1350.
The general ticket covers the three parts that charge: the Nasrid Palaces, the fortress and the Generalife. You enter the palaces at the half-hour printed on the ticket and at no other time. Charles V's palace and the lanes between the gates are free.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Nasrid Palaces: Mexuar, Court of the Myrtles, Court of the Lions | General ticket, at the time printed on it |
| The fortress (Alcazaba) and the Watch Tower | General ticket or gardens ticket |
| The Partal and its gardens | General ticket or gardens ticket |
| The Generalife | General ticket or gardens ticket |
| The Palace of Charles V and its two museums | Free to enter |
| The Gate of Justice, the Wine Gate and the square between them | Free |
| The view from the Mirador de San Nicolás, across the valley | Free; in the old quarter opposite |
Muslims ruled most of Spain from the eighth century. By 1238 the Christian kingdoms of the north had taken nearly all of it back. One Arab chief saved a strip of mountains and coast in the south by becoming the vassal of the king of Castile, and made Granada his capital. His family, the Nasrids, held it for 254 years.
They built on this hill because it could be defended, and they brought water to it in a channel six kilometres long. With water they could have gardens, baths and pools; the palace is arranged round them.
The walls look like carved stone. They are plaster, pressed in moulds and once painted blue, red and gold. Running through the patterns, thousands of times, is one line in Arabic: "There is no victor but God."
On 2 January 1492 the last sultan handed the keys to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Before you leave, find that line on a wall. It was the dynasty's motto, and by the end it was a prayer.
"The Alhambra is a palace." It is a walled town on a hilltop. It held a fortress, six or seven palaces, a mosque, baths, workshops and houses for two thousand people. The famous rooms are two of the palaces.
"It is built of stone and marble." Marble is used only for columns, fountains and some floors. The walls are rammed earth and brick, and the decoration is plaster, wood and tile. It was cheap, quick and never meant to last seven centuries.
"The plaster was always this pale." It was brightly coloured. Traces of blue and gold survive in sheltered corners.
"The Generalife is part of the palace." It was a separate country estate on the next hill, where the sultans went to escape the court, with its own farm.
"The big square palace is Moorish too." It was begun in 1527 for the Emperor Charles V, in the newest Italian style, and it has nothing to do with the sultans.
The stops follow the usual way round: in by the old gate, up the fortress, through the palaces in the order a visitor of 1400 would have gone, then out to the gardens.
The gate was built in 1348, the year the Black Death reached Spain. The passage inside turns four corners, so that nobody could charge through.
On the keystone of the outer arch an open hand is carved. On the inner arch there is a key. The hand is probably the five duties of a Muslim, and the key is the sign of the Nasrid kings. What people made of them is in the legends below.
The Alcazaba, at the tip of the hill, is the oldest part. The first Nasrid king built its towers after 1238 and lived here himself. The foundations in the courtyard are the houses and the bath of his guard.
Climb the Watch Tower. Below you is the city, the plain that fed it, and the snow of the Sierra Nevada, which fills the water channel in summer. For centuries the bell on this tower told the farmers of the plain when to open and close their ditches at night.
The first rooms of the palaces were the public ones, where the sultan's ministers heard petitions and gave judgment. They have been altered more than any others; one became a Christian chapel.
Beyond is a small court with one great wall of carved plaster. Two identical doors open in it. One led to the palace and one led back out; a visitor who had no business there could not tell which.
This was the official palace. The pool is thirty-four metres long and was kept full to the brim, so that the tower would stand reflected in it and seem twice its height to anyone waiting to be received.
Inside the tower is a single room eleven metres square and eighteen high. The sultan sat in the middle alcove opposite the door, with the light behind him, so that envoys saw only his outline.
Look up. The ceiling is made of more than eight thousand pieces of cedar, fitted into rings of stars. It shows the seven heavens of Islam, one above another, with the throne of God at the top.
Tradition places in this room the council at which the last sultan agreed to surrender, and the audience at which Columbus won his ships. Neither is recorded by anyone who was there.
