Building the Alhambra Palace, 1333

In 1333, Emir Yusuf began to build the splendid palace that came to be known as The Red Fort, Qalat al-Hamra: the Alhambra. His reign and his son’s spanned most of the 1300s and established the palace that we tour today. There are other sections built by later Christian kings, but I won’t write about them here.

During the Reconquista years of the 1200s, the Emirs of Granada chose to move their residence to an ancient fortress on a hilltop. The first fort, the Alcazaba, had been built in the early years of the Muslim Conquest. It was seated at the point of the long hilltop, where steep hillsides fell away to the river valley, like the prow of a land-based ship. Of course, it was strictly practical, modeled after the classical world’s fortresses in Syria. There were few windows and no residential chambers.

To make it into a residence, the 13th century Emirs built three square tower keeps, each about 16 meters to a side. Interior arches supported four floors that included residential rooms. One of the towers had a bell that was used for many years to keep time for farmers who needed to turn on and off irrigation systems. In 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, the hoisting of their flag over this bell tower was the symbolic “Mission Accomplished” moment.

The next important task was to bring water into the fortress, using canals and, I suppose, a system of pumps to get it to the hilltop. New warehouses held stores in case of a siege. During the next few Emirs’ reigns, they added public baths (complete with steam room supported by a copper boiler) and a mosque.

The technology used to pump water up to the hilltop and then keep pipes pressurized for fountains was a primary luxury of the time; Southern Spain is very hot and dry. The Alhambra managed the climate with interior courtyards (blocking hot dry wind) that offered shade and evaporative cooling. Keeping ponds full and fountains running took up a lot of the available water resources. The most famous fountain courtyard has 12 lions with water jets, while the Court of the Myrtles contains a large pool of water.

In Yusuf’s time, the fortified gate called Gate of Justice was the main entrance, completed in 1348. Visitors passed under a horseshoe arch with a carving of The Hand of Fatima. This hand is a charm against evil, and its five fingers represent the five principles of Islam. The same design, more stylized than in the 14th century carving, is used as a general good-luck symbol in the Middle East, even in Israel, where it’s known as a Chamsa (chamesh means 5).

The Emir’s private living quarters, known as the harem, used a lot of water. They had running water (early taps had been invented by the 1300s) both hot and cold, and both baths and pressurized showers! Female grooming had a long tradition in the Middle East; women were shaved, bathed and perfumed, often with plucked eyebrows and cosmetics. But the word “harem” originally just means “restricted,” the way White House tour guides never cross lines into the restricted private areas where the President actually lives, so it was not supposed to mean “women only.”

Emir Yusuf and his son, Mohammed, wanted their living quarters to amaze the world, so they were decorated more elaborately than any monarch’s palace until Versailles. The Alhambra Palace’s decoration with geometric figures really stands out to Western eyes, since European decorative traditions tended to use figures of humans, animals, and flowers. M. C. Escher was inspired by the tesselated tiles to develop his tesselation drawings. “Circle Limit” (1960) closely resembles the domed tiled ceilings of some Alhamabra rooms.

Instead of using color, yeseria technique uses carved plaster to create three-dimensional wall art. Where Greek sculpture had created bas-relief, in which figures are in half-round, Islamic yeseria actually cut through the plaster so that darkness behind the screen of carved plaster made the designs stand out very starkly. They showed geometric figures, leaves, and Arabic scripts, often in combination. The “Hall of the Boat” (actually “Blessing” in original, Arabic baraka –> Spanish barca) has walls and ceiling entirely covered in yeseria plasterwork.

An even more three-dimensional decoration can be found in the techniques of muqarnas and mocarabe, from Persian decorative tradition. The muqarnas uses concave surfaces to create texture, sometimes with colored decorations inside each concave bowl or cell. The mocarabe is an extreme form of muqarnas technique; it is like a honeycomb tipped to point its openings downward, hanging from above like a stalactite. One hall in the Alhambra is known as the Hall of the Mocarabes.

Finally, the Alhambra’s rooms were often decorated by poems in Arabic. The poems praised the artistry of each room, and many praised Mohammed V, the Emir whose long reign in the late 1300s saw the completion of the palace’s greatest beauties. The Alhambra Palace was the most beautiful king’s residence of its time.