See Spain’s fabled Alhambra as few have ever before

Jesús Bermúdez has deep ties to the Alhambra. Born in the fortress built on an imposing hill in Granada, Spain, he grew up within the palace’s walls. When his father became director of the Alhambra museum in mid-century, the family moved into a house inside the monument. It was “the stage,” as he calls it, on which his days played out, an upbringing that steeped him in its legends and history from an early age—and inspired an enduring devotion to it. For nearly four decades, Bermúdez has been the archaeologist and conservator at the Alhambra, seen as the crowning glory of the nearly 800-year Muslim reign on the Iberian Peninsula. Though he moves through the complex with the easy familiarity of navigating one’s own home, he still manages to impart a sense of wonder, as if glimpsing it for the first time. He stops often to greet student groups, guards, guides, gardeners. He displays the same pride I imagine the sultans must have had when they showed their palace to visitors.

Bermúdez is the ideal guide for a behind-the-scenes tour (and has also written the official guide). Starting from the Gate of Justice, the largest of the Alhambra’s four entry points, we explore not only its trademark courtyards and towers but also the recesses that few are allowed to see, places where fact intermingles with fable. As researchers continue to plumb its depths, the Alhambra remains a site for archaeology and restoration, including a rebirth of one of its most enigmatic works of art, recently completed after nearly 20 years.

“The Alhambra is first and foremost a palatine city,” he says. “It was the seat of the head of state, with military barracks, a courtly city, and a set of palaces built over the course of two and a half centuries.” The monument grew over that time from the primitive Alcazaba, or fortress, built by Muhammad I beginning in 1238, to later palaces reflecting the Nasrid dynasty’s sumptuous style. A line of sultans from the Nasr family ruled until 1492, when this last stronghold of Muslim authority on the peninsula was toppled by a newly unified Spanish monarchy after the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.

During the 254 years the Nasrids governed the Granada emirate, which extended far beyond the city itself, this part of today’s Andalusia region was “frozen in time, maintaining a feudal society secluded in an idyllic oasis,” Bermúdez explains. And yet the kingdom left a legacy in a monument considered the pinnacle of the beauty and architectural refinement born in Al Andalus, as the larger Muslim-ruled region was known. History could never forget it.

With Granada’s fall, a succession of Catholic governors ran the fortress until the beginning of the 19th century, when it was occupied by Napoleon’s troops. They decimated it on their departure. The Spanish crown eventually ceded it to the state, and it became a national monument in 1870. Today the palatine city is alive again, with a court of officials at its service, a bureaucracy that keeps it running, and strict entry protocols, as if we’re foreign envoys bearing a message for the emir.

One of the most notable envoys to Spain is the reason so many know this corner of the world today. The writer Washington Irving was a diplomat posted at the American Embassy in Madrid when he visited Granada in 1829. That was 17 years after Napoleon’s troops had decamped, and what remained deteriorated from neglect. Rooms were plundered, the pools became washing areas, the courtyards were turned into corrals, and families who had nowhere else to go settled in the empty spaces. “It went from being a castle of kings to a refuge for outcasts, but it was always inhabited,” says Bermúdez. “And that kept it standing.” The squatters of the Alhambra, Bermúdez calls them.

Irving gave them a more romantic name: the children of the Alhambra. It was the vagrants, the bandits, the disinherited who, together with the ghosts of the defeated, populated his Tales of the Alhambra—unveiling the city and putting it on the tourist map. Still in every bookstore in the city and widely translated, the book perpetuated the fortress’s romantic aura, reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights. Other notables had set foot in Granada, but none had the impact of Irving. Given the weight of his influence, his single statue, set just off the Cuesta de Gomérez, a historic path to the fortress, seems a lukewarm tribute.

When Irving arrived at the Alhambra with his traveling companion, a Russian diplomat, they were appalled that visitors, even dignitaries, had left their mark in graffiti—their names and notes scrawled on its walls. The Russian provided a leatherbound guest book to discourage the practice. Thousands of signatures filled that volume for the next 43 years. It was an early glimmer of recognition of the structure’s value.

