The Alhambra!

So Saturday I officially visited the famous Alhambra!!  Oh my gosh it is absolutely gorgeous.  I can't believe I live so close to it and you all should be jealous. :P  haha I know that sounds terrible, and that you are all jealous, but for real, it's amazing.  I still can't believe that I live with all this history in my backyard.  Europe makes America look like a baby with all the centuries of history they have here.

P.S. This post is going to be pretty long so I'm probably going to post in in two parts.  

Okay, so in case you know nothing about the Alhambra, or what it is basically it's a gigantic castle that was built in around the 1300's by the Aarabs and their king Momhamd ben Al-hamar lived in it.  It was served as a royal residence for the royal families, and then the Catholics captured the fortress, Queen Isabella and King Fernidado.  It was abandoned in the 18th century and then in the 19th century restoration began on the castle.  It is a gigantic complex with huge gardens, multiple houses, and Generalife (pronounced hen-er-ah-leef-eh), which is a ton of gardens.  The place is giagantic and it took us about 3 hours to see most of it, but not all of it.


http://www.alhambradegranada.org/en/info/placesandspots.asp
This is basically a link of all the rooms and place I saw.  We had tickets to access different parts of the Alhambra


For starters we arrived at Plaza Nueva at 11.  Here's Plaza Nueva:

So really Plaza Nueva is just another of many Plazas in Spain, and this is where we met up as a group to head to the Alhambra, which by the way is pronounced without the :h" (Al-am-bra).  So we met there at about 11 and then started to hike up this gigantic hill, not really hiking but it certainly felt like it.  When we finally got up there it was pretty cool, you can see why it's such a cool place, because it's pretty high above sea level, the view are amazing from up there.

So we finally get up to the mountain basically and we see that the place is huge.  Our guide brought us over to a really cool bronze map of the Alhmabra, which basically outlines the whole complex.  That's the picture of the complex.  It's gigantic and there's so much to see.  We started off there and got these cool little headsets to plug into.  They basically were wirelessly connected to our guides microphone so he didn't have to shout, because there were about 20 of us per group.  So we finally started our tour around 11:45 or noon and started walking around.  There are a ton of different rooms in the palace.  There is also only one entrance that is now in use at the Alhambra, La Puerta de Justica, the door of justice.

La Puerta de Justica

The door of justice is like the main entrance and on it there's actually a little statue up top of Mary and Jesus.  We learned that was not part of the original structure, which makes sense because the Alhambra was built by the Islams, not the Catholics.  So that is just one of many additions to this building that were added after the Catholics came to power here.

From there we entered the castle and saw most of the palace rooms.  They are incredibly beautiful and there is so much detail in them.  There was a lot of damage though and a lot of the color in the rooms and tile is gone because of light and age.  But they are gorgeous.  I'm going to stop here and start a new post though because I have so many pictures and stuff I want to write about.