Bob:

Seeing the Alhambra that afternoon was just fantastic and well worth all the trouble. Seeing the old, original fortress (Alcazaba) that was located right on the point of the hill jutting out over the city of Granada took about an hour. We climbed up on some of the towers and battlements and were rewarded with marvelous scenic views of the rest of the Alhambra palace on the hillside behind us or the city of Granada laid out in almost a 360-degree panorama in front of us.

The Alcazaba itself was definitely a fortress with no trace at all of anything palatial. Although there were no cannons there, stacked in an alcove in the courtyard I saw a pile of what looked like huge stone cannonballs and the cannons that fired those babies must have been HUGE. The interior courtyard was mostly barren ruins, but you could clearly see the outline of where the walls for the rooms on the top floor had been.

Monika:

Bob:

Ambling back into the interior of the Alhambra, we took a few minutes to see the more modern palace of Carlos V, who had decided that the Nasrid Palace was not good enough for him. So he replaced the beautiful, intricate Moorish architecture with a huge monstrous block of a thing (vaguely Italian Rennaisance style) with an equally huge circular courtyard kind of punched into the center of it. It had all the aesthetic appeal of a gargantuan round hole punched into a big, ugly square peg. Goodness gracious! Carlos might have been a military genius or a grand and virtuous ruler, but he had all the aesthetic skills of the Communist Empire in its heyday, which is not saying much.

Inside, we tried to get into the Alhambra museum but it had already closed at 2:30 p.m. Wow, talk about banker's hours! Since that museum is only open from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., you really don't have a chance of seeing it if you are forced to buy the afternoon tickets to the Alhambra, a fact that they never make clear to you at the outset. Now of course, the art museum housed in exactly the same building was open for tourists, but that one, predictably enough, charged an extra entrance fee. Well, we already felt snookered on this museum business and decided to give it a pass.

Continuing our perambulation, we passed a set of shops (where entrance doesn't require you to purchase any tickets, of course!). Now ordinarily I wouldn't take the trouble to look into tourist shops, but I was caught by the fancy Moorish doorway of one, and stopped to take a picture of Monika in that. When I went inside I was surprised to find beautiful examples of what looked like the original Moorish tiles and stone carvings adorning the walls of the shop. So if you visit the Alhambra and have a couple of spare minutes, you might want to stop into the shops not to buy, but rather to gawk and take pictures. Actually, seeing tourist trinkets displayed against some of the finest examples of Moorish art and architecture in the world was a bit jarring, but I just focused on the old stuff.

Monika: