A Ridiculously Long Post about the Alhambra with a Million Pictures

Let's talk about the Alhambra!

Boringly described, it's a palace and fortress complex on the top of a hill/small-mountain in the middle of Granada, Spain.

More interestingly, the famous palace is nearly 700 years old, was the royal court of the Sultans of Andalucia, then, after the reconquista, became the royal court for the queens and kings of Spain.  Columbus got his official "okay, we'll give you money to go 'find India'" from this palace.  Queen Catharine (later the divorced wife of Henry VIII) grew up there.  It gradually got forgotten over centuries and in Napoleon's time was just a place for squatters, but then word started to get around that there was an amazing palace hidden on the hill in Granada.  Washington Irving actually went and lived in it for a while, writing Tales of the Alhambra.  It basically became the hipster-cool place to go in the 19th century and now it's the most visited place in Spain. 

Here's the thing about the Alhambra - when you're there, your eyes are so overwhelmed by all the detail that your brain can't actually handle it.  You see it, but after about 4.2 seconds, you stop being able to look at everything.  The plaster work is ridiculously gorgeous and detailed.  It's only in looking at these pictures later that I can start to see it again.  

Plus, imagine that quite a lot of this plaster work was also painted in blues, yellows, and reds so it would have been even more overwhelming.

But even with so much overwhelming detail, the most impressive thing is that nothing felt out of balance - that even with every inch covered in designs, it still managed to look clean and orderly.

The generally-agreed-upon climax of the Alhambra is the Court of the Lions.  It's a place where it's impossible to notice everything beautiful - but we at least tried to take pictures!  Even though we had such a specific window of time we were allowed to be there, we took every minute to soak it in.  It was, after all, one of my life bucket-list places-to-see.

Seriously, how did they design and do this??

I mean, COME ON!

There are other parts of the Alhambra complex we could talk about - like the Palace of Charles V (yawn), the Citadel (cool in a castley-forty kind of way?), the Generalife Gardens (I always love me some gardens!)...but the point of it all was always the Alhambra.  This Nazarid jewel, as the experts say, uniquely untouched by the popular Byzantine styles of its era - simply the greatest example of beauty that came out of the height of Moorish culture.  It was, to me, the highlight of the trip and in my Top 5 Places from our European travels - which is saying quite a lot.