Albaicín
Hillside quarter of narrow lanes, laced beneath by an eleventh-century gravity-fed water network of hidden cisterns.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Albaicín in Granada opens with a puzzle: in an era when most of Europe dumped its waste in the street, how did this hillside quarter get running water into ordinary homes? The answer traces to the eleventh century, when the Zirid emir Badis ibn al-Mansur had a channel cut from a spring called the Well of Tears, ten miles away, using gravity engineering borrowed from Persia, Syria and Jordan. You'll hear about the cisterns this network fed, including the Aljibe del Rey, a stone tank large enough to hold roughly a hundred twenty bathtubs of water, kept drinkable on purpose by eels and turtles that ate the algae. Walk these lanes knowing dozens of cisterns like it once lay hidden beneath your feet.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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