Though his fellow traveler soon departed, Irving would stay on for several months, “spellbound,” he wrote, “in this old enchanted pile.” He ensconced himself in royal chambers that opened up onto the picturesque Lindaraja garden. Mateo Jiménez, a self-described “son of the Alhambra” who claimed his ancestors had lived in the fortress for generations, offered himself up as a servant and guide, recounting the family lore.

(The dazzling details of Spain’s Alhambra)

Places where Irving set his reflections and accounts still can be seen today, such as the reconstructed Gate of the Seven Floors. Popular legend holds that Boabdil, the last sultan, fled through that gate, imploring that it be sealed after his departure. Irving’s story describes a succession of passages in which the sultan would have hidden a magnificent treasure in case he ever managed to return. Another spot, the Tower of the Princesses, later renamed after Irving’s tale, was the setting for his story of three Muslim princesses who fall for Christian captives.

The book made the fortress “an object of desire—a need to visit it, to discover it,” says Bermúdez. “Today we know this is also part of our heritage. Preserving a universal monument such as the Alhambra also means preserving all the values from its past.”

The Alhambra has always enraptured those from the outside. In January 1492 Queen Isabella, leading a military procession, began her triumphant ascent up Cuesta de Gomérez on horseback to Al Hamra, which translates to “the red” for the fortress’s pink-hued stone. The Reconquest—lasting more than 700 years—had rolled back Muslim territories one by one across the peninsula. A papal order authorized this final crusade, resulting in a 10-year war waged for control of the holdout Granada kingdom.

When the keys to the Alhambra were finally surrendered, chroniclers noted Isabella’s surprise as she took in the fine details inside the bastion that had long been forbidden to her: its intricate latticework, honeycombed vaulting, the infinite geometry of its tiles, trickling pools that mirrored the magnificent facades.

The Alhambra had been an impregnable fortress for almost three centuries. One might expect a Christian queen to reduce it to ashes, erasing from its walls the inscriptions praising Allah. Instead, she ordered that it be left untouched. What’s more, she determined it would be her destiny for eternity, something that the unfortunate Boabdil could not fulfill: “I will and command that, if I should die outside the city of Granada, my entire body be taken, as it is, without delay, to the city.” When she died in 1504 at her residence in the town of Medina del Campo, her coffin was sent on the three-week journey to Granada. The Alhambra, emptied of its Nasrid court just 12 years before, would be the final resting place of the Catholic queen. (Initially interred in the fortress, her remains, along with those of her husband, King Ferdinand, were later transferred to the Royal Chapel of Granada.)

While on his honeymoon several years later, King Charles V, Isabella’s grandson, visited the city conquered by his grandparents. Grasping the symbolic value, he set out to designate his own palace in the Alhambra. Construction took more than a century, and the king never lived there, but Bermúdez considers that beside the point. It superimposed a new narrative: Charles used the original architecture as a base to build anew, a metaphor for triumph. And “placing himself just that little bit higher,” Bermúdez says. Standing adjacent to the three Nasrid palaces—the Mexuar, the Comares, and the Palace of the Lions, collectively the undisputed jewel in the crown for visitors—the square, rigid structure built for the Spanish king was likened to “a meteor” by one architect.

Inside the central colonnade of Charles’s palace, Bermúdez pulls out a key the size of his forearm and opens a door to a stone staircase. The “stairway of time,” the Alhambra staff calls it. We descend in semidarkness to another gate. My eyes struggle to adjust before I’m dazzled by bright light. Bermúdez wields a new key and, as if enchanted, I’m suddenly standing in the Courtyard of the Myrtles, named for the bushes that surround its rectangular pool, in the Comares Palace. Yes, a bit lower than Charles’s.

In a moment we transitioned from Renaissance sobriety to a saturation of the senses, from the victors to the vanquished. The staircase, built in 1580, was intended to do precisely that: to unite the old royal house with the new one. Tourists view our sudden apparition as if we were ghosts from the past. With a mischievous smile, Bermúdez closes the door behind us.

