Europe > Spain > Andalucia > Granada > Articles > Granada: Europe's most African City

‘An African paradise set under the Sierras like a rose preserved in snow’ is possibly the best description that Granada will ever be awarded. The writer Laurie Lee had already hiked the length of the country when he fell in love with this intensely romantic Andalusian city and declared it ‘probably the most beautiful and haunting of all Spanish cities.’

Granada is most famous as the location of the awesome Alhambra Palace, but the last resting-place of the Moorish Kings seems to benefit as much from its relationship with the city as the city is complimented by the Palace. Wherever you wander in the tangled labyrinth of the Albayzín (the town’s old medina quarter) the soaring walls of the palace are at your shoulder; walk beneath the intricate arches of the Alhambra – so weightless as to be like petrified lacework – and you notice that the Moorish arches perfectly frame the view back across the valley to the medina.

‘In the valley below, where the city stood, I could see mists covering roofs,’ wrote James A. Michener in 1968. ‘In the trees at the edge of the garden, birds sang and beyond them rose the sombre wall and the turrets that protected it.’

Cobbled alleyways snake upwards through bougainvillea-draped plazas and past the ‘secret’ high-walled gardens that are known in Granada as Carmen. Finally the alleys disappear into the web of goat-paths that fan across Sacromonte – the ‘Sacred Hill’ - towards the mysterious caves that even today are famous for their nights of wild gypsy flamenco.

As the ‘burrows’ of Sacromonte have always been the refuge of the gypsies, so the caverns in the mountains above the Alhambra are said to hide the enchanted warriors of the last Moorish king – waiting for ‘the day of reckoning’ when they will swarm out to retake their beloved city.

For it was in Granada, as Washington Irving once put it, that ‘two great civilisations once blended to the death.’ The future American ambassador actually lived in the ‘old enchanted palace’ of the Alhambra, in 1829, while working on the story of his travels through a ‘stern, melancholy country with rugged mountains and long sweeping plains…partaking of the savage and solitary character of Africa.’ Almost a century later Gerald Brennan lived – in less salubrious accommodation – in one of the mountain villages which are, even today, almost identical to other villages facing them from the Rif Mountains on Africa’s northern tip.

Brennan, a walker of legendary stamina, visited Granada often and noticed ‘a lyrical quality about the place, an elegance of sight and detail, of tint and shape’ which was strangely at odds with ‘the harsh and tawny lion-skin of Spain.’

The narrow alleyways of the Albayzín epitomise the way that Andalusian hill-towns have of closing themselves in against the surrounding country, like besieged camel-trains. ‘Half the country is mountain and wilderness,’ Lee wrote in a 1960s magazine article, ‘it knows a savage climate, vast aching skies, interminable landscapes of distance and silence. But within the bright walls of its towns and villages it has developed a gregarious and extrovert ritual of life in which there are few outsiders and little loneliness.’

Words that were written long ago still hold true and – with its eastern treasures and African climate – Granada remains the most romantic and haunting of Spanish cities.

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