Steeped in history
The Iberian peninsula remains popular for long and short breaks. Michael Kerr opts for the latter in Granada but thinks the city merits more time.
(Filed: 21/01/2006)
Granada basics
More than 5,000, my guide, Antonio, said. He craned his neck as I did to take them in, those pieces of shimmering stucco that seemed to be exploding inside the octagonal frame of the ceiling.
Hanging, hanging, but never falling. These mocárabes, he had told me earlier, were representations of the stalactites in the cave in which Mohammed had received inspiration for the Koran. He followed my gaze down the wall, to the dado verse that ran all the way round the room, to the tiles with their patterns of small shields and interwoven ribbons without beginning or end.
A quartet of Japanese tourists stepped in front of us, videoing first, looking later. When they had moved on, Antonio said softly: You have to imagine the carpets, the wall hangings, the braziers they would have used at night to keep warm . . .
Lions Court, The Alhambra: it sees seven thousand visitors a day
I tried. I was particularly keen on the braziers, for my teeth were chattering, and my fingers so cold I could hardly hold the pen with which, in the dim light, I was trying to scribble notes. The Alhambra is a dreamy place, but at night it can also be a cold one.
Washington Irving would have conjured up a brazier in no time. During his stay here in the early 19th century, when this palace-city was a ruin squatted by the homeless, Irving – perhaps best known in Britain as the author of Rip Van Winkle – wrote a fanciful account of its Muslim past based on legend and folklore, peopling its halls and courtyards with vengeful sultans and teasing sultanas, spinning yarns that, in the years since, have served to enlarge the myth and obscure the truth – but done no harm at all to the gate receipts.
The Alhambra, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain to fall to the Christian Reconquista – in 1492 – is the most popular tourist attraction in the country. Seven thousand visitors a day shuffle through it, and there would probably be many more if numbers were not restricted by a system of timed tickets.
The Time Out Guide to Andalusia recommends Irvings Tales of the Alhambra as essential reading for those visitors. I would suggest instead The Alhambra, published by the British Arabist Robert Irwin only a year ago, and now out in paperback.
Irwin opens with two long paragraphs in italic. At the end he announces: Not one fact in the preceding two paragraphs is likely to be correct. Yet I have carefully compiled them from material drawn from real and current guidebooks.
Over the following 200 pages, he sets about nailing lies, legends and mistakes and, with a perhaps or a probably, offering tentative conclusions of his own about everything from when the various parts of the Alhambra were built to how they were used. He cannot do more. We are dealing, he says, not so much with a body of knowledge as with a body of wild guesses.
As Irwin goes about his clinical corrections, the reader does wonder if the man has a romantic bone in his body. But now and again a crack appears even in his restraint. At the end of a passage on arithmetic, on the ratios and proportions that underlie the beauty of the building, he says: One is not expected to master that complexity and detail, but to drown in them.
Easily done. I took an immediate liking to Granada, too. Even the taxi journey from the airport was a pleasure, with the snow-capped Sierras visible all the way in to town. I could see them, too, from my room in the Alhambra Palace Hotel, a kitschy, Muslim-Christian homage to the real thing, with Islamic inscriptions decorating its Moorish arches and Hapsburg eagles printed on its fitted carpets.
Antonio, whom I joined at the Alhambra for an evening tour at eight oclock, told me that the same stucco had been used in my hotel as in the restoration of the Alhambra itself. Restoration and additions have contributed enormously to what the tourist sees today.
The complex has been transformed since medieval times. Most incongruous is the Renaissance palace at whose doors we met: commissioned by Carlos V in 1526, it was not finished until the 20th century. It is a gorgeous building, but you do not need to be an architect to see that it is in the wrong place.
Antonio did not mind that. Indeed, as he led me round he seemed to be revelling in the contrasts and contradictions, the mingling of Moorish and Christian: a wall where the two faiths came into contact; an opening offering a glimpse of a medieval roof and a Renaissance one; the Justice Gate, decorated with both Moorish symbols and a Virgin and Child. At the end, he bought me a drink and pointed me in the direction of a heart-warming soup – having walked me down to the centre of town through woods that had been planted by the Duke of Wellington.
Such is the layout of the Alhambra that it is impossible to get a sense while you are in it, especially in the dark, of how its parts fit together. I returned in the morning at 8.30, the low sun freshening the silver of the birches lining the approach, and climbed to the top of a watchtower in the Alcazaba, the oldest part. From here, and by studying the aerial photographs in a locally bought guidebook, I got a real sense of the shape of the complex: a ship, with the Alcazaba at its prow and the Generalife gardens at its stern, steaming towards the city.
There were few other tourists yet, but I could hear their coaches lumbering up the hill. At a kiosk in front of the Alcazaba, conifers piercing its roof, staff fortified themselves for the invasion with coffee and brandy. By 10.30, when my ticket allowed me back in to the palaces I had explored the night before, the place was a circus.
Now and again I tried to sit on the floor, as the original inhabitants would have done, but no sooner was I settled than someone would stand right in front of me. Bloody tourists, I muttered to myself. Then, in the blunt tones of Yorkshire, I heard a man say: Of course in those days there would have been snotty guards with big sharp spears sticking them up your arse if youd even tried to come in . . .
