Tales of the Alhambra: Washington Irving's Granada

Irving's guide, a local boy named Mateo Ximenes, meets him at the outer gate and explains the carvings with relish. The hand over the arch and the key above it, he says, are magical devices on which the fate of the Alhambra depends. The spell will last until the hand reaches down and grasps the key, and then the whole pile will tumble and the buried Moorish treasures come to light. Historians read the hand differently: five fingers for the Five Pillars of Islam. The gate itself dates from 1348, under Yusuf I.

Irving lodged at one end of the Governor's apartment, a suite of empty chambers in front of the palace, looking out on the great esplanade the book calls the plaza de los algibes, the place of the cisterns. He stayed about three months and was given access to the archives. The book that came out of those weeks reintroduced the Alhambra to Western readers. Today the plaza still divides the Alcazaba from the Nasrid palaces, and a plaque marks the rooms where he stayed.

Location precision: The book places his rooms in the Governor's apartment facing the plaza without naming the exact chambers; the pin marks the plaza.

Visitor guidance: A plaque marks the rooms where Irving stayed.

Poking at a mysterious door in the corner of the cook's chamber, Irving finds a narrow corridor and a dark winding staircase down an angle of the Tower of Comares. At the bottom he is "suddenly dazzled" by the antechamber of the Hall of Ambassadors, the audience chamber of the Moslem monarchs. The hall fills the whole tower, 11.3 metres on a side and 18.2 high. From the central window he looks down on the valley of the Darro, where Charles V is said to have sighed: "Ill fated the man who lost all this!"

Irving thought no part of the palace gave a better idea of its original beauty. Here Mateo told him about the Abencerrages, noblemen said to have been beheaded beside the fountain in the neighbouring hall, and showed the ruddy stains on the pavement he called their blood. The murmurs heard at night were their spirits, Mateo insisted; Irving suspected water running through pipes under the floor, but was too considerate to say so. The central fountain still stands on twelve marble lions.

Looking out from the Alhambra's towers, Irving points to the airy palace with its tall white towers and long arcades on the mountainside: the Generalife, a summer palace of the Moorish kings. Above it, on the naked summit, lie the ruins of the Silla del Moro, the Moor's seat, where the unfortunate Boabdil retreated during an insurrection and looked down mournfully on his rebellious city. In the Nasrid period the Generalife was a country villa and farming estate, remodelled by Isma'il I in 1319.

On an evening stroll up the glen between the fortress and the Generalife, Irving sees a Moorish tower glowing in the sunset and a young woman with flowers in her hair at its high window. Mateo says it is the Tower of the Princesses, traditionally home to the daughters of the Moorish kings. The captive beauty turns out to be the young wife of the old adjutant of invalids. Irving then tells the legend of three princesses shut up here by their tyrant father and allowed out only at night. The tower itself probably dates from the end of the 14th century.