The Generalife Garden

The Generalife is the garden-retreat of the Nasrid sultans of Granada, set on the green hillside of the Sabika above their great palace-fortress, the Alhambra, and built in the fourteenth century at the height of the Nasrid kingdom, the last Muslim state of the Iberian peninsula. Its heart is the Patio de la Acequia, the Court of the Water-Channel: a long, narrow walled garden with a still channel of water running down its centre, crossed by slender arcing jets from fountains on both sides, lined with beds of flowers and clipped myrtle and closed at either end by pavilions of fine carved stucco and tile. The whole art of the place lies in water, led down from the mountains through the channels and basins of Andalusi irrigation engineering and turned into beauty, into coolness and the constant music of fountains; for the Muslims of al-Andalus, as elsewhere, the walled garden with its four-fold channels and its running water was an image of the garden of paradise promised in the Qur'an. The Generalife and the Alhambra together are the supreme surviving works of the art of al-Andalus, made in its final flowering before the fall of Granada in 1492. This scene depicts the water-garden: the channel and the arcing jets, the cypress and myrtle, the pavilions, the red walls of the Alhambra below and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada beyond. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance.