All Ways Spain: Creative long weekends in and around Granada

Granada: A young city, old at heart

When you first arrive in Granada you may well be disappointed. What’s more, unless your arrival is by hot air balloon, depositing you noiselessly in the Alhambra or Albaicin, you will quite likely be stressed and disappointed. This is because getting into Granada is a trial, and what you see in the process, quite frankly, an eyesore.

This hardly sounds like encouragement to visit a city which in most travel literature exhausts all known superlatives. Yet Granada, unlike almost any other city, manages to get away with it. The outskirts of light industrial debris (Granada seemingly has no light industry - just the debris), the wholesale property speculation carnage wrought on its once expansive vega (valley) and its strangulated traffic: all are forgotten when one is finally secure within Granada’s embrace.

A natural bounty

Countless words have been written about the city’s capacity to enchant, seduce, almost bewitch the stranger, and many are those who once in that embrace never wish to leave. Charm is never truly susceptible of analysis, but the foundations of Granada’s allure are most certainly in large part geographical. There are the magnificent views afforded by the twin hills of the Sabika (on which stands the Alhambra) and that of the Albaicín, the area where in the 11th century the Zirid dynasty established the first major city. The grandest of the imposing mountain ranges which surround Granada, the Sierra Nevada, frames the city perfectly. And it is watered and kept cool by two rivers, the Darro and the Genil.

Given these natural advantages, it is hardly surprising that throughout history so many diverse peoples have settled upon Granada as “home”. Iberian tribes, the Romans, for seven centuries the Moors, their Castillian conquerors, all have left their own mark on its landscape and character. The history of Granada is told in more depth elsewhere in these pages but, in attempting to capture the essential character of the place, mention must be made of 1492.

Granada’s defining moment

The year in which Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and found land rather than the generally supposed abyss, is key in Spanish history and inextricably linked with Granada. The “Reconquest” of Granada marked the end of the last lingering Moorish dominion in the Iberian Peninsula and motivated the expulsion from the newly unified Spain of its influential Jewish community. These events help explain why Granada – to this day – has such a unique character. Not only was here the influence of Islam and, to a lesser extent, Judaism, longest lived but the Christian stamp given after 1492 is perhaps the most marked of any Spanish city.

Granada has an impressive collection of Renaissance Christian architecture, much of it erected on the sites formerly occupied by mosques or on lands confiscated from the Jews. Church properties, be they convents, monasteries, abbeys, friaries, hermitages, chapels or just plain churches, cover the map of Granada. The architectural and cultural wealth that they house often goes unnoticed by visitors - partly because these buildings often seem rather inaccessible, partly no doubt because of their sheer abundance - but with a little perseverance and local knowledge a great range of treasures can be seen behind these doors.

New converts

Ironically, the most significant religious construction of recent years is the New Mosque of San Nicolas, centre of worship for the small population of North Africans and the growing number of sufi converts to Islam. The Mosque’s architecture, bland in comparison with most churches, was supposedly the root cause of the polemics that delayed its building, but what is certain is that when the call to prayer was sounded by the muezzin on its inauguration in July 2003 it was the first time that such sounds had drifted over the Albaicin in 511 years.

Conservative and conservationist

A place whose civic memory stretches back so far - and scarcely a mention yet of the Alhambra - cannot but fail to have an “old heart”. When all around are the inspiring works of one’s ancestors it is only natural to look backwards. Granada has long been known - disparagingly in many circles - for being inward-looking and conservative. Yet when you have the Alhambra as the ceiling to your everyday views such tendencies seem entirely natural, even commendable. Who would not want to conserve the Alhambra?

However, like most self-evident truths, this is far from being the whole story. The very Alhambra was, at the beginning of the 19th century, going to seed, neglected and unloved for over two centuries. Palaces once fit only for kings were occupied by a rag-tag mob, bedding down with their animals on straw and manure where once had been fine silk carpets, the dazzling colours of the wall engravings vanishing amid the smoke, soot and grime. “One of the great wonders of the world” was rescued from its fate not by the efforts of the city fathers but the writings of an American diplomat, one Washington Irving. His enormously popular Tales of the Alhambra kindled an interest among fellow Romantics that put Granada firmly on the tourist map.

The double-edged sword

The complacency that almost sunk the Alhambra has not entirely gone. The monument is at once Granada's blessing and curse. Of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who visit Granada yearly, it is estimated that a majority visit only the Alhambra, and in large part this is attributable to a local attitude that said “when you have the Alhambra, what more do you need?”. Furthermore, this has seemingly allowed that all kinds of architectural and urban outrages be committed, so long as the jewel was left untouched. In recent years, however, a growing realisation has taken hold that when selling Granada the Alhambra should be seen as the icing and not the entire cake itself. More is being done to promote the legacy spread throughout the city of so many centuries of rich, complex human history; to accentuate not just the venerable and old in Granada, but also the dynamic and young.

Young and old

For Granada, though old at heart, is a young city. Over 60,000 students (some 15% of whom are from outside Spain) give the place a decidedly youthful air, cosmopolitan to a degree which might be unusual in a city of 250,000 inhabitants in the interior of Spain. The city’s innumerable bars and cafés depend in large measure on this population, as does the tradition of the free tapa which accompanies each drink - a practice not widely followed elsewhere in Spain. A thriving arts scene is also a by-product of the university’s strong presence, and Granada has long been a centre of inspiration for writers, composers and musicians. Indeed, the person of Federico García Lorca, the poet and dramatist, perhaps most readily embodies the contrasting forces that have shaped and continue to shape Granada. The city’s most famous son – and pin-up of many a tourism initiative these days - was scarcely talked about until some twenty years ago. Executed by the Nationalists at the beginning of the Civil War his name was seen as too divisive. On top of his Republican sympathies and homosexuality he had offended the elite of his home town by saying that 1492 had been a “disastrous event”: a civilization “unique in the world” had been replaced by “a wasteland populated by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain today”.

Divisions at the crossroads

The fault lines in Granada society that Lorca had so tragically trod upon have not entirely disappeared: the celebration, every 2nd January, of the Catholic Monarchs’ taking of the city draws support and criticism alike. But in many ways it is this tension that gives Granada so much of its undeniable vida – life. A young and youthful city struggling to fit the past into an ever-changing present, Granada is alive with paradoxes. Thousands of students fill the city with vivacity and youth, yet their presence accounts in many ways for the development beyond the Camino de Ronda (once meant to be the limit of the city’s encroachment into the fields and orchards of the Vega) a speculation fuelled in large part by the lucrative rents from students. The largest Muslim population (outside Madrid and Barcelona) resident in Spain lives in Granada - a city which was largely built upon the fruits of their ancestors' expulsion. And now that the modern era at long last values the Moorish past, painstaking architectural work is carried out to restore the Alhambra - but whose version of the past is to shape how it now looks? For a monument, indeed a city, so resplendent in historical remains, this is a major challenge: to determine at what point to stop the clock with each restoration. But conundrums such as these are what make Granada so much more than just a collection of museum pieces, interspersed by souvenir shops, as so many other cities have allowed their “heritage” to become. Instead, Granada is today what it has been for centuries: the human crossroads of so many peoples, so many views of history and so much questioning of where that history belongs in today's world of rapid change.