Partal Alto de la Alhambra Garden
Terraced upper garden laid over the exposed foundations of a ruined Nasrid-era palace.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Partal Alto garden in the Alhambra, Granada, starts with a strange question: who buys a slum, room by room, just to tear it down? In 1923 the architect Leopoldo Torres Balbas did exactly that, buying out families living inside the ruins of a five-hundred-year-old Nasrid palace to see what lay beneath their houses. Beneath the rubble he found a great reflecting pool that had lain buried for centuries, and on the upper terrace, the stubborn foundations of an even older palace.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Alhambra
Hilltop Nasrid fortress-palace complex of carved stucco halls, courtyards and towers above the city.
Generalife Gardens
Cypress-shaded Nasrid summer garden of terraces, water channels and a legendary six-hundred-year-old tree.
Palace of Charles V
Renaissance palace of stone circles and squares, raised over demolished Nasrid royal apartments and left roofless for centuries.
Alcázar Genil
Carved Nasrid-era pavilion beside a lost giant pool once built for staging mock naval battles.
The Moor’s Chair (Saint Helen's Castle)
Ruined Nasrid watchtower guarding a royal irrigation canal, later the site of a restaurant that never opened.
Nasrid Palaces
Ornate royal apartments of carved stucco and honeycombed ceilings, where a dynasty's last council chose surrender over siege.