A walled medina between two hills: the Great Mosque with its silk market, college and funduq in the lower city, the Albaicín on its hill across the Darro, and the Alhambra on the Sabika ridge above. Between them a dense fabric of patio houses on through-streets and dead-end lanes.
Granada became the capital of the Nasrid kingdom in 1238 and remained, until 1492, the last Muslim state in the Iberian peninsula. The city followed the pattern of the western Islamic medina. At its heart stood the Great Mosque, and round it the institutions of learning and commerce: the Madrasa founded by Yusuf I in 1349, the Alcaicería (a walled market of narrow lanes for the silk trade, shut at night) and, across the river, the funduq where merchants lodged with their goods. Through-streets (the shari‘) ran from the gates to the mosque and the bridges; everything else was reached by lanes, many of them dead ends.
The shape of that fabric was set less by any plan than by law. The Maliki jurists of the Maghreb and al-Andalus judged building disputes by the principle that no one may do harm to a neighbour. A house might not overlook another’s patio; doors across a lane were not to face one another; a dead-end lane belonged to the houses that opened on it, which could close it with a gate; a public street had to stay wide enough for laden animals to pass. The market inspector (muhtasib) kept the trades in their rows and the streets free of encroachment. The result is the inward-turned patio house behind a blank wall, and the branching, closing pattern of the lanes.
Above the city the Nasrid sultans built the Alhambra, a citadel and palace town on a ridge between the Darro and the Genil, fed by a canal from the river, the defensible, well-watered site that Ibn Khaldun prescribes for a ruler’s seat. Positions in the lower city are approximate; the Great Mosque and the Maristan were demolished after 1492 and are shown from descriptions.