Europe > Spain > Andalucia (Granada) > Granada > Gardens > Articles > Peaches in the Alhambra: Letter from Andalucia

November 2000: Yesterday we nearly dared to eat a peach; to steal one from a sudden glorious cluster, bulging from a tree in the middle of the Alhambra palace. In Seville and Cordoba, and any number of town squares across Southern Spain, autumn’s gifts of oranges and limes are swelling the trees. It’s perfect that in the Alhambra it should be peaches, because at this time of year the gardens are a fairy tale. There’s a story about a nameless fighter who, as Napoleon’s troops were withdrawing from Granada, single-handedly saved the Alhambra by snuffing out the fuses they’d laid to blow it sky high. In my book he should be lorded in ballad, immortalised in song. Some enlightened World Monument fund should dedicate a marble tomb to the Alhambra’s Unknown Soldier.

From the charming Mirador of St Nicolas the Autumn views of the citadel are staggering; delicate red walls etched against ice blue skies and the soaring white peaks of the Sierra Nevada, among a patchwork of glittering greens and quivering ochres, carried aloft on a cloud of bell towers and terracotta roofs. I wish I could paint.

We didn’t manage to steal our peach. The tree was cordoned off and besides, we’d just had lunch in a good restaurant next to the ticket office, the Jardines Alberto. Even in the sun the winds slicing off the Sierra make it too cold for Andalucia’s summer specialty, Gaspacho, and the bolshy service in the Ristorant Mimbre over the road had driven us up here. We ordered garlic and ham soup with delicious bread rolls, followed by scrambled eggs with prawns and asparagus - not my taste - and, once again, aubergines. This time they’d come up with a more sophisticated local adaptation; they’d stuffed them with Anglerfish, topped with grated cheese.

It set us up perfectly for the walk, past the Parador, one of the most popular hotels in Spain (you have to book 6 months in advance) where Ferdinand and Isabella were first buried next to the sun dappled inner courtyard; then down to Charles V’s pompous Romanesque Pantheon. I’ll never forgive his Majesty for destroying one of the Arabic palaces to build it, but it’s a reminder of bullrings and how the whole gladiatorial tradition comes straight from Rome’s Coliseum. Next to it the Palace of the Nazaries was as delicate and sensual as ever.

The swarm of visitors has dried to a trickle too and we had the place almost to ourselves. The peace is loveliest on the Alhambra’s eastern hill, in the Generalife. It was the Sultan’s summer palace and the Moors were right, under broiling summer heavens paradise is a landscaped garden. It epitomises this people’s mastery of the art of water. For another example visit the enchanting little Arabic baths near the Plaza Nueva, and have an infusion of peach tea upstairs; listening to the Generalife’s fountains dancing and gurgling among a riot of flowers, I remembered that Carl Jung said he had to live by water.

Not that Andalucia has had a lack of water recently. Last week the rains came. In Tarifa in the west, where I was knocked off a galloping horse by a wave and you can almost reach out and touch Morocco, the downpour was magnificent. It didn’t impress Manuel at my local though, as we chatted over an olive about various bogus schemes to seed the skies. Arxarquia only gets a parching twenty days of rain a year and these hills will never compete with the lush greens beyond Tarifa and Jerez de la Frontera. Sherry, brandy, cork, fruit and bulls have supplied the unrivalled wealth to erect Jerez’s elegant, burgherish streets.

I still haven’t given up on food in Arxarquia itself though, so we set off to The Venta de Alfarnate, reputedly the oldest inn in Andalucia. It was once infamous as a haunt of bandits, as was the whole region until as recently as the 1950s. Now it’s a little over-homogenised, but the splendid fireplace warmed our spirits and its a fun place to eat. They serve a specialty too, Huevos a lo Bestia. It’s chorizo and blood sausage with an unconquerable wedge of pork and two fried eggs, perched on a Sierra of breadcrumbs. It’s hardly the Alhambra of culinary design, but it was filling winter grub. I didn’t even need a glass of mineral water to swallow my black pudding.

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