Alhambra Guided: the Fortress Walls and the Last Nasrid Sultans

The Alhambra is a palace city, and this guided visit takes it in that order: the walls first, then what they were protecting.

The fortress is where the garrison sat waiting for an attack that came, eventually, from the Catholic Monarchs. Walking the ramparts before the palaces changes the tone of the whole visit. The decoration inside is easier to read once you have seen how nervous the people who commissioned it had reason to be.

Then the palaces of the last sultans of the Nasrid dynasty. This was the end of eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula, and the building knows it: no other European monument was finished so close to the fall of the state that built it.

The Renaissance answer stands in the middle of the site, put up by the empire that took over.

The gardens close the visit. Water and architecture were designed together here, so the sound of it arrives before the shade, and the Andalusi idea of a garden as a built thing rather than a planted one becomes obvious.

An expert guide covers the history, the secrets and the legends, and at the Alhambra the legends are half the record.