There are few things more dull than looking at other people’s holiday photos. Nonetheless, the place we visited today was so astonishing that I couldn’t resist giving you a selection of some of the 40 photos I took. For my friend @LifeTestDummy.

That tower means business but conceals the softer face of home life chez the Emir

Frogs and froglets

This is what I mean by a PR battle. This church over looks the Generalife’s beautiful gardens.

This is what I mean by depictions of nature

Don’t tell me those aren’t pine trees

View over Granada

Imagine looking across from here to the other side of the palace and waving hello to your Caliph

Without doubt the Alhambra Palace is one of the most beautiful and spectacular places I’ve ever visited. It’s way up there with the Taj Mahal, though it’s been better preserved and isn’t overrun with people.

I’m always struck by the intricacy of the carvings and the workmanship in places like this. How many people came to work every day for years on end in order just to labour on one intricate piece until it was perfect? I wonder if there are a few typos amongst all the carvings that no-one will ever notice.

I usually find this overwhelming: whether it’s the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, Chartres Cathedral, the sculptures at Ellora or the Sagrada Familia: they all put my worries about the progress of my kitchen project into sharp relief. I wonder whether the Moorish rulers woke up drumming their fingers every morning, anxious for their palace to be finished.

I’m not in any way a scholar of Islamic art but I’d always understood that Isalm forbade the depiction of anything in nature. It’s difficult not to see flowers and leaves among the calming geometric patterns and Koran quotations, though, and I wonder how the Emirs and Caliphs got away with that. Or perhaps the form of Islam they practised was not as fundamentalist as some we see today. I don’t know but it’s definitely a subject for further study.

Al-Andalus was a Muslim kingdom from the 8th century and, by the 13th Century, Granada was an Emirate that allied itself to King Ferdinand III of Castille. Until the Inquisition in 1492, Moors, Christians and Jews lived side by side and created the most beautiful architecture. My feeling, from the splendour of the Catholic churches I’ve seen, is that there was a bit of competitive aggro going on between them. Call it early Public Relations: whose gang was the most tempting to join?

I was dreading going to Alhambra today a bit. There’s heatwave here and temperatures are in the high 30s so I thought it would be unbearable. Yet the design of the palace is such that its courtyards and cloisters are full of shady places to sit and contemplate the water, the view, the sky. Even at the height of the day’s heat, it was lovely and cool.

When we went to see the Temple at Luxor albeit in even hotter weather, there was nowhere to shelter. Of course that was built in tribute to the majesty of the Egyptian gods, whereas the Alhambra was built as someone’s home. A house can be a sort of prison of luxury, can’t it, where everything, the bedroom, the sound system, the garden, the kitchen is so just-as-we-want-it that we can hardly bear to leave it. This is how I think the Alhambra’s inhabitants must have felt.

On first glance, Generalife looked to us like a global insurance corporation but the word comes from Yannat al-Arif, the possible meaning of which is “most noble of gardens.” Planted these days with lavender, roses, myrtle and linked by steps and rills of running water, they are, indeed, splendid and beautifully kept. It was a surprise to spot the frogs and their little froglets in one of the cooling ponds.

All this for €10 each. (My more commercially-minded OH thinks they sell themselves short.) It was truly spectacular. Fantastic organisation, too: we bought our tickets online last night and collected them at an ATM of the La Caixa bank just over the road on our way up to the palace.

So, a quick wash and brush up and off to a BYCB concert in Antequera. It’s OK. We found the place due to some judicious emailing and a nifty phone call from Jen at BYMT. You’re a star!