In Granada it’s all about the pomegranates. Well it isn’t actually nevertheless you will find various depictions of pomegranates popping up in unlikely places around the city including its flag. Even the name of the town reflects the pomegranate obsession held by the locals since earliest times. Pomegranates were symbolic of wealth, abundance, fertility and a functioning market garden economy. Since the founding of Grenada the Spanish have planted olive trees on every available piece of open land but it’s still the pomegranate that gets the shout out on the regional flag. It is unknown whether this has caused resentment in the olive community.
After gazing at the Alhambra from afar the previous evening today today we would get up close and personal with all things red brick and monumental. In deference to the hysterical weeping from one member of our tour group it was determined that we would catch a bus to the entrance rather than struggle up by foot. Struggling by foot would commence once we alighted from the bus.
The Alhambra has a passport control stricter than many countries and we had to flash our proof of foreignership on multiple occasions just so we could continue to trespass on a national monument. Immigration issues aside our path was smoothed by an excellent guide whose name I would repeat if I could remember it. He was exceptionally knowledgeable and told us a lot of useful information about the Alhambra to add mental colour to our gawking.
The main thing he told us was that basically it was all about the plumbing. The Alhambra is huge, basically a royal city encircled by a wall. There is the palace where the Sultan hung out, a fort where the soldiers who alternately protected and menaced the aforementioned Sultan lived and the rest was occupied by all of the little people who rarely get a mention in history but without whom the Sultan would just be an overdressed guy with delusions of grandeur. All of these people needed water, including the Sultan and this is a bit of a problem because the one thing Granada doesn’t have in abundance is water.
So for the Alhambra the whole place is designed to facilitate the flow of water (hijacked from a local river) from the top of the complex to the bottom through several kilometres of pipes and channels to ensure that every body got the wet stuff they needed and the Sultan could indulge his penchant for fountains.
Giving a silent acknowledgement to the Mario brothers of old we set off on the first stage of our tour which wasn’t the Alhambra at all but the Sultan’s summer palace a short way up the road. It was called the Generallife a name which prompted our guide to assure us that it meant something different in Spanish and the Sultans were not in fact sponsored by an insurance company. Given the average life expectancy of each Sultan there wouldn’t be an insurance company in the world that would touch them.
In keeping with most Islamic architecture the summer palace was pretty unimpressive on the outside with all of the cool stuff within. This is partly modesty and a desire not to flaunt your wealth to the neighbours. Modesty is all very well but if you happen to be sitting on a small (or large) fortune it’s probably simple common sense not to rub it in the faces of the less fortunate lest they decide to improve their fortune at your expense.
Surrounding the summer palace are vegetable gardens which have been producing edibles for centuries and continue to do so to this day. Much of the summer palace is actually more modern as it was given as a reward to a wealthy Muslim family who betrayed the Sultan, abandoned their religion and discovered that the wages of sin were a large palace and marriage into the Grimaldi family. You may remember the Grimaldi, they were a bunch of Italian thugs who captured Monaco by disguising themselves as monks and seizing the citadel by surprise. They’re still there. Anyway of course this family wanted to keep up with the latest trends so the gardens and renovations tend to be more French than traditionally Islamic.
Once past this monument to treachery and apostasy we followed the water channels down until we were in the Alhambra itself. There’s quite a lot of it. We first moved through the city where all those who laboured in the Sultan’s service lived. Of this part not a shred remains. As our guide pointed out it is the palace and the fort that gets all the publicity, nobody is going to pay scarce dollars to preserve a peasant hovel if there’s a palace crumbling next door. And there is a palace crumbling next door. In fact there are two. Holy Roman Emperor (and King of Spain) Charles V demolished a chunk of the Sultan’s palace so that he could build a honeymoon palace on the site. He stayed precisely one night and never came back. To be fair this was at least partly because his empress (and co-participant in the honeymoon) developed an irrational fear of earthquakes and they decided to finish the honeymoon somewhere the roof was less likely to fall on their heads.
In place of the homes of the ordinary folk (although since they were direct servants of the Sultan they probably weren’t that ordinary) a handsome garden has been planted with gaps in the hedges representing the doors to various dwellings that had once been there. My conclusion, houses were very small back then unless you were the Sultan or Holy Roman Emperor of course.
Past this leafy representation of the proletariat (or perhaps more accurately petty bourgeoisie) we come to the fort. Towering walls with a view across the city of Grenada good enough to make anyone who lived there reconsider any treacherous thoughts they may have possessed. There were also dungeons and grain silos which bore a remarkable similarity to each other. The principal difference was you could exit the grain silo under your own steam. Plus barracks which proved that the soldiers weren’t much better housed than the civilians.
And so to the royal palace where the Sultan sat in state and dispensed justice (at least it came from the Sultan so if you were interested in seeing tomorrow you called it justice and praised Allah for the Sultan’s wisdom and mercy). As was traditional the palace started off unimpressive and got less so the further you got into it. By the time you reached the room where the Sultan gave audience you had navigated twisting corridors, surprise opening doors, the obligatory pond and fountain combo and finally reached a room where the sun shone through stained glass and reflected onto the Sultan himself in such a way that it was difficult to determine what exactly you were seeing. What you did know was you were in the presence of a man who could arrange the entire architecture of a palace so that you couldn’t quite see him even when you were looking straight at him. Nothing about this was accidental.
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Having passed through the royal reception room (the Sultan was out) we emerged blinking into the sunlight and made our way through a conveniently planted forest back to the still inhabited part of the city which had the advantage of being closer to our hotel.
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