Some two million people visit the Alhambra each year, but they’re limited to about 20 percent of the site. Bermúdez guides me through some of the hidden parts, namely an underground network. These are modest and functional rooms, he says, kept out of sight as they were back then, the domain of servants and guards who kept the palace running. Some also held prisoners. We peer into one of the complex’s 20 dungeons, which was discovered just over a century ago. After the fall of Granada, the queen herself rushed to free Christian prisoners, as she had done in the Muslim stronghold of Málaga, where an officer from the Netherlands told her he’d been held for more than 40 years.

Still in the bowels, we make our way to a large cistern, which more readily resembles a cathedral with its barrel-vaulted naves and sheer size. The underground structures also provided a cool, stable temperature to store grain and other staples. As we descend by ladder into a cavelike silo, it strikes me as the place where the Alhambra’s legendary passageways could begin. I instinctively search with my headlamp. None are here, but they do exist. One level up, members of the royal guard would have been posted beneath the throne room in the Comares Tower, ready to intervene in a crisis. We walk through the tunnels, aware that tourists marveling at the magnificence of the room cannot imagine the infrastructure that lay beneath.

Bermúdez unlocks a door. A flashlight illuminates a staircase that leads deep into the earth and, after 200 steps down, to yet another door. It opens into the heart of the woods, just outside the walls. We’re a short distance from the Darro River. It would have been an easy—and clandestine—way to leave the fortress. In 1359 Muhammad V, the eighth Nasrid monarch, was ousted by a revolt that put his half brother in his place. In the middle of the night, rebels scaled the walls and knifed the guards. Barely 20 years old, the rightful sultan escaped—some say through a passageway in the Comares Tower. Was this the place where he would have arrived breathless and been spirited away?

The coup was a game of thrones involving changing loyalties, including that of his Christian ally Peter of Castile. After three years, Muhammad V returned to his throne. Without that subsequent prosperous and peaceful 30-year reign, the Alhambra as we know it today would not exist. Muhammad ushered in the dynasty’s golden age. He built what many consider to be the most striking spot in the Alhambra—the courtyard with a central fountain ringed by a dozen lion statues—and he continued his father’s tradition of embellishing palaces with another art form: Arabic inscriptions.

The Alhambra is a palace of poems, an architecture of words, says José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, author of Reading the Alhambra, which decodes the inscriptions on its walls. Like Bermúdez, he’s spent his life studying this place and translating it to the world. “If it lost its supports, columns, and arcades, the building would be held up by words alone,” he says, referring to its ubiquitous calligraphic panels. Leaning on his knowledge, I see a different Alhambra—with the language barrier, one that remains largely inaccessible to those who inherited it. Verses run along its walls, curl in cartouches, and even meet in the closets. Some are carved in plaster, others in wood, or meticulously inscribed on tiles. The omnipresent motto of the Nasrid house, “There is no conqueror but God,” alternates on the walls with greetings for visitors, including baraka (blessing), afiya baqiya (perpetual health), and yumn (fortune).

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In reality, the Alhambra was designed to praise God—and the sultan, as God’s earthly representative. The ornamental script envelops visitors as if they were inside a monumental book. But the power of the written word didn’t end there. The Diwan al Insa, the office of correspondence and records, was created around 1273 and run by a master of two nuanced arts: diplomacy and writing. “His function was propagandistic,” says Puerta Vílchez. “The texts had to be not only correct but beautiful, poetic, capable of praising God, the dynasty, and the sultan.” The person with the best command of language, the katib, became a double vizier—head of that office and prime minister—the most powerful man in the kingdom after the sultan.

Puerta Vílchez regards the kingdom’s great poets as if he had worked with them himself, composing verses or transcribing internal documents that serve as invaluable chronicles of a tempestuous era. In his view, it’s the swan song of the dynasty, aware of its geographic isolation on the peninsula and the inevitability of its fall. Written mainly by three successive poets who headed the chancellery in the 14th century, the Alhambra’s epigraphs represent some of the Nasrids’ most dazzling contributions to Islamic art—perhaps an attempt to demonstrate a grandeur that was not going to last much longer. Of the two forms of Arabic used, the naskhi, or cursive, is easily visible, but the Kufic form may go unnoticed even by a visitor who knows the language. With a rectilinear style, it can masquerade as a geometric element, blending into the decor.

