![]() ![]() ![]() The walls and towers look more or less the same as they did when Washington Irving took up residence in the Alhambra in 1829, a literary squatter who would go on to serve as the U.S. The ancient Iberians once occupied this ground, and then the Romans and the Visigoths. And across a sharp defile, immediately ahead, rose the crenellated walls of the Alhambra, a delicate marble confection within a fortified shell, half a mile from end to end. To the other the snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada took on a mellow tint in the declining sun. To one side, a few hundred feet below, the tiled roofs of the city gave way to a plain stretching hazily westward. Vernal lushness was a month away, but the boxwood and the sculpted evergreens proved amply fragrant. The time of year was late February, but the temperature was always in the high 60s or low 70s. There, in a terraced garden, I would sit for several hours and read. Every afternoon during a recent visit to Granada, the onetime capital of the last Islamic emirate in Spain, I climbed the high, rugged spur that serves as a pediment for the Alhambra, the fabled palace of the sultans. It started out as a way to pass an idle moment, and quickly became a habit. ![]()
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