Philippa Gregory

Alhambra Palace

My policy of visiting any place that I write about in my novels has finally paid a dividend in life experience as well as in fiction technique. A previous research trip took me,’ and a faintly protesting husband to Calais on a cold damp weekend which, though irreplaceable in terms of research, was not an enviable location for a romantic weekend. Mary Tudor was devastated by the loss of Calais but believe me, worse things have happened.

However, my current research is focussed on Katherine of Aragon and -hurrah – her childhood home was the exquisite Alhambra Palace in Granada. Katherine was the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon and these two extraordinary monarchs fought their way through the mountains of Spain and the plains of Granada to defeat the last kings of the moors in Spain and so end 700 years of Moorish occupation of Spain.

It was a crusade, fought in Europe, with all the glamour and brutality of the mediaeval world, and with all the passion of fundamentalist religions in collision. The moors had turned Spain into a full-fledged Moorish kingdom which lasted for seven centuries, with universities studying medicine, mathematics and astronomy in defiance of the writ of the Roman Catholic church. Their engineers irrigated the hills and the valleys turning Spain into a richly prosperous kingdom, their wealth and power was legendary. For Isabella and Ferdinand it was a mighty challenge to dislodge the outpost of the most powerful kingdom in the world, especially when the Moors fell back to the fortress that was said to be invulnerable: the Red Fort which enclosed the palace of the Alhambra.

Isabella and Ferdinand fought their way step by step over the mountains. As a visitor now, you can fly into Malaga airport over the tawny rocky slopes of the Sierra Nevada and find yourself in the overdeveloped coastal strip of the Costa del Sol. In its favour it has to be said that the development is at least limited in scale. The conjoined hotels form only a narrow traffic-filled strip, clinging to the beach; but behind them are the hills and valleys of a beautiful barren Spain.

We drove ourselves in a hire car which exceeded all hire cars in perky vulgarity. It was a small Citroen with a neat electric roof in the interesting colour of high-shine orange. I could not feel that it contributed much to my sense of style; but it rattled us up into the hills speedily enough, and with the wind in our faces and the sun on our heads who cared if we looked like a glossy high-speed tangerine?

The road wound up and up in snaky bends, wonderfully empty of traffic under hot blue skies. We had left Britain in grey mizzle and the heat was incomprehensible. No weather map, even studded with smiley suns, ever conveys the shock of heat when you step out of a plane in your semi-winter clothes into an oven which sucks the English damp out of you and replaces it with exhausted pleasure.

We stopped for a drink at a roadside bar and were offered free tapas of bread, potato quiche, sardines and sausage. No-one spoke one word of English, everyone nodded and smiled – and all this intensely foreign experience less than half an hour’s drive from Torremolinos.

Up and up to the top of the mountain in the national park and then twisting down to the great broad plain of Granada. The city itself is a maze of high buildings with a great green park, wide squares with fountains and a couple of impressive looking streets. The park, the squares and the streets I saw from one perspective and then another, then the first then the second again as we went round and round in the revolving Satsuma, trying to make sense of the road map in a city that despises street names. The only place we could find for certain was the Alhambra Palace itself, set high on the hill above the city, and the equally well-signed Zone Industriel. We ricocheted from one to another, increasingly frustrated, like a couple of cross pips trapped in a rolling citrus fruit.

In the end – we succumbed to the last resort of the lost tourist and hired a taxi to lead us to the hotel which, of course, was placed full square on a street that we had driven up and down half a dozen times. The staff greeted us with commiseration, unloaded the car and took it away (thank God) in moments. They promised not to return it to us till the end of our stay, and showed us into an elegant black and taupe bedroom with dark shutters that kept the room cool and shady.

It’s the speed of travel which, when it works, is so wonderfully surprising. We had breakfasted on Easyjet sandwiches flying out of Newcastle airport; but we dined that night in the great square in the lee of the cathedral, where locals and tourists mooched by, looking at the menus, and showing off their clothes. The evening breeze was warm, the food casually fantastic, it felt like a wonderfully long long way from home.

Up early like eager students we were first in the queue for the timed ticket entrance to the Alhambra Palace. The Palace itself is set like a jewel in the safe box of the citadel which was both fortress and small town. We approached it walking through the recently-excavated medina where craftsmen had worked and the ordinary people had lived and shopped and bargained. Their bath houses: functional small spaces compared to the palaces of the Greeks and Romans, can still be seen.

The Palace is, in Moorish tradition, unassuming from the outside. The entrance door is small, the inner hall modest. The beauty of the place unfolds to the heart of it: the exquisite courts. Even their names are evocative: the Court of the Gilded Room, the Court of the Myrtles. The Court of the Lions. The Court of the Myrtles is exquisitely simple, a rectangle of water with two hedges of myrtle set either side, running the length of the rectangular court. Nothing could be more simple and yet strikingly lovely. The Court of the Lions is an inner court: square with four open rooms set on each of the four walls, beautiful tracery of stone admitting any breeze and framing the view over the town of Granada. From each room on each side a rivulet of water flows through a channel of marble to the central fountain: the fountain of the lions who hold a great overflowing marble bowl on their backs so the whole court is filled with the sound of running water, a luxury utterly specific to this culture which came from the desert and made its greatest palaces in arid lands.

Every room seems to open to a court, every court has water at the centre, you walk from one shaded room to another in a state of increasing admiration and wonder at the civilisation of such a society which had such wealth at their disposal and chose to spend it on private beauty and domestic art. Centuries after this palace was built, the nobles of England were still squandering their fortunes on great show palaces of unfriendly scale, exceeding each other with mountainous staircases and monumental halls. The Moors of Spain believed in beauty to a human scale, on private pleasure and not in show.

Thus far, thus so wonderfully like the descriptions in the books. But the pleasures I had not anticipated were the looming functional bold square-towered fort, and the strong march of the palace walls. Nor had I imagined the the rich scramble of flowers in the irrigated gardens of the Generalife, the exquisite combination of the walled Sultana’s garden overlooking spectacular views and the small miracle of stone and water and plant which somehow gives the human spirit such a sense of peace. The word ‘rauda’ is the Arabic word which means both gardens and cemetery; and in these gardens you have a sense of eternal peace, appropriate for a religion which thinks of Paradise as a garden.

Totally Alhamra-ed-out we retired in the heat of the day for a siesta in the shady bedroom rising only, hungry as Crusaders, for dinner. Bowing to my husband’s passionately expressed insistence, we were dining in the hotel, and my doubts about the logic of a Spanish chef in a Granada hotel who offers kangaroo steaks on the menu, were swiftly laid at rest.

We ate out, in a shadowy courtyard as the sky turned softly blue and the fountain splashed water. We dined like millionaires on exquisite dishes wonderfully presented. We had strawberry gazpacho, a sweet foam of soufflé fruit on a base of salty stock, wonderfully tender kid, steak served with more strawberries. The dining room behind us glowed with candles, the service was all-but invisible except for the smiles. Spanish diners arrived throughout the evening, too chic to even think about eating dinner until long after English bedtime. At midnight, as we left, the exquisite ladies in well-cut black frocks were arriving for their aperitifs.

But we were up at dawn, the citrus citroen gleaming eerily in the streetlights. The pale sun rose as we drove towards Malaga airport, through a stony scenery with huge forests of olive trees like embroidered dots on the rolling landscape of gold. The flight was on time, the service pleasant, we had no luggage, we whisked through. We were home in time for Sunday lunch. It could not have been easier, it could hardly have been cheaper, it was bliss. It was not Calais.