Granada

Granada was the capital of the Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, until 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista and received the city’s surrender from the Nasrid sultan Muhammad XII. The Alhambra — the palatial city built by the Nasrid dynasty on the hill above Granada between the 13th and 14th centuries — was not destroyed after the conquest. The Catholic monarchs chose to preserve it, and then to build their own Renaissance palace within its walls. The result is one of the most layered and complex monument sites in Europe: a Moorish palace, a Christian palace, a fortress and gardens, all on the same hill, each from a different era and each still largely intact.

The Generalife — the Nasrid sultans’ summer palace and gardens above the Alhambra — is included in the standard entrance. The gardens are terraced with water channels, cypress hedges and the Patio de la Acequia, an irrigation canal garden that has been planted and replanted on the same bones since the 13th century. Below the Alhambra, the Albaicín is the old Moorish residential quarter on the facing hill — a network of steep cobbled lanes that the Moors laid out as a defensive maze and that still largely resists easy navigation. The Mirador de San Nicolás at the top of the Albaicín gives the most direct view across the valley to the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada behind it.

Granada has a mosque on the Albaicín hill — the Great Mosque of Granada, completed in 2003, built on land that was previously part of the Moorish city and oriented toward the Alhambra. It is a functioning place of worship and one of the first mosques built in Spain since the Reconquista. Halal restaurants are well-established in Granada, concentrated around the Albaicero and Caldereroía Nueva streets in the old quarter. The best time to visit is spring or early autumn — summer in Granada is genuinely hot, with temperatures regularly exceeding 38°C in July and August.