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The Alhambra occupies a long sandstone ridge above Granada in southern Spain, overlooking the city and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada beyond. Its name — from the Arabic al-Ḥamrā, "the red one" — refers to the reddish color of the sun-dried tapia walls that enclose the complex. The site has three distinct zones: the Alcazaba (military fortress), the Nasrid Palaces (the royal residential and ceremonial core), and the Generalife (summer palace and gardens on the adjacent hillside). A fourth zone, the Medina — the palace city proper — is largely unexcavated and remains under the gardens.
The Nasrid dynasty established themselves in Granada in 1238 under Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar and immediately began construction on the ridge. The palaces as they survive were built principally under Yusuf I (r. 1333–1354) and his son Muhammad V (r. 1354–1391), who created the Comares Tower, the Hall of the Ambassadors, and the famous Court of the Lions. The Court of the Lions is the most celebrated space in Islamic architecture: a rectangular courtyard surrounded by 124 marble columns with stalactite capitals, sheltering arcaded galleries with pierced stucco screens of extraordinary mathematical delicacy. At the center, twelve marble lions support a dodecagonal basin of the fountain, the whole functioning as a hydraulic clock and astronomical instrument. The muqarnas (stalactite vaulting) of the Hall of the Two Sisters, with over 5,000 individual plaster cells, is among the most complex single ceiling in the medieval world.
"Give him alms, woman, for there is nothing worse in life than being blind in Granada."
— Francisco de Icaza (1910s), later popularised as a saying about Granada / the Alhambra
The Alhambra fell to Ferdinand and Isabella in January 1492 — the same year Columbus sailed — ending 781 years of Islamic rule in Iberia. The Catholic Monarchs used it as a royal residence. Charles V demolished part of the medina to build his Renaissance palace in 1526, a jarring insertion that nonetheless survived and now houses the Alhambra Museum. The Generalife gardens, restored over centuries, represent one of the oldest surviving Islamic garden designs in the world.