I gave up, had a stroll in the gardens and then, following Antonios advice of the night before, caught a bus across the River Darro to the Albaicín, the oldest part of the city. The bus was a Mercedes, scarcely more than a minibus, with seven or eight people seated and everyone else standing, grabbing for firmer handholds as it slewed round corners and over cobbles, up and round, up and round, to the stop for the Plaza San Nicolás.
Just uphill from the stop were the square, the church and a parapet over which 30 or 40 people sat dangling their legs, looking across at where I had just been. Even in the midday sun, with the light at its most unflattering, the Alhambra looked ridiculously picturesque. From the far corner of the square came a few hesitant chords as a young gipsy guitarist fumbled for a tune. His flamenco would shortly be joined by another sound: the call of the muezzin, which is being heard in Granada again for the first time in more than 500 years.
A new mosque opened here in 2003. Non-Muslims are welcome to enter its garden, also with a view of the Alhambra, with paths of flagstone and flint and raised beds of white-painted brick full of Michaelmas daisies, roses and pansies. As I wandered around, a group of middle-aged men was making a fuss of a young black man in a dark suit and red tie topped by a flowing cream robe. A white woman approached them, wearing a turban, a silky jacket and a long skirt. I asked her whether there was something special going on.
Yes, she answered, my son is getting married. Then came the muezzins call, and they all disappeared inside.
I followed as far as the entrance hall, where there were videos on sale about the building of the mosque and racks of pamphlets: El Corán, La Politica de Islam, Aprende Arabe (Learn Arabic). Among them was a pamphlet in English, Islam Today, which declared that, under the obligations of a just civilisation, Muslims were precluded from taking the jews and christians as their friends since they are an enemy.
The pamphlet was published by a sect named Murabitun, which is based in Inverness and which (I discovered on returning home) has praised Hitler as a great genius for his jihad against jewism. It was the one sour note in a city where the resurgence of Islamic influence and orientalism was otherwise fascinating. For in cultural terms, at least, there is certainly a reverse Reconquista going on.
There are countless shops selling tea things and carpets, leather and candle snuffers, their stock drawn from countries throughout the Middle East and their staff from Moroccans among the 70,000 students at Granada University. I had a soak and a massage in a hammam and sipped mint tea in a tetería, where I was served by a young man from Togo. I ate a lamb tagine as authentic, and tasty, as anything to be found in Marrakesh. And outside the Capilla Real, last resting place of the Muslim-conquering monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, I found a man in a fez offering to paint the names of passing tourists in Arabic.
Inside the chapel, it is still 1492. A massive painting shows Ferdinand and Isabella taking Granada; the glorious and gruesome altarpiece depicts the surrender of the last sultan, Boabdil, and the conversion of Muslim men and women to Christianity. But the 21st century intrudes. One man was talking on his mobile phone, a second was boasting to a friend about the capabilities of his mobile phone and a third was shooting photos of his family on his PDA, right in front of a sign saying No Fotos, No Video.
In the tight streets around the cathedral, stalls were piled with spices and chillies and herbal cures. There was Flor de Azahar for Insomnio y Migraine, Flor de Malva for Catarro and something, the weightier tourists were promised, that would help them to lose fats.
They could, instead, have danced off their fats at the Corral del Carbón. This balconied Moorish fondak, or inn, was built in the 14th century for merchants who brought their wares to Granada from all over Spain and north Africa. It got its present name after the Reconquista, when vendors weighed their charcoal on scales set up near the central fountain in its cobbled patio. Now it was again resounding to African rhythms – the sound of a 10-piece band comprised of nine black drummers and singers from Senegal and a white keyboard player. Otra? -Another one? – their leader asked when they had finished their set and it was clear that no one wanted them to go. And in response there was a long, drawn-out Síííííí!
I felt like that about the city as a whole. It was a place where I could have done with more than a long weekend and where the locals were a lot more welcoming than their reputation suggests.
A taxi driver atoned for his poor navigation by halving my fare, and an elderly couple sipping a post-mass morning coffee insisted that I share their pastries. From medieval craftsmanship to modern street puppetry, there was no shortage of things to see. As an inscription on a plaque in the Alhambra put it, Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada – Give to the beggar, my dear, for nothing in life is harder than to be blind in Granada.
Granada basics
Getting there
Michael Kerr travelled with Monarch Scheduled (08700 406300), which ?ies from Gatwick to Granada daily; return fares from £63 including taxes.
Staying there
He stayed at the Alhambra Palace Hotel, booked through Keytel International (020 7616 0300, www.keytel.co.uk), the UK agent for paradors in Spain, which can also book accommodation at the Parador de Granada, in the grounds of the complex. Special offers at paradors throughout 2006 start at about £30 per person per night including buffet breakfast.
Reading
The Alhambra by Robert Irwin (Pro?le Books, £8 .99); The Alhambra and Generalife in Focus (Edilux , €8 from shops in Granada), a beautifully produced and dependable guidebook.
Further information
www.alhambradegranada.org; www.tourspain.co.uk.
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