In the Palace of the Lions, poet Ibn Zamrak and Muhammad might have had their boldest collaboration. Its fountain, magnificently sculpted so that the rock grain simulates the lions’ muscles, contains a symbolic message. It features the word “caliph,” Islam’s highest leader, whose role transcends that of sultan. The change in title imbued Muhammad, a political figure, with religious authority—an impeccable example of 14th-century PR. “Those were difficult times,” says Puerta Vílchez. “The sultan needed to legitimize his power not to Christians so much as his own people.”

The same palace also holds a rare artwork in the Hall of the Kings, which after a two-decade effort has just been restored to its former glory. Three painted scenes include human figures, atypical in Islamic art. But that’s not the only enigma. Presiding over the central dome, 10 men dressed in luxurious Muslim-style garb appear to be watching over the space. One theory maintains they’re the first 10 Nasrid rulers (hence the room’s name). Two other paintings depict medieval court vignettes in which Christian and Muslim knights hunt, joust, and rescue maidens. (Muslims always win in these scenarios.) “At least two royal weddings took place in the Hall of the Kings,” says Puerta Vílchez. “These paintings extolled the splendor of the Nasrid court and were meant to be seen.” The 14th-century works were eventually hidden when the room was absorbed into a 16th-century church. Over time, they deteriorated.

The original canvases were made from horsehide tanned with alum and embellished with natural tempera pigments, then attached to wooden frames shaped like inverted boat hulls and covered with tar and plaster to prevent water or fire damage. “Artisans from different trades were involved—specialists in wood, painting, and leather. Together they created a masterpiece whose execution technique is unknown in the Spanish-Muslim world,” says Elena Correa, who heads the Alhambra’s restoration department.

A collection of architects, master plasterers, carpenters, and painters has worked hand in hand to repair the hall, presumably as the team that created this artistic jewel did 600 years ago. One achievement was inventing a restorative mortar that’s imperceptible to the viewer. The stealth ingredient is quinine. “If we want to show a reconstructed segment, we have to use ultraviolet light,” says Ramón Rubio, who leads the stucco and tile restoration workshop. The inspiration arose from an unexpected moment—when he observed quinine’s fluorescence in a gin and tonic under disco lights.

Who were the painters of these scenes showing a last vestige of coexistence between Muslims and Christians before the fall of Granada? Experts say they could have been Christian artisans from neighboring kingdoms that commercially traded with the emirate—mainly those on the Italian Peninsula and particularly Genoa—or Muslims who knew the Renaissance techniques of those courts. Despite the arduous research involved in the restoration, in this place, as in so many others in the Alhambra, mysteries remain.

I look over to the Albaicín, Granada’s labyrinthine medieval quarter, built on a hill opposite the Alhambra. With its whitewashed facades, villas, and hidden gardens of cypress trees, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect view. I descend toward the Albaicín down a lane known as Cuesta del Rey Chico (Little King, Boabdil’s nickname), departing as the 24th and last Nasrid sultan did when he left the fortress forever. Crossing into that parallel world, I see the Alhambra as his subjects might have. From the Albaicín, the Alhambra’s palaces can be read chronologically from right to left—like Arabic itself. The language can still be heard in the quarter, which is lined with tea shops and has the ambience of a souk. After Boabdil was deposed, residents were allowed to keep their businesses, homes, language, and religion, but that spirit of coexistence lasted only eight years. By 1501, Muslims were forced to flee or convert to Christianity.

I peer into the Dar al Horra Palace, the home of Boabdil’s mother and his final refuge in Granada, before he fled to Morocco. Nothing on the outside gives away its graceful interior. Like the Alhambra, the exterior reveals little. Beauty is unveiled only within. Before leaving, I pause for one last look. My friend Blanca Rooney, a veteran guide, is beside me. “I’ve seen it many times,” she says. “It’s the look of someone who is bidding farewell to the Alhambra as if they had just been expelled from it.”