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The Alhambra fell to the Catholic kings in [492. The conquest marked the end of the Muslim rule in Spain and must have seemed a great deal more important than the fact that one of Queen Isabella's sea captains, a certain Cristoforo
Colombo from Genoa, had
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westward passage to the Indies. After the Conquest some of the buildings within the precincts were destroyed and the rest of the palace was left to fall into decay until restoration work began in the 1820s. The contrast between the fortress area and the palace is vivid. After the stern walls of the Alcazaba, the courtyards and colonnades, lush well-kept gardens and lofty audience chambers, seem like some magical stage set for the Arabian Nights. Fountains and ornamental pools are everywhere so that the place seems alive with the sight and sound of water; reflections dapple on the walls and pillars, to discover a
while the gentle play of fountains is heard in every court. The conversion of the parched rocky site is due to the aqueduct built by Mohammed I, big enough to supply the military garrison and the gardens that were yet to be laid out. The Court of Myrtles, one of the most beautiful, was built by Mohammed V (136291). At the center of the court is an ornamental pool fringed with myrtle trees, while at either end a porchway flanked by six colonnaded arches gives access to the court from other parts of the palace. On the north side an ante-room led to the Hall of the Ambassadors. This is the literal English equivalent of the Spanish comares, but it seems likely that this word itself came from a misunderstanding of the Arabic qamariyya, a style of colored glass developed in Cairo in the thirteenth century.
The now empty windows of the hall were once probably glazed with vibrant stained glass; the hall, which may have been the throne room, is one of the triumphs of Muslim architecture in Spain.
The most famous part of the whole palace is the Court of the Lions. At its center is the exquisite fountain that gives the court its name. It consists of an alabaster basin rising from a platform borne up on the backs of twelve marble lions. They are carved in coarse brutal lines that contrast effectively with the delicacy of the rest of the court. This is more than a hundred feet long and sixty wide, and is decorated with close-set slender colonnades and rills of water running in channels let into the floor.
Beyond
Gardens,
a
are the beautiful Generalife
courtyard
set
with ornamental
Top The
Court
oj
Myrtles
in the
magical combination of water,
Alhambra
trees
is
a
and stone,
characteristic
of Moorish architecture.
Above The
elegant fountains and luxuriant
vegetation in the Generalife Gardens of the
Alhambra make it hard to realize that the palace was built on an arid outcrop of red and sunbaked Opposite Looking
into the
Alhambra.
64
MM
Court
oj Liotis at the
rock.