🇪🇸 Spain · Andalusia
Granada is one of those cities that stay with a traveller for good. Lying at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, with its snow-capped peaks in the background for much of the year, it holds on a hilltop the Alhambra, the most beautiful complex of Nasrid palaces and gardens in the Islamic world and the most visited monument in Spain. It was the last capital of al-Ándalus, and that Arab past still beats in the white maze of the Albaicín, in the tea houses, in the Arab baths and in the echo of a history that ended in 1492 with the surrender of the Nasrid kingdom to the Catholic Monarchs.
But Granada is not only the Alhambra. It is also the Christian city of the Capilla Real, where Isabella and Ferdinand lie; the city of the Sacromonte caves and their flamenco zambras; the city of a tradition unique in Spain, the free tapa that comes with every drink. It is a university city, young and bohemian, with viewpoints from which the Alhambra is outlined against the sierra at sunset, lively squares and streets that smell of spices. It was also the city of Federico García Lorca, the Granada-born poet murdered in 1936 at the start of the Civil War.
This guide walks through the essentials of Granada with a practical eye: how and when to book the Alhambra (the single most important item of the trip, because tickets sell out weeks or months ahead and the Nasrid Palaces have a fixed entry slot), what to see in the Albaicín and the Sacromonte, where to eat tapas like a local, how to get around its hills and how to escape to the Sierra Nevada. Granada is intense, romantic and slightly melancholy, and it hands you some of the finest sunsets in all of Spain.
Granada's roots reach back to antiquity: there was an Iberian and later Roman settlement called Iliberri (Iliberris) on the Albaicín hill, and a Jewish presence so significant that the area became known as Garnata al-Yahud. After the Muslim conquest of 711 the city gained weight, and in 1013, with the break-up of the Caliphate of Córdoba, it became a taifa ruled by the Berber Zirid dynasty, who moved the capital to the Alhambra hill. But Granada's great moment came in 1238, when Muhammad I ibn Nasr (Alhamar) founded the Nasrid kingdom, the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula, which for two and a half centuries paid tribute to Castile and flourished artistically: the Alhambra as we know it dates from that era. The kingdom fell on 2 January 1492, when the last sultan, Boabdil (Muhammad XII), handed the city to the Catholic Monarchs following the terms of surrender signed in November 1491. Christian Granada then began: the cathedral and the Capilla Real were built, where Isabella and Ferdinand were buried; the surrender terms were gradually broken and Muslims were forced to convert, leading to the Morisco rebellion and expulsion between 1568 and 1571. Centuries later, Granada was the birthplace of the poet Federico García Lorca, murdered in August 1936 at the start of the Civil War. The full story, with its names and dates, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The luminous south: the land of Tartessos and Roman Baetica, of the Caliphate of Córdoba and the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, of the American gold that passed through Sevilla and of flamenco with its Roma roots.
Read the history of Andalusia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the Alhambra turned its hill red, there was already life on the slopes where Granada now stands. There was an Iberian settlement on the Albaicín hill, and around the first century BC the area was absorbed into the Roman world under the name Iliberri or Iliberris, a municipality of some importance in Baetica. Little survives of that Roman Granada, but it is known to have hosted an early Christian council, the famous Council of Elvira, held at the beginning of the fourth century.
After the fall of Rome came the Visigoths, and in 711 the Muslim conquest changed the fate of the peninsula. In the early centuries of al-Ándalus, the main urban centre in the area was not yet Granada but neighbouring Medina Elvira. On the hill facing the future site of the Alhambra, however, a quarter grew up with a Jewish community so large and influential that it gave the place its name: Garnata al-Yahud, 'Granada of the Jews'. From that place name, according to many scholars, the city's present name derives.
The decisive leap came in the eleventh century. When the Caliphate of Córdoba disintegrated in the chaos of the fitna, al-Ándalus broke apart into small independent kingdoms, the taifas. Around 1013 a Berber tribe, the Zirids, founded the taifa of Granada and moved the capital from Medina Elvira to the more defensible hills beside the Darro river. The Zirid kings fortified the Albaicín, raised walls and an alcazaba, and laid the foundations of the medieval city. El Bañuelo, one of the best-preserved Arab baths in Spain, also dates from that Zirid period. Granada was starting to become Granada.
The great chapter of Granada's history, the one that made it universal, began in the thirteenth century. While the Christian Reconquista advanced unstoppably through the south — Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236 and Sevilla in 1248 — a leader named Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, known as Alhamar ('the Red') or Muhammad I, seized power in Granada and founded the Nasrid dynasty in 1238. So was born the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula, which would survive two and a half centuries.
The Nasrid kingdom covered the present-day provinces of Granada, Málaga and Almería, a mountainous territory, densely populated and prosperous thanks to silk, irrigated farming and trade. Its survival rested on a shrewd combination of diplomacy, tribute payments (parias) to Castile, shifting alliances with the Marinids of North Africa and the exploitation of Castilian civil wars. In a sense it was a vassal state that bought its independence for generations.
