Palacio de la Madraza
Surviving hall of a fourteenth-century Islamic university, its mihrab dome hidden behind a baroque civic facade.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Palacio de la Madraza in Granada follows Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, who arrived eight years after the city's Christian conquest determined to break its Muslim faith by destroying what its people read. It reaches back to the madrasa founded on this site in thirteen forty-nine by the Nasrid sultan Yusuf the First, the first public university in Muslim Spain, where scholars once taught law, medicine and astronomy, and to the enormous bonfire of its library that Cisneros ordered nearby. Stand in the square outside before you go in, where the manuscripts were burned, then step through the horseshoe arch into the building itself.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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