Spain Part VIII: The Alhambra

Disclaimer: It's now been a long time since we visited Spain. We were busy over the holidays and forgot to finish one or two posts. While we know it's out of order (this was one of the first things we did in Spain) and really delayed, we still wanted to go back and finish it...

The Alhambra is located in Granada and is visited by more than 6 million people every year. When we were wondering around, we found a square across the city that really shows the scale of the Alhambra. The palace and fortress look gigantic sitting high above the city, and the Sierra Nevada mountains make for a perfect backdrop!

We had tickets to visit the Alhambra on our 2nd day. It's one of the most popular attractions in Europe, so you have to book your tickets ahead of time. We reserved ours almost two months in advance and there were only 7 tickets still available for our day! In fact, the 7 spots were only for the first time slot of the day at 8:30. While we weren't so excited to have such an early start, it actually ended up being perfect since it wasn't as crowded then and let us have a much more relaxed tour through the palace. Cool fact: Sunrise in Granada in October was around 8:30, so our ascent up to the Alhambra felt like it was the middle of the night...

The start of our walk up the hill.

Starting to get light out when we reached the top.

The Moors were Muslims from northern Africa that expanded their rule to include Spain, Portugal, southern Italy, Malta, and other areas from approximately 700 AD to 1500 AD (a really long time). During their control of the Iberian Peninsula, they constructed the grounds in different phases. The Alhambra consists of four main areas: Alcazaba (fortress), Nasrid Palace (Islamic palace), Palace of Charles V (Christian palace) and Generalife (garden complex). The fortress was the first part to be built at the end of the 9th century and was set on top of the steep hill for added protection. Admittedly, this is the least exciting part of the visit, but only because the rest of the grounds set the bar quite high. The view down on Granada is pretty excellent!

The second part, the Nasrid Palace, was built in the 1300s for the Sultan of Granada and is by far the most impressive part of the grounds. Typical Arabic architecture uses a lot of intricate design and geographical shapes, but this palace really took it to a new level. Some rooms had inscriptions and designs carved almost from floor to ceiling, and the ceiling itself usually had extremely tedious stucco designs. I'm really not sure if we've ever seen anything else this impressive!

Some of the detail may be hard to see, but you can always click on the pictures to make them bigger..

Not sure if it's really clear from the picture but the ceiling here was really awesome. The texture of the wall was a lot of tiny imprints that staggered in hundreds of layers, eventually forming a dome.

This was a temple - you can see some subtle cracks in the wall.

Looking out at the main courtyard through really cool columns.

Same courtyard. The lion fountain in the middle is really famous, and it was under renovation for a long time and was just recently returned.

You can see how the archways are supposed to resemble curtains.

For the literary buffs of the group - Washington Irving actually lived in the Alhambra for a while and wrote a famous book here. This was his room.

Beautiful views of the hills from one of the many terraces.

After the palace, it was only mid-morning and the weather was beautiful, so we headed over to the third section, the Generalife. These gardens were also built by the Moors. Another common characteristic of Islamic architecture is the use of water, which is evident throughout the entire Alhambra grounds. The Generalife portion was built in the early 1300s as a place of rest for Muslim royalty and is one of the oldest surviving Moorish gardens.

This view is from inside the Generalife looking back on the fortress and palaces. You can see how huge these grounds really are...

You can't exactly tell from this picture, but we're standing at the top looking down over a few layers of terraces, each with flowers and fountains.

...and another picture for scale.

After finishing the Generalife, we headed back to our last stop, the Palace of Charles V. Being the most modern section of the Alhambra, it was built in 1527 by Charles V after the Christians gained control of both Granada and the Alhambra. Fortunately, the Christian rulers chose to add on and not make too many major changes to the Islamic portions that existed. The palace was our least favorite part, probably because it paled in comparison to the detail and intricate Islamic palaces. The Palace of Charles V houses two museums, and the most impressive portion is the open courtyard in the center.

Outside of the four main areas, we also took some cool pictures just while walking around the grounds...

Looking back on our entire Spain trip, visiting the Alhambra was probably our favorite thing (aside from the amazing food and wine, of course). In fact, we think the Alhambra is among the coolest things we've ever seen in Europe!

Bis später,
Matt and Kristin