Hammam Al Ándalus

This guide to Hammam Al Ándalus in Granada starts with a mystery restorers found under an old bakery floor: a hidden network of boilers built not for ovens but for heating bathwater. It traces how this house began five centuries ago as a Muslim hammam, engineered to keep three rooms at three different temperatures with no open flame, and how a sixteenth-century ban on public bathing turned the same machinery toward baking bread instead, for centuries after. Look up at the star and octagon shapes cut into the vaulted ceiling above the pools, older than the ban that once silenced them.