Puerta de Elvira

This guide to the Puerta de Elvira in Granada starts with a puzzle: old descriptions list a barbican, several towers, courtyards and a gun port, yet only two earthen towers and one horseshoe arch remain. It traces the gate from a plain eleventh-century Zirid wall opening, through its transformation into a walled fortress under the Nasrid sultan Yusuf I in the 1300s, to the 1612 demolition that let houses crowd against the old walls, and the further damage left by Napoleonic troops. Locals today mostly call it Elvira's Arch rather than a gate at all.