The Alhambra, a Nasrid fortress-city: from the Gate of the Pomegranates to the Generalife: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The Nasrid fortress-city
The Alhambra was a walled palace-city, and this walk reads it in layers: the gates and fountain of the approach, the fortress, the church and baths of the old mosque, the Emperor's palace, the Nasrid palaces and tower-palaces, and the canal that watered them all.
The stops
The foot approach to the Alhambra climbs from Plaza Nueva up the Cuesta de Gomérez, and this Renaissance gate stands at the top as the way into the Alhambra Woods. Work on it began to mark Emperor Charles V's 1526 visit to Granada after his wedding to Isabella of Portugal, and it replaced an older Islamic gate. The name comes from the three large open pomegranates above the main arch, which sit beside the imperial shield and the figures of Peace and Abundance, and the gate sits on the approach, outside the four spaces the Alhambra's official site lists for ticketed visits.
Photo: Harvey Barrison from Massapequa, NY, USA — CC BY-SA 2.0 This Renaissance fountain stands just outside the Gate of Justice, beside a bastion of the wall that was built to defend the gate. It is named for the reign of Charles I of Spain, and it was designed by Pedro Machuca, the architect of the Emperor's palace inside the Alhambra, and made by Niccolo da Corte, probably for the count of Tendilla, then governor of the Alhambra. Sources disagree on the date: the Spanish Wikipedia gives 1545 and the English Wikipedia's Alhambra article gives 1524. It sits on the approach, outside the ticketed spaces.
Photo: Roberto Chamoso G — CC BY-SA 3.0 es This gate once stood in the city below as one of the main access gates to medieval Granada, and it was nicknamed the Arch of the Ears because in the early 16th century the mutilated ears of fraudsters were displayed here. The city council pulled it down between 1873 and 1884, in an eleven-year struggle with the provincial monuments commission, and it fell three years after being declared a national monument. It was rebuilt here in the Alhambra woods in the 1930s, and its loss became a symbol of the fight for heritage protection in Spain.
Photo: Merymartin — CC BY-SA 4.0 Yusuf I opened the Gate of Justice in 1348; it is the largest of the Nasrid tower-gates and the main one under Christian rule. A carved hand sits above the horseshoe arch on the outside and a carved key above the arch on the inside. From the Christian conquest of 1492 until Napoleonic troops occupied the Alhambra in 1810, the gatekeeper lived in its tower, and beyond the gate lies the monumental complex, whose ticketed spaces are the Alcazaba, the Nasrid Palaces at a set entry time, the Partal and the Generalife.
Photo: Paul Arps from The Netherlands — CC BY 2.0 The Wine Gate connects the Alcazaba with the area of the palaces and opens onto the Plaza de los Aljibes, named for the cisterns beneath it. It is one of the oldest buildings of the Alhambra, attributed to the reign of Muhammad III (1302 to 1309), with a west face decorated around the turn of the 14th century and an east face decorated after 1367. The large cistern under the square dates from around 1494 and was among the first works carried out after the 1492 conquest.
Photo: Kent Wang from Barcelona, Spain — CC BY-SA 2.0 The Alcazaba is the oldest surviving part of the Alhambra, built by Muhammad I, founder of the Nasrid dynasty, after 1238 on the site of an earlier Zirid fortress. Its westernmost tower, the Torre de la Vela, is visible from most of the city, and by tradition the flag of Castile was raised over it on 2 January 1492; its bell is rung on special days such as the anniversary of that conquest. Inside the walls lay a small district for the elite guards, with a bathhouse, a cistern and a communal kitchen, and the Alcazaba is one of the spaces visited with a ticket.
Photo: Alberto-g-rovi — CC BY 3.0 The present church was built between 1581 and 1618 where the Alhambra's congregational mosque had stood. That mosque was built under Muhammad III in the early 14th century, was converted to a church after the conquest, and was demolished in 1576. Every Holy Week a sculpture of Our Lady of Sorrows from inside the church is carried through the streets of Granada on a throne made to resemble the arcades of the Court of the Lions, and the church is not one of the four spaces the official site lists for ticketed visits.
Photo: Tuxyso — CC BY-SA 3.0 The baths of the Alhambra's main mosque were built under Muhammad III along with the mosque, and they stand on the east side of the church, reached from the main street. They may have been partly demolished in 1534, were built into a house in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were restored in 1934. The rooms follow the usual sequence of changing room, cold room and hot room, and the Alhambra's visiting guide lists free entry to these baths.
Photo: Chabe01 — CC BY-SA 4.0 Charles V's palace was begun in 1527 to a design by Pedro Machuca: a 63-metre square around a circular courtyard. Work stopped in 1637 and the building stood roofless until 1967, and it was never home to a monarch. It now holds the Alhambra Museum and the Fine Arts Museum of Granada, and the Alhambra's own visiting guide lists free entry to the palace.
Photo: Andrei Dimofte from Stuttgart, Germany — CC BY 2.0 Muhammad V had the Court of the Lions built during his second reign, between 1362 and 1391, and it is counted among the most famous palaces in Islamic architecture. Twelve sculpted lions carry the central marble fountain, and the columns of the arcade around it alternate singly and in groups of two or three, a pattern unique in the Islamic world. This is part of the Nasrid Palaces, which are entered with a ticket at the set time printed on it; the official site says anyone not at the entrance at that time will not be admitted.
Photo: Kent Wang from Barcelona, Spain — CC BY-SA 2.0 Muhammad III built the Partal in the early 14th century, which makes it the oldest surviving palace in the Alhambra, and it was the first of several palaces built along the northern wall. Only its portico and tower survive, facing a large reflecting pool, with a mirador room projecting from the wall over the city below. After 1492 it passed into private hands and was remodelled as a house until 1891, when it was ceded to the state, and the Partal is one of the four spaces the official site lists for ticketed visits.
Photo: Kent Wang from Barcelona, Spain — CC BY-SA 2.0 This tower in the north wall was turned into a small palace in the 14th century, one of several wall towers done up in the reign of Yusuf I, and it is called an exceptional example of Nasrid domestic architecture. Its name, Tower of the Captive, is a fanciful one with no historical basis; the Arabic inscriptions inside call it a qalahurra, a tower palace. The tilework inside includes a purple found nowhere else in the decoration of its era, along with four long poems by the grand vizier Ibn al-Jayyab, but the palace-towers along this wall are usually closed to visitors and open only on occasional dates, so this is a tower to look at from the path.
Photo: Martin Furtschegger — CC BY 3.0 Water reached the palace-city by the Acequia Real, the royal canal, which takes it from the Darro river about 6.1 kilometres east of the Alhambra. Before entering the walls the canal crosses a ravine on an aqueduct, protected by a tower that is called, precisely, the water tower. From here conduits and tanks carried the water through the citadel, and the same canal runs down the middle of the Courtyard of the Water Canal at the Generalife.
Photo: FlyingCrimsonPig — CC BY 2.0 The Generalife was the Nasrid rulers' summer palace and country estate, built in the late 13th or early 14th century by Muhammad II or Muhammad III, and the rulers could reach it from the Alhambra by a private covered passage that began at the Torre de los Picos. Its heart is the Courtyard of the Water Canal, 12.8 by 48.7 metres, with a small mirador that is probably the earliest in Nasrid architecture, though the lines of water jets are a 19th-century addition. The Generalife is one of the four spaces the official site lists for ticketed visits.
Photo: Rosa-Maria Rinkl — CC BY-SA 4.0
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