COMUNICACIÓN Y PRENSA

The Alhambra (literally “the red one”), the “red fortress” as it was known, has been from much time a place synonym of exotic and melancholy beauty. In the book “The Alhambra”, by Robert Irwin, published by Almed in a new collection called “Maravillas del mundo” (Wonders of the world), the English writer examines the history of this masterpiece.
The Alhambra is the Europe’s greatest monument to its Muslim past and the only substantially surviving medieval Muslim palace complex anywhere. The fourteenth-century palace, home to the last Moorish rulers of Spain, who were finally driven from Spain by the ‘Catholic Kings’ Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, also became a monument to the triumph of Christianity at the XIV and XV century. Every day thousands of tourists visit this vast hilltop complex which contained six palaces, a barracks, a mosque, an aviary and a zoo as well as a town and industrial workshops. Much has been destroyed.
Unlike other Spanish Muslims monuments, the Alhambra’s impressive effects were cheap, substituting for real material splendour skilled craftwork in stucco, wood and leather, overlaid with textiles and carpets. It is Irwin’s theory that the Alhambra was conceived by intellectuals such as Ibn al-Khatib as a building to think in. ‘It is a text-laden building, an inhabitable book,’ he says.
The Alhambra has had an enormous impact in the literature, Orientalist painters, and writer such as Washington Irving or Jorge Luis Borges.