Granada: the Albaicín to Sacromonte: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Albaicín alleys, cármenes, cave houses
The Albaicín was the Moorish quarter, and the Castilians and the Morisco families remade it: a hammam beside the houses of the conquerors on the Darro, mosques turned churches, a new mosque on the same hill, Morisco houses, a school in cármenes and cave homes on the slope beyond.
The stops
Plaza Nueva, the New Square, was laid out between 1506 and 1515, when 72 metres of the river Darro were vaulted over, and much of the square still sits on the covered riverbed. Its character comes from the Real Chancillería palace, ordered built in 1531 and finished in 1587, the only building on the square to reach today without notable changes. In 1835 a flood of the Darro destroyed the Pilar de las Ninfas, a fountain that had separated the square from Plaza de Santa Ana, and the two spaces have been joined ever since.
Photo: Superchilum — CC BY-SA 3.0 El Bañuelo is a hammam, an Islamic bathhouse, dated to the 11th or the 12th century, and it is the only bathhouse in Granada outside the Alhambra that has been restored and opened to visitors. Its largest room, the warm room, has a central vault resting on marble columns, many with capitals reused from Roman and Caliphal times, and a ceiling pierced with star-shaped and octagonal skylights. People kept using the baths until the 16th century, and later the building served as a public laundry and as a home, before restoration began in 1927.
Photo: R Prazeres — CC BY-SA 4.0 The convent known as Santa Catalina de Zafra was founded in 1520 by the widow of Hernando de Zafra, secretary to the Catholic Monarchs, on houses given by the Crown that had belonged to Nasrid nobles. Building was finished in 1540, and the convent is arranged around several patios and a garden, which is how it joined the old houses into one. Its church has a Renaissance portal in the style of Diego de Siloé, with a niche holding a statue of Saint Catherine of Siena, and the convent is home to Dominican nuns.
Photo: https://granadapedia.wikanda.es/wiki/Usuario:Carlosrs — CC BY 3.0 This Mudéjar-Renaissance church, built between 1559 and 1567 to designs by Juan de Maeda under the supervision of Pedro de Solís, is considered one of the most significant religious buildings of Granada after the Reconquista. Its tower and sacristy had to be rebuilt after an explosion at a nearby gunpowder factory in 1590. The eastern side keeps a stretch of the original Nasrid wall above the Darro, and the main portal, finished in 1589, has a niche with statues of Saints Peter and Paul.
Photo: Paul Hermans — CC BY-SA 3.0 This Renaissance palace on the Carrera del Darro carries the date 1539 at the top of its facade, and the richly carved front is attributed to Sebastián de Alcántara, a pupil of Diego de Siloé. It belonged to the family of Hernando de Zafra, the Catholic Monarchs' secretary, and was bought in 1917 to house the Archaeological Museum of Granada, which is still inside. A blind side balcony carries the inscription "Esperando la del cielo", and an old legend of a lady in white is told of the house.
Photo: Palickap — CC BY-SA 4.0 The city council built this little tower in the early 17th century, on land given by the lords of Castril, as a lookout where musicians played and notables watched the festivities on the promenade below; it is named for the chirimía, a wind instrument, and was one of the first buildings to bring the Baroque style to Granada. The promenade beside it, laid out in 1609, is officially the Paseo del Padre Manjón, after the founder of the Ave María schools, whose first school is also on this walk. Since the 19th century people have called it the Paseo de los Tristes, the Promenade of the Sad, because funeral processions passed here on the way to the San José cemetery behind the Alhambra.
Photo: Jebulon — CC0 This church went up in 1520 in Gothic-Mudéjar style, and it was the first place the Catholic Monarchs consecrated as a church, on the site of what had been a mosque of converts until 1492. Beside it stands the old minaret, built in the early 13th century under the Almohads and the only part left of that mosque; its square tower has vaulted ramps around a central pillar, like the Giralda of Seville, and walls with sebka lozenge patterns in brick. The belfry on top was added in 1520 for Christian worship.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0 The Mudéjar church of San Nicolás was built in 1525 and fills a whole block of the Albaicín. The square on its south side, the Mirador de San Nicolás, opens a wide view across to the Alhambra. In 1932 attempts were made to burn the church; the roof over the presbytery went, with its Mudéjar ceiling of great value, and the vault below held for three more years before it gave way.
Photo: Paul Hermans — CC BY-SA 3.0 The Granada Mosque, beside the Plaza San Nicolás, opened in 2003 as the first mosque built in the city since 1492, the year of the Christian conquest. The local Muslim community began the project in the 1980s, but building did not start until the late 1990s, with financial support from the emir of Sharjah and King Hassan II of Morocco. The complex has a prayer hall, a garden and an Islamic studies centre with a library, all designed with traditional Moorish motifs.
Photo: Øyvind Holmstad — CC BY-SA 4.0 This church stands on the site of the Albaicín's main mosque, built in the 13th century under the Almohads, and only its courtyard, ringed by arcades of horseshoe arches, has survived. Cardinal Cisneros consecrated the mosque as a church in 1499, and the present building went up in the 16th century. A fire in 1936 almost destroyed the church, and the courtyard, which mostly still dates to the mosque, was reconstructed in the 1950s.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 4.0 These are two Morisco houses of the 16th century, standing at the corner of the Cuesta del Chapiz and the Camino del Sacromonte. The larger was rebuilt in the early 1500s by the Morisco Lorenzo el Chapiz over the remains of a 14th-century Nasrid palace, and it keeps the original long pool in its patio and the marble columns of its north portico. The houses were confiscated in 1571 after the Morisco uprising, and since 1932 they have housed the School of Arabic Studies, after a restoration by the architect Leopoldo Torres Balbás.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1889 the priest and professor Andrés Manjón founded here the first of his Ave María schools, which later grew to more than three hundred centres across Spain. He had bought a series of cármenes, plots of land between the old Guadix road and the Darro, near a cave where in 1888 he had found a teacher giving lessons to a group of Roma girls. Manjón wanted flowers, gardens, trees, fish and birds beside the school, and the Casa Madre still stands in the Darro valley.
Photo: Briske88 — CC BY-SA 4.0 This museum spreads over eleven original caves, kept and set up to show how people lived and worked on the Sacromonte, and its address is the Barranco de los Negros. In the 1960s more than 1,500 cave houses were counted here, and thousands of people lived in them. A neighbourhood legend says the ravine is named for freed slaves who dug the slope in search of treasure that departing Arab families were thought to have buried, and who then made homes of the caves they had dug.
Photo: Øyvind Holmstad — CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1595 relics said to be those of Saint Caecilius, a disciple of the apostle James, and lead plates written in Arabic, the lead books, turned up on this hill, which was then called Ilupitano. The books were declared a forgery in the 17th century, but the discovery gave the hill its name, Sacromonte, and led to the abbey, which the archbishop of Granada commissioned from the Jesuit brother Pedro Sánchez with El Escorial as his model. Today it is a priests' residence, a parish church and a museum, and the lead books are kept there.
Photo: Pepepitos — Public domain
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