The second palace was private, built about 1370 by Muhammad V. He had been overthrown, had lived in exile in Morocco and at the court of Castile in Seville, and had fought his way back. The court he built is unlike anything before it: a forest of 124 thin marble columns round a cross of four water channels.
In the middle twelve stone lions carry a basin on their backs. A poem cut round its rim describes the water: silver that melts and runs between jewels.
Go into the halls on the north and south sides and look up. The domes are made of thousands of small plaster cells, like the inside of a honeycomb. They were built to catch the light from the windows below and turn slowly through the day like a night sky.
Nearly every wall carries words. Scholars who catalogued them counted about ten thousand inscriptions. Most are the motto, or blessings and verses from the Koran.
The rest are poems, written for these rooms by the sultan's ministers, and many speak in the voice of the building: "I am a garden adorned by beauty", says one hall. The palace describes itself to you as you walk through it.
Below the plaster, at the height of a seated person, the walls are covered with tile. Each coloured piece was cut by hand from a glazed slab and fitted to its neighbours like a jigsaw. The patterns repeat without a gap and could go on for ever.
Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, came here on his honeymoon in 1526 and ordered a palace of his own beside the old ones. It is a square with a round courtyard in the middle, thirty metres across, ringed by two storeys of columns. Nothing like it had been built outside Italy.
It was paid for by a tax on the Muslims who had stayed. When they rebelled in 1568 the money stopped. The palace stood without a roof for four hundred years; the present one dates from the twentieth century. Charles never lived in it.
The portico by the pool is all that stands of the oldest palace here, of about 1300. In the nineteenth century it was a private house; the last owner gave it to the state in 1891.
A path leads across a ravine to the Generalife. Its main court is a long garden with a water channel down the middle. The crossing jets were added in the nineteenth century; the sultans had a quiet channel and beds of flowers sunk half a metre below the paths, so that you walked level with the blossoms.
At the top of the garden is a staircase whose handrails are channels of running water. You climb it with your hand in a stream.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1238 | The first Nasrid king takes Granada and begins the fortress | The Mongols are overrunning Russia; in China the Southern Song (1127–1279) has forty years left |
| 1348 | The Gate of Justice is built | The Black Death; the Yuan dynasty will fall in twenty years |
| 1350 | Ibn Battuta visits Granada | Four years earlier he was in Quanzhou and Hangzhou |
| about 1370 | The Court of the Lions | The Ming dynasty (1368–1644), founded in 1368, is building the walls of Nanjing |
| 1492 | Granada surrenders on 2 January; Columbus sails on 3 August | China under the Hongzhi emperor of the Ming; Leonardo is in Milan |
| 1527 | Charles V's palace is begun | His troops sack Rome the same year; the Jiajing emperor reigns in Beijing |
| 1812 | Napoleon's army blows up towers as it leaves | Napoleon marches on Moscow; the Jiaqing reign in China |
| 1829 | Washington Irving lives in the palace | The Daoguang reign, ten years before the Opium War |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The Moorish king who built the Gate of Justice was a magician. He laid a spell on the fortress: it will stand until the hand on the outer arch reaches down and takes the key on the inner one. On that day the whole hill will fall to pieces and the treasures buried under it will come to light.
Source: Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra (1832), from the people who lived in the ruins
A sultan invited the knights of a great family, the Abencerrajes, to a feast in the hall south of the Court of the Lions, because one of them was the queen's lover. As each came through the door his head was struck off over the fountain. Thirty-six died. The rust-red stain in the marble basin is their blood.
Source: Ginés Pérez de Hita, The Civil Wars of Granada (1595), a historical romance
Riding away into exile, the last sultan stopped on a pass in the hills, looked back at the Alhambra and wept. His mother said: "You do well to weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man."
Source: Told by Spanish writers from the sixteenth century; the pass south of Granada is still called the Moor's Sigh
A girl who climbs the Watch Tower on 2 January and rings its bell will be married before the year is out.
Source: A custom of Granada, kept every year on the anniversary of the surrender
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The Alhambra's official ticket site (tickets.alhambra-patronato.es) and Granada guides of 2026; we did not open the booking pages ourselves.
Checked 2026-11-12
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