The Alhambra

Granada, from the Alhambra

The highlight of a trip to Granada is a trip to the Alhambra. It's a fortress built above the city that has been added to and changed over the years, and has rightly been designated a World Cultural Heritage Site by the UN. It is a large park with the more recent palace of Carlos V but of more interest, an Arabian palace of varying ages and their accompanying gardens and parks. I spent my time there devouring everything with my eyes and didn't actually draw much, or even take pictures.
The walk through started with a colonnade of

cedars: this kind of row of trees is almost as beguiling to me as portals with hints of what's on the other side. The crowds weren't bad, and it was possible to imagine strolling here in the early morning with just the birds and a few gardeners. (to be a gardener here-- in my next life!) Then the Carlos V palace, which I didn't enter. Palace fatigue. The Nasrid Palace, though: simple empty hallways and unfurnished rooms, sometimes covered with mosaic tiles in geometric patterns wrapped around many gardens, each with a fountain or pool of some kind, with barely moving water, yielding nearly perfect reflections of the elaborate arches. The sun glanced off the water's surface and made watery reflections on the jasmine; swallows swooped low into the courtyards from the high walls. The whole thing, composed of many sections and enclosed gardens, flowed so smoothly together that I din't really notice moving forward. It had an overall dreamy effect. Unbelievably peaceful, even with tourists tramping through. Unlike my garden, these all were restrained, with mostly green.                                                                                            

my photo

Juan Vida, 1996

Joaquin Sorolla, 1917

Eugenio Gomez-Mir, 1920

 

Jose Maria Lopez-Mezquita, early 20th c.

When  I got home, I found a magazine waiting (Saudi Aramco World, July August 2014) with many paintings interpreting the Court of the Myrtles, one of the few places I photographed. Fifteen, in fact: here are a few. Seems I will have to try it myself.  Outside the palace, there were more familiar gardens, whose plants were astonishingly familiar to me: the majority of them were plants that are or have been growing in my own yard. It made me realize what a variety of plants I have! There were gardeners watering and weeding, people wandering . . . there were groups of Chinese tourists that seemed to be performing a mandatory visit (there were five girls gathered around a fountain tickling the water), but otherwise, everyone else drifted by apparently in the same dream as me. Oddly, the only feature that stood out as lacking in grace was the sculptured lions in the Court of the Lions-- the iconic image of this place. An interesting feature was the Escalera de Agua-- stairway of water. Where stair rails would be expected, there were low walls with gutters on top about 6" deep and wide. The floor of these gutters had little ridges that created cascades as the water rushed down along the stairway, and at the landings, there were little deeper pools that made the water go in a circle around itself. The attention given to the look and sound of water is something wonderful. In one garden I sat next to an odd German gentleman and we chatted about some of the engineering and aesthetic elements of the place: he said he comes back every three or four years, just to sit here. I can believe it!        

Nasrid Palace

The city below

The place has so many fountains, pools, and water sources for the gardens: the source is the Sierra Nevada, behind the city. The Arabs who first built the place ran the water down in pipes that became increasingly narrow, to develop the pressure required for the fountains. Once they run through the fountains, they go down to the city (which at that time was workers that supported the palaces and gardens) for their use.     Finally I wandered through tall trees (in most places here, the trees are pruned to within an inch of their lives so you can't know their natural shape or size: these were like what I think of as trees, and off the wide path, there was a smaller path where they toed in making the path zigzagged, something that seemed to me more like a Japanese fancy. And back to the real world: though the real world here is not so bad, if you are on vacation.