Reading this week:

• On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World by Philip Gooding
• Weyward by Emilia Hart

When you’re in Granada, of course the biggest thing you gotta do is go see the Alhambra. And so we did! We dedicated the whole day to it.

First we had to get there of course, which we did by hiking on up the hill. You would think you couldn’t get lost on the way to the Alhambra, it is right there on top of the hill you can see it from everywhere in Granada, but we couldn’t even quite figure out where the front door was. We wound up entering via the Puerta de la Justicia, which felt like we were sneaking in the back. We had tickets for the Alhambra, which all the guide books recommend you get well in advance, but it wasn’t immediately clear how the whole complex worked. We had thought like you just have a ticket for the complex and then wander around. Turns out you can just walk into the Alhambra itself, but if you want to see the various compounds within the Alhambra, that’s what requires tickets and your one ticket lets you into all of them, but like once. That eventually became clear but in the meantime we were confusedly peripatetic.

The first place we wandered into were the Generalife, which despite the name is much more specifically a complex of gardens (and a palace). And then even more specifically it is apparently a summer palace, which confuses me. Like it was a countryside retreat for the Sultan, but it is like a five-minute walk from the court? This is like the US president having a summer home over in Foggy Bottom, isn’t it? I don’t get it. Very pretty though! I loved all the water features and fountains and everything. I liked that water would flow out of fountains and then into little channels before finally emptying into pool surrounded by bushes and trees and flowers. To get water to the Alhambra they had a canal running from way upstream on the Darro which I find super cool and apparently which you can still see remnants of, though we didn’t manage to hike all the way out there. They had other stuff that must have been designed to impress me, specifically, including espaliered orange trees, which I didn’t even know you could do to orange trees. The palace of the Generalife was also our first taste in the Alhambra of the absolutely luscious ceilings we would see throughout the Alhambra. I know I raved about the Mezquita but the farther south we went the more intense these ceilings got. They are meant to inspire a recollection of the cave of Hira. I think I might have a lot more revelations too if I got to hang out in such a palace all day.

Having wandered the Generalife and subsequently picked up a guidebook in one of the several gift shops in the complex, we had gotten our feet under us, Alhambra-touristing-wise. Although you could go into the other compounds at any point on your general Alhambra ticket, we had timed tickets for the Nasrid Palaces, and it was now that time, so off we went. Running out of words to describe the result of centuries of accumulated majestic architecture, I noted in my journal that it was “again stunning, over the top, beautiful, out of this world.” This is where mosaic tiling really shines and my super amazing wife later bought a whole book about it. There were so many different motifs and later we were to see the labor that goes into it and I can barely believe it. I think they worked really hard at the Alhambra to stick in every type of tile work imaginable. I think my particular favorite were interlacing star wheels based around what I think is a zellij pattern. But really it’s impossible to pick a favorite and that’s why they try to stick in every single type I assume. We were also overwhelmed by more and more and more fantastical ceilings and various mind-bogglingly complex stucco’d walls. I think the most famous space in the Alhambra is the Court of the Lions, which is neat and all, but as you can see in my picture of it below my neck was craned firmly up. Not to say the palace didn’t have some absolutely rocking courtyards; although I bought a print of the famous lions it was the courtyards full of trees that I enjoyed the most in-person. Oh, to be the less-important son of a sultan, lounging in courtyards writing absolutely execrable poetry.

After the palaces we visited the next most exciting place in the Alhambra, which was the wonderful wine stand fittingly near the Puerta del Vino. A wine stand! In a national park! The Spanish are wonderful. We actually forewent the wine but had some bocadillos for lunch as we perused that guidebook we had purchased. Fortified we went on into the Alcazaba, which was also fortified, being a fort and all. The experience in this section of the Alhambra was damped (and dampened) by the fact that just as we reached the tippy-top of the tower with the gorgeous views of both the city of Granada and the Sierra Nevada it started to rain. A cold rain too! Fitting for February. But we scurried back down into the tower and huddled there with some other tourists. We hadn’t brought any raingear or an umbrella, which made wandering around the Alhambra less desirable. So we decided to at this point pop into the Palace of Carlos V.

Carlos V was the grandkid of Isabella and Ferdinand which is why he was in a position to build (or have built, he didn’t do it himself) a big imposing square palace with a round middle right in the middle of the Alhambra complex. Since he wasn’t using it anymore these days they have stuck two museums into it. The first one had artifacts from the Alhambra and also quite a lot about tilemaking. Maybe tilemaking was only a small part of it but after all the gorgeous tiles in the palaces it was what I was most interested in so it’s the bits I remember. But I was also impressed by the above chair because that sucker is like 640 years old. With the palace in Madrid I liked to imagine all the armor they had was just sitting in storage for a few centuries and I have to imagine the above chair was the same which just tickles me pink. A very nice chair! I gotta get one. The other museum in the Carlos V palace was a Museo de Bellas Artes and what I wrote down in my journal is that the Artes were indeed Bellas so that should be a good enough recommendation to visit yourself.

At this point we were pretty pooped from seeing just centuries upon centuries of art and history and so we head out. Our last big adventure for the day (besides some souvenir shopping) was to hike up to a viewpoint so we could see the sunset over the Alhambra. This was enjoyable for the small winding and pretty streets that meandered up to the viewpoint, full of pretty tilework and with a smattering of pretty cats, though a bit of a bust sunset-wise because of the clouds. But as sunset fell upon our first full day in Granada we were looking forward to seeing even more of the sights (and eating more tapas).