In September 1812 Napoleon’s retreating troops rigged the Alhambra with explosives and blew up eight towers before a Spanish soldier, José García, cut the remaining fuses. The name comes from the Arabic for the red one, after walls of rammed earth made from iron-rich clay. The hill held Roman, Visigothic, and ninth century military works before Muhammad I, founder of the Nasrid dynasty, made it his capital in 1238. The Nasrids brought water up with the Sultan’s Canal, a gravity-fed system tapping the river miles upstream, and guarded it with the Alcazaba citadel. In the 14th century Yusuf I and Muhammad V built the Comares Palace and the Palace of the Lions, directed by viziers and poets such as Ibn al-Khatib and Ibn Zamrak.

In January 1492 the last Nasrid sultan surrendered the city to Ferdinand and Isabella without a siege. That March they signed the Alhambra Decree expelling Spain’s Jews, and in April Columbus pitched his voyage in the Hall of Ambassadors. In 1526 Charles V tore out part of the Comares Palace for a heavy Renaissance palace. By the 18th century squatters, prisoners, and sheep filled the courtyards, and an earthquake struck in 1821. Washington Irving moved in and published Tales of the Alhambra in 1832, making the ruin famous. The Contreras family then restored it to match tourist fantasies, until Leopoldo Torres Balbás arrived in 1923 and applied scientific preservation.

• A fortified tunnel called a coracha that let soldiers reach the river for water during a siege
• Courtyards aligned north to south so winter sun warmed the halls while deep porticoes blocked the summer sun
• Muqarnas ceilings and walls of poetry carrying the Nasrid motto, there is no victor but God
• Seventy empty tombs left in the royal mausoleum after the departing sultan took his ancestors’ remains into exile
• Rafael Contreras’s invented Persian-style domes on the Court of the Lions, later dismantled by Torres Balbás