That long breathing space allowed an extraordinary artistic and cultural flowering. The Nasrid sultans, above all Yusuf I and Muhammad V in the fourteenth century, built and decorated the Alhambra as we admire it today: the Nasrid Palaces, with the Court of the Myrtles, the Hall of the Ambassadors and the sublime Court of the Lions, are the summit of Andalusi art, a universe of pierced plasterwork, muqarnas, tilework and Arabic inscriptions repeating the dynasty's motto: 'Only God is victor'. The Albaicín and its cármenes grew on the slopes, and the Generalife became the kings' pleasure garden. In the autumn of the Middle Ages, Granada was one of the most refined and populous cities in Europe, a refuge for scholars, poets and craftsmen, and the last bastion of a civilisation that had been on the peninsula since 711.
The end came with the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragón under Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic Monarchs. In 1482 they began the War of Granada, a long, methodical campaign that strangled the Nasrid kingdom city by city. Resistance was further undermined by infighting within Granada's own royal family, torn apart by civil war between the old sultan Muley Hacén, his brother 'el Zagal' and the young Boabdil.
Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil ('the Boy'), was the last sultan of Granada. Captured by the Castilians and then released in exchange for commitments, he was caught between Christian pressure and the collapse of his own kingdom. With the capital under siege and all hope of relief gone, Boabdil negotiated a settled surrender. The Capitulations of Granada, signed on 25 November 1491, promised the defeated respect for their religion, their property, their laws and their customs.
On 2 January 1492, Boabdil handed the keys of the city and of the Alhambra to the Catholic Monarchs. Tradition tells that, riding away into exile and looking back from a mountain pass — the so-called 'Suspiro del Moro', the Moor's Sigh — the last sultan wept for the loss of his city, and that his mother, Aixa, reproached him: 'You weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.' The anecdote is probably legend, but it captures the symbolic weight of that day: the fall of Granada ended almost eight centuries of Muslim presence on the peninsula and the Reconquista. It was also a decisive year for world history: that same 1492, the Catholic Monarchs decreed the expulsion of the Jews and financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus, who would reach the Americas in October.
The Catholic Monarchs made Granada a symbol of their triumph. They chose the city as their burial place and ordered the building of the Capilla Real, a Gothic church where their remains still lie today, along with those of their daughter Joanna the Mad and their son-in-law Philip the Handsome. Beside it rose, in the sixteenth century, the great Renaissance cathedral, a masterpiece by Diego de Siloé, on the site of the old main mosque. The emperor Charles V, grandson of the Catholic Monarchs, also left his mark with the imposing Palace of Charles V, circular in plan, set inside the Alhambra grounds.
But the respect promised in the Capitulations did not last. As early as 1499, Cardinal Cisneros pushed forced conversions and burnings of Islamic books that provoked the first Albaicín rebellion. In the years that followed, Muslims were compelled to be baptised: they became 'Moriscos', new Christians always under suspicion. Their language, dress, baths and customs were progressively banned.
The tension exploded at Christmas 1568 with the Rebellion of the Alpujarras, a cruel war in the mountains south of Granada that Philip II crushed harshly, handing final command to his half-brother Don Juan de Austria. After the Morisco defeat in 1571, tens of thousands of Granada's Moriscos were deported and scattered across Castile, and the region was left depopulated, later resettled with Old Christians from the north. The final expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain, decreed by Philip III in 1609, brought the long Andalusi intermingling to a tragic close. Granada lost much of its population and its craft knowledge, and entered centuries of relative decline, with the Alhambra abandoned and even occupied by squatters and, later, by Napoleonic troops who badly damaged it as they withdrew in 1812.
Forgotten Granada was reborn in the nineteenth century thanks to the Romantic travellers. The half-abandoned Alhambra fascinated European artists and writers who turned it into a myth. The American Washington Irving literally moved into its ruined halls and published 'Tales of the Alhambra' in 1832, a book that travelled the world and set off both early tourism and the protection of the monument. From then on came the restorations that saved the complex, declared a National Monument in 1870 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984, along with the Generalife and the Albaicín.
Granada also gave the twentieth century one of the greatest voices in Spanish literature: Federico García Lorca, born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, on the Granada plain. A poet and playwright of world stature, author of 'Romancero gitano', 'Poet in New York' and tragedies such as 'Blood Wedding' and 'The House of Bernarda Alba', Lorca embodied like no one else the soul of his land, of flamenco and of the Andalusian duende.
His fate was bound for ever to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. When the military coup broke out in July 1936, Granada fell at once to the rebels and a ferocious repression was unleashed. Lorca, progressive in his views and homosexual, was arrested on 16 August 1936 and shot at dawn on 18 August in the country between Víznar and Alfacar, alongside a schoolteacher and two anarchist bullfighters. He was 38. His remains have never been found and still lie somewhere in a mass grave, a painful symbol of the tens of thousands of victims of the repression. His murder shocked the world and turned the poet into a martyr of culture against fascism.
Granada today is a university city, alive and cosmopolitan, embracing at once its Arab past, its Christian inheritance and the memory of Lorca. Every evening thousands of travellers crowd the Mirador de San Nicolás to watch the sun set the red walls of the Alhambra alight above the snows of the Sierra Nevada. It is the same scene that bewitched Boabdil, Washington Irving and Lorca, and that still makes Granada one of the most unforgettable cities in the world.