The Alhambra in Granada: what it is, who built it, the Nasrid palaces, the Court of the Lions, the Generalife, tickets and the legends

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Alhambra is a walled citadel on a hill above Granada in southern Spain, the palace and fortress of the Nasrid emirs who ruled the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia from 1238 until they surrendered it to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492; its name, from the Arabic al-qal'a al-hamra, means "the red fortress", after the colour of its rammed-earth walls. Inside the walls are the Alcazaba, the military fort of the 13th century; the Nasrid Palaces of the 14th, the Comares Palace and the Palace of the Lions, with the finest plasterwork, tile and carved-wood ceilings in Islamic architecture; the Renaissance palace of Charles V dropped into the middle of them in 1527; a medina of houses, baths and workshops; and, across a ravine, the Generalife, the emirs' summer garden. It is the most visited monument in Spain, with about 2.7 million visitors a year and tickets that sell out months ahead. Below: who built it and when, what each part is, how it was decorated, what happened after 1492, how to visit and in what order, and the legends, with the tradition it belongs to in Islamic architecture.

Who built it: the Nasrids

Muhammad ibn al-Ahmar, a minor lord from Arjona, made himself ruler of Granada in 1238 as the Christian kingdoms swept over the rest of Muslim Spain, held his kingdom by paying tribute to Castile and even helping it take Seville, and moved his court from the old Zirid fortress on the Albaicín hill to the Sabika hill opposite, where he built the Alcazaba and brought water up from the River Darro by a six-kilometre channel, the Acequia Real, which made the palaces and gardens possible. His dynasty ruled for 250 years, the longest of any in Muslim Spain, as a small, rich, crowded state of silk-weavers and refugees living on trade and diplomacy, and its two great builders were Yusuf I (1333–54), who built the Comares Palace with its tower and the Gate of Justice, and his son Muhammad V (1354–59 and 1362–91), who finished Comares and built the Palace of the Lions after returning from exile in Morocco. The last emir, Muhammad XII, whom the Spanish call Boabdil, surrendered the city after a ten-month siege and rode away to the Alpujarras and then to Africa. Alhambra.

The parts of the Alhambra

• The Alcazaba. The fort at the western tip of the hill, the oldest part, with the Torre de la Vela, the watchtower whose bell rang the irrigation hours of the plain and rang for the surrender in 1492; the view over Granada and the Sierra Nevada is from here.
• The Nasrid Palaces. Three connected palaces entered on a timed ticket: the Mexuar, the council hall, the oldest and most altered; the Comares Palace, around the Court of the Myrtles, a long pool between hedges reflecting the Comares Tower, whose Hall of the Ambassadors was the throne room, with a ceiling of 8,000 pieces of cedar representing the seven heavens; and the Palace of the Lions, Muhammad V's private palace, around the courtyard with the fountain of twelve marble lions and 124 slender columns, with the Hall of the Two Sisters, the Hall of the Abencerrajes and the Hall of the Kings opening off it under muqarnas domes.
• The Partal. The gardens and pool of an earlier palace of Muhammad III, of which the portico survives, the oldest palace on the hill.
• The Palace of Charles V. A square Renaissance block with a circular courtyard by Pedro Machuca, a pupil of Michelangelo, begun in 1527 and never roofed until the 20th century; it holds the Alhambra Museum and the Fine Arts Museum.
• The medina. The upper Alhambra, once a town of several thousand, of which the foundations, the baths, the church of Santa María on the site of the mosque and the convent of San Francisco, now a parador, remain, along with the Torre de las Infantas and the other towers of the wall.
• The Generalife. Across the ravine to the east, the summer palace and gardens, with the Court of the Water Channel, the long garden of a central rill with fountains, the oldest surviving Moorish garden in the world, and the terraces above it planted in the 20th century.

