LBB Note #7: Granada (Day 3: La Alhambra)

Every fairy tale kingdom needs a castle.

Anthony Bourdain described Granada as "The fairy tale Kingdom of Granada". This phrase remained in my head throughout the entire trip, and I would mutter it to myself whenever Granada would show us some of its magic.

One of these moments happened before we headed up the Sacromonte to the flamenco show. On the way there we visited the most popular mirador of the city, right in front of a church at the top of the neighboring Albaicin hill. The place was packed, but it was still too early; sunset was still an hour or so away.

So in the meantime we did what any sane person would have done at that point: get some tapas in the bars/restaurants in front of the church. We were about to finish our first tapa when someone in the neighboring table took out a guitar and started an impromptu flamenco session.

                                       

It was getting closer to sunset, so I walked over to the edge of the park and waited while looking at the fortress. She rose from between a tall cover of trees, small windows making her seem impenetrable. I drew little attack plans in my mind of how to approach the hill in case I wanted to take her, but nothing I thought of was plausible. I then stopped trying to think of how to attack her and thought of her beauty. The lowering sun making the red hue of her walls darker; the Sierra Nevada mountains in the background providing a surreal setting to an already hard-to-believe view. It made sense now; her name. Al-Hamra literally means Red One (feminine, La Roja in Spanish).

As the final rays came down, I realized that this was a lowly serf's view. If you were a Sultan or a nobleman you lived inside the complex. Anyone else that wanted to get a good look at her probably would have had to climb the hill that I stood on. I wasn't too worried, though; tomorrow I would have a Sultan's look of the palace.

As we walked back to the apartment we got a good look at the creek, called the Rio Tarro, that marks the border between the Alhambra hill and the Albaicin, the division between real life and fantasy. 

(Picture credit: Planet Ware)

View from the creek.

The next morning I woke up early, as I always do when there is some level of expectation. We had tried (unsuccessfully) for the last two days to get tickets into the complex. The entrance to the fortress, and specifically to the Nasrid Palaces, is strictly monitored
through quotas. Only a certain number of people can get in in one day, and there was still some uncertainty of whether I would leave Granada without visiting the Alhambra.

We took a cab at 7:30 AM, and we were in line by 8:00. The winding road up the hill was through a heavily forested area, and the morning air was crisp and cold; the coldest of the whole trip, at around 52°F. All this added to the fantasy setting of the visit.

By the time we got to the gate, the screens showed about 500 tickets remaining, and only about a hundred or so people were in line in front of us. It seemed like we were going to make it in.

The walkways from the visitor's entrance to the castle walls were paved and flanked with nice flower gardens and tall trees on either side. We took the bridge into the complex, and finally stepped inside the fortress. I was surprised to see it was like a small town; not only one large building but a small citadel. There were streets, hotels, houses and restaurants. 

The Alhambra has three main sections; the Alcazaba, which is the military fortress that defended the citadel; the Nasrid Palaces, which was the residence of the Sultan; and the Generalife Palace, which is built on an adjacent hill outside the fortress walls, and served as the summer palace and country club for the Sultans and the Sultanas. 

We had been assigned a certain time to enter the Nasrid Palaces, (which is the zone with the heaviest traffic) which that was still a couple of hours away, so we decided to visit the Alcazaba first.

Gate into the Alcazaba

The Alcazaba juts out of the edge of the hill as the bow of a ship would. It has fairly large turrets, and claustrophobic staircases leading down to the barracks and up to the defensive positions. Only the foundations of buildings remain, but it wouldn't be hard imagining the Moorish soldiers tending to their daily business while defending the Emirate.

We began climbing the front of the fortress, the main defensive position. At the very edge there is a tower with a deep cliff below it, from where you can see the entire city and the vega below. At the top of the tower fly the flags of Europe, Spain, Andalucia and Granada.

Back down to the citadel, we sat down for some coffee and a small sandwich while we waited for our turn to enter the palaces. We visited the local museum, which is inside a palace built by Charles V.

                                       

After a short line and wait, we finally made it inside the Nasrid Palaces. We were greeted by a massive door of carved marble. 

The inside of the palace was filled with little details: tessellations repeated over and over again on the ceiling as stalactites or on the walls as tiles. It all flowed together (sometimes literally). 

We made our way out to the Patio de los Leones where a large fountain of ten lions of carved marble stood as the centerpiece to an open-air patio with white marble floors. The almost-noon sun shone down especially bright on the marble and I was blinded by the overwhelming white of the place. When I recovered from the snow-blindness I noticed that the fountain supplied each of the four rooms at the edges of the rectangular patio with water, a series of channels of flowing water extende out from the center fountain. 

I was astounded by the use of light of the place. Since all the walls had arabesques on them, the light filtered through, giving a nice well-lit (but not too bright) feeling to the entire inside of the palace. The sound of rushing water was everywhere and fountains were ubiquitous, sometimes with large reflecting pools extending out from a single water source. 

We walked back outside of the hills and through a hedge maze to get to the Generalife on a separate hill.                              

                                       

The Generalife had much more natural setting to it, with gardens of hedges, flowers, trees and fountains. 

The view from the Generalife was honestly the best of the entire city, with the Alhambra in the foreground and the city in the back. It was here were I felt that I was in another place entirely, almost another world; than the city below. In between the staircase of fresh, cold water that feeds the entire complex and the ages-old dark-wood trees, I found a bench from where I could look at the entire panorama and I sat there. 

I sat there imagining the Moorish princes and princesses looking proudly on their flourishing kingdom from atop one of the towers, imagining the victorious procession of the Reyes Catolicos marching in and draping their banner over the sides of the castle walls. I thought about the defeated Boabdil having to escape through the small gate at the foot of the fortress, having to give all of this up, and I imagined him weeping the whole way out. 

I thought about how, though this city was reconquered by Christianity and the conquering Kings were buried in this soil, the main attraction to the city all these centuries later was this Muslim structure. I sat and thought and thought until it as time for me to leave. I honestly don't know how much time I was sitting on that bench, time didn't seem to follow the same rules up there. I was just trying to take all of this in before I inevitably had to start walking down and away. 

Of course, I eventually did. I walked back down the Alhambra to the city below, back to our room and into a car away from Granada, back through winding roads and mountains all the way to Valencia and (I mean this in the least cliche way possible) real life. The Alhambra was really something else, and she was on my mind the whole way back. I was missing her as soon as I turned my back on her and I understood--even if in just the smallest of fractions-- what Boabdil must have felt 600 years ago.