To reach the Alhambra, that paradise of fortified palaces and gardens, you walk uphill. First along winding streets and twisted lanes, through an arched stone doorway, and then up a broad path that cuts through trees growing with tropical fury. On either side are the silver lines of running water, and their splash blocks any noise from the town below.
There are a series of switchbacks – the road ascends continuously – signs and maps, the cinderblock structure of the tourist office, guards with ticket scanners and an occasional truncheon, and then you are there, walking through an avenue of topiary toward the Nasrid Palace, the Alcazabar, and the gardens that surround them.
Built at the height of Moorish Spain's power, and taken over after their expulsion and defeat in 1492, the buildings are remarkably intact. Tourist numbers are high – the entire site is UNESCO listed – and so your ticket is marked with a staggered entry time that provides a half hour window in which to enter the palace. Of course once inside you are free to remain as long as you please, wandering through gardens filled with rose bushes, rectangular ponds with coloured carp, courtyards and balconies.
The palace itself is a series of great and small rooms, decorated on every surface with tiles, plaster, stone and timber carving. In the larger rooms these carvings reach the domed ceilings in an infinite geometry of text and pattern and motif.
Because of the heat of the Andalusian summer the windows are large, though shielded from the worst of it by marble lattices. On the hottest days you sit in alcoves on the cool marble floor.
At one such window, looking out over terracotta rooftops toward Albayzin, the old Moorish quarter, you see the tourists gathering in the Mirador de San Nicolas, looking back across the same buildings to the palace in which you stand.