How it was decorated

The Nasrids built cheaply and finished richly: walls of rammed earth and brick, columns of marble, and over everything a skin of carved plaster, glazed tile and wood. The lower walls are lined with tiles, alicatado, cut into geometric mosaics of stars and interlaced polygons whose patterns, mathematicians found in the 20th century, include all seventeen possible symmetry groups of a flat pattern. Above the tiles, the plaster, yesería, was carved wet in moulds and by hand into arabesques, shell patterns and calligraphy, and painted in red, blue and gold, of which traces remain; the mottoes "There is no victor but God", the Nasrid motto, and "Blessing" run around every room, along with poems by the court poets Ibn al-Khatib and Ibn Zamrak written for the rooms they are in, so that the Hall of the Two Sisters speaks of itself as a garden of stars and the Fountain of the Lions describes its own water. Ceilings are of wood inlaid in geometric strapwork, or of muqarnas, the honeycomb of thousands of small plaster cells that hangs from the domes of the Two Sisters and the Abencerrajes like stalactites, catching the light from small windows below them so that the ceiling appears to float. Water runs through everything, from the Acequia Real to the pools, rills and fountains, and each palace opens on a courtyard with a pool that mirrors it; the architecture was meant to be seen from inside, low, sitting on cushions, with the garden framed by the arches, and the plain exterior gives no hint of it.

After 1492

Ferdinand and Isabella took the Alhambra as a royal palace, repaired it and left it largely alone; their grandson Charles V, visiting on his honeymoon in 1526, demolished part of the palaces to build his own, which was never finished. Philip V and the Bourbons abandoned it; by the 18th century it was a barracks, a prison and a squatters' village, and in 1812 Napoleon's retreating troops blew up part of the walls and towers and would have destroyed the palaces had a soldier, José García, not cut the fuses. Washington Irving, the American writer, lived in the palace for three months in 1829 and his "Tales of the Alhambra" of 1832 made it a Romantic destination and began its restoration; the state took it over in 1870, and the architect Leopoldo Torres Balbás in 1923–36 cleared the 19th-century additions and set the principles still followed. The Fountain of the Lions was restored in 2002–12, and the lions returned. UNESCO listed the Alhambra and Generalife in 1984 and the Albaicín quarter in 1994.

Visiting: tickets and the order

Entry is limited to about 8,000 a day, and the Nasrid Palaces to 300 every half hour at a fixed time printed on the ticket, which must be booked on the official site, with a passport or ID number, as soon as sales open, three months ahead in high season; day-of tickets are rare. The general ticket covers the Alcazaba, the Nasrid Palaces, the Partal and the Generalife; a garden ticket omits the palaces; night visits to the palaces or the Generalife are separate. A workable order from the main entrance, at the top of the hill, is the Generalife first, then down through the medina and Partal to the Nasrid Palaces at the ticketed time, then the Alcazaba, then out by the Gate of Justice into the town, about three to four hours in all; the reverse, from the Cuesta de Gomérez in the town, is a steep walk up. Charles V's palace and its museums are free. Cameras are allowed, tripods are not, and the palaces are best in the morning light or at night. Sunset over the Alhambra from the Mirador de San Nicolás across the valley is Granada's classic view.

Versions and theories

• The Moor's last sigh. Boabdil, riding away, is said to have turned at a pass to look at Granada and wept, and his mother Aisha to have said, "Weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man." The pass is the Suspiro del Moro on the road south; the story is from 16th-century Spanish chroniclers and no earlier source has it.
• The Abencerrajes massacre. The rust-coloured stains in the fountain of the Hall of the Abencerrajes are said to be the blood of thirty-six knights of that family, beheaded there by the emir for one of them's affair with the sultana; the stains are iron in the marble, and the story comes from a 16th-century Castilian novel. The hall keeps the name.
• The Fountain of the Lions is Jewish. The twelve lions are older than the courtyard and one theory has them from the 11th-century palace of the Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrillah on the same hill, as the twelve tribes; the theory is unproven and the lions are Nasrid in style.
• The hidden treasure. Irving's tales have the Moors' gold enchanted under the towers; every generation of Granada has dug for it. Nothing found.
• The plaster was white. It was painted, in strong colours, and the tiles were brighter; the honey tones of the Alhambra today are age and Romantic taste.
• The seventeen symmetry groups. True as far as it goes: the mathematician Edith Müller found thirteen in the Alhambra's tiles in 1944, and later studies claim all seventeen, though the count depends on how colours are treated. Escher visited in 1922 and 1936 and drew the tiles, and his tessellations came from them.

The Alhambra's relatives, from Córdoba's mosque to Isfahan and the Taj Mahal, are in Islamic architecture; the Taj's story is in how the Taj Mahal was built.

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