Alhambra

The Alhambra is a walled complex of palaces, fortifications and gardens on the Sabika hill above Granada in southern Spain. Work on it began in 1238 under Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar, founder of the Nasrid dynasty and of the Emirate of Granada, which would be the final Muslim state in the Iberian peninsula. It is the only well-preserved palace surviving from the medieval Islamic world, and after 1492 it also became a Spanish royal residence with notable Renaissance additions. Its name comes from the Arabic for "the red one", after the reddish rammed-earth walls.

Archaeologists have found ancient foundations on the hill, though a Roman presence is uncertain. A small fortress, probably of Visigothic origin, stood there by the ninth century, and the "red castle" first appears in accounts of fighting in the late ninth century. In the eleventh century, when Granada was the capital of a Zirid Berber kingdom, a fortress on the Sabika formed part of the city's defences, and the Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrillah built a palace with gardens on the hill, of which nothing survives. Granada later passed under the Almoravids and then the Almohad Caliphate.

As Almohad power collapsed after 1228 and Castile captured Córdoba and Seville, Ibn al-Ahmar made Granada his base. In 1238 he marked out a new citadel on the Sabika, built its ramparts and brought water from the river. A canal from the mountains to the east made it possible to turn the fortress into a self-contained royal city with a congregational mosque, baths, houses, workshops and gardens. Of his own work, only parts of the walls and the Alcazaba fortress at the western tip remain.

His successors kept building and rebuilding. Muhammad III raised the Partal Palace, the oldest Nasrid palace still standing, in the early fourteenth century. Ismail I began the official Comares Palace, and Yusuf I added its Hall of Ambassadors and the main gate. The high point came under Muhammad V, who reigned with interruptions from 1354 to 1391 and built the Palace of the Lions. The Nasrid palaces are organised around courtyards with pools and fountains, their walls covered with tile mosaics, carved stucco, Arabic inscriptions and honeycomb muqarnas vaults. Building slowed in the troubled fifteenth century.

The Reconquista reached Granada in January 1492, when the last sultan, Muhammad XI, surrendered the emirate to the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, without the Alhambra itself being attacked. The monarchs stayed in the palace for several months. There, on 31 March, they signed the Alhambra Decree ordering the expulsion of Jews who refused to convert, and in April they agreed terms for the Atlantic voyage of Christopher Columbus. The palace became Crown property, governed by the Mendoza counts of Tendilla, who strengthened its towers against artillery.

The emperor Charles V visited in 1526 and converted parts of the Nasrid buildings into royal apartments. He also demolished part of the Comares Palace to make room for a large Renaissance palace, begun in 1527 and left unfinished. After Philip V dismissed the governing family in 1717 and 1718, the complex sank into its worst decline, inhabited by local officials, prisoners and the poor. The army of Napoleon occupied Granada from 1810 to 1812, used the Alhambra as a fortress and, on leaving, blew up eight of its towers before a Spanish soldier disabled the remaining fuses. An earthquake in 1821 caused more damage.

From the late eighteenth century the ruined palaces fascinated European and American writers and artists. The American author Washington Irving lived in Granada in 1830 and published Tales of the Alhambra in 1832, which did much to spread its fame. Restoration began in 1828 under José Contreras and continued under his family until 1907, but they often added invented features, such as Persian-style domes, to make the buildings look more "oriental". The state took over the site after the revolution of 1868, declared it a national monument in 1870, and from 1923 to 1936 the architect and archaeologist Leopoldo Torres Balbás introduced a more scientific approach, reversing some earlier inventions and excavating lost palaces.

A council has managed the site since 1940, and responsibility passed to the regional government of Andalusia in 1984. In the same year UNESCO listed the Alhambra and the neighbouring Generalife estate as a World Heritage Site. It is now one of Spain's most visited monuments, and research and restoration continue.