La Alhambra — The Alhambra

Al-Andalus, and the most visited building in Spain

The Alhambra is the most visited monument in Spain, with something in the order of two and a half million people a year passing through a hill fortress designed for a court of a few hundred. That mismatch is the whole explanation for the booking system Alex runs into, and it is worth understanding before you travel rather than at the gate. Tickets are sold online, weeks ahead, and they sell out — genuinely, not as a marketing pressure tactic. Your ticket carries a fixed half-hour slot for the Palacios Nazaríes, the Nasrid palaces, which is the part everyone comes for, and if you miss the slot you do not get in. The rest of the site — the Generalife gardens, the Alcazaba fortress — is more flexible. Going early or late in the day is better in every respect, and in summer it is the difference between a pleasure and an ordeal. What you are looking at is the last chapter of eight centuries. Muslim armies crossed from North Africa in 711 and within a few years controlled most of the peninsula; the territory they held was al-Andalus, and the name of Andalusia comes from it. Over the following centuries Christian kingdoms pushed south, and by the thirteenth century only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada remained. The Alhambra is that kingdom's palace-city, built mainly in the fourteenth century under Yusuf I and Muhammad V, and it fell in 1492 — the same year Columbus sailed, which is not a coincidence, since the Catholic Monarchs funded the voyage in the aftermath of the conquest. Two things to look for, because they are what makes the building extraordinary rather than merely old. The inscriptions: the walls are covered in Arabic calligraphy, poetry and Quranic verse used as architectural ornament, including the Nasrid motto that repeats endlessly — there is no victor but God. And the water: the whole complex is engineered around it, carried from the Sierra Nevada by a channel system and used for cooling, sound and reflection. The guide's el agua lo organiza todo is precise rather than poetic. One note on the language itself. Spanish took around four thousand words from Arabic during those centuries, and you have already used several — ojalá from lesson 59, plus aceite, azúcar, almohada, alfombra, alcalde, aduana, ajedrez, and the al- of Alhambra itself, which is simply the Arabic definite article fossilised into the Spanish noun.