Granada
Extracts from lonelyplanet.com and andalusia.com
Read up on your Nasrid history, slip a copy of Federico García Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads into your bag, and acquire a working knowledge of Andalucía’s splendid Moorish architectural heritage – Granada is calling and its allure is hard to ignore.
Internationally revered for its lavish Alhambra palace, and enshrined in medieval history as the last stronghold of the Moors in Western Europe, Granada is the darker, more complicated cousin of sunny, exuberant Seville. Humming with a feisty cosmopolitanism and awash with riddles, question marks, contradictions and myths, this is a place to put down your guidebook and let your intuition lead the way – through the narrow ascending streets of the Albayzín, and the tumbling white-walled house gardens of the Realejo quarter. Elegant yet edgy, grandiose but gritty, monumental but marked by pockets of stirring graffiti, 21st-century Granada is anything but straightforward. Instead, this sometimes stunning, sometimes ugly city set spectacularly in the crook of the Sierra Nevada is an enigmatic place where – if the mood is right – you sense you might find something that you’ve long been looking for. A free tapa, perhaps? An inspirational piece of street art? A flamenco performance that finally unmasks the intangible spirit of duende?
Endowed with relics from various epochs of history, there’s lots to do and plenty to admire in Granada: the mausoleum of the Catholic monarchs, old-school bars selling generous tapas, bohemian teterías where Arabic youths smoke cachimbas (hookah pipes), and an exciting nightlife that bristles with the creative aura of counterculture. Make no mistake, you’ll fall in love here, but you’ll spend days and weeks trying to work out why.
Granada was first settled by native tribes in the prehistoric period, and was known as Ilbyr. When the Romans colonised southern Spain, they built their own city here and called it Illibris. The Arabs, invading the peninsula in the 8th century, gave it its current name of Granada after the Pomegranate fruit that grows throughout the area. It was the last Muslim city to fall to the Christians in 1492, at the hands of Queen Isabel of Castile and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon.
One of the most brilliant jewels of universal architecture is the Alhambra, a series of palaces and gardens built under the Nazari Dynasty in the 14th C. This mighty compound of buildings – including the summer palace called Generalife, with its fountains and gardens - stands at the foot of Spain's highest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, and overlooks the city below and the fertile plain of Granada.
Read up on your Nasrid history, slip a copy of Federico García Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads into your bag, and acquire a working knowledge of Andalucía’s splendid Moorish architectural heritage – Granada is calling and its allure is hard to ignore.
Internationally revered for its lavish Alhambra palace, and enshrined in medieval history as the last stronghold of the Moors in Western Europe, Granada is the darker, more complicated cousin of sunny, exuberant Seville. Humming with a feisty cosmopolitanism and awash with riddles, question marks, contradictions and myths, this is a place to put down your guidebook and let your intuition lead the way – through the narrow ascending streets of the Albayzín, and the tumbling white-walled house gardens of the Realejo quarter. Elegant yet edgy, grandiose but gritty, monumental but marked by pockets of stirring graffiti, 21st-century Granada is anything but straightforward. Instead, this sometimes stunning, sometimes ugly city set spectacularly in the crook of the Sierra Nevada is an enigmatic place where – if the mood is right – you sense you might find something that you’ve long been looking for. A free tapa, perhaps? An inspirational piece of street art? A flamenco performance that finally unmasks the intangible spirit of duende?
Endowed with relics from various epochs of history, there’s lots to do and plenty to admire in Granada: the mausoleum of the Catholic monarchs, old-school bars selling generous tapas, bohemian teterías where Arabic youths smoke cachimbas (hookah pipes), and an exciting nightlife that bristles with the creative aura of counterculture. Make no mistake, you’ll fall in love here, but you’ll spend days and weeks trying to work out why.
Granada was first settled by native tribes in the prehistoric period, and was known as Ilbyr. When the Romans colonised southern Spain, they built their own city here and called it Illibris. The Arabs, invading the peninsula in the 8th century, gave it its current name of Granada after the Pomegranate fruit that grows throughout the area. It was the last Muslim city to fall to the Christians in 1492, at the hands of Queen Isabel of Castile and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon.
One of the most brilliant jewels of universal architecture is the Alhambra, a series of palaces and gardens built under the Nazari Dynasty in the 14th C. This mighty compound of buildings – including the summer palace called Generalife, with its fountains and gardens - stands at the foot of Spain's highest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, and overlooks the city below and the fertile plain of Granada.
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First Order Questions:
Why is this site good for settlement, and are these properties still applicable in the modern era? What are the cultural demographics of Granada and how have they changed through the years? What differentiates a city from a big town? Second Order Questions: In what ways could you consider a city to be 'living'? Is a city a place where people live, or a people who live in a place? What contributes to a city's personality more, the buildings or the people? |
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