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Courtyard of the Palace of Charles V (by Ra-smit)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Court of the Lions (by comakut)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Honeycomb in the Hall (by jvwpe)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Pools in the Palacio de Generalife (by Berthold Werner)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Panoroma of the Alhambra (by Slaunger)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Night View of Alhambra (by Anjad Sheikh)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Interesting Facts and Tales of Alhambra:\u00a0 <\/strong>Besides offering beautiful architectural buildings and gardens, Alhambra also has many interesting facts and tales.\u00a0 Here we describe a few.<\/p>\n

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To provide drinking water for the people, including the rulers and their families, living inside the palace, an aqueduct was constructed from outside of the palace to lead to inside the palace.\u00a0 In order to assure that the water is safe to drink, they placed turtles in the aqueduct inside the palace.\u00a0 If the turtles were alive, then the water was safe to drink.\u00a0 To provide added assurance, they asked the soldiers inside the palace to drink the water first.<\/li>\n
Granada means pomegranate in Spanish.\u00a0 So Granada was named after the fruit pomegranate.<\/li>\n
There are 613 seeds in the pomegranate, and there are 613 Mosaic laws in the Old Testament.<\/li>\n
There are a lot of orange trees inside the gardens of Alhambra.\u00a0 They are called mandarin because they were thought to be native and imported trees from China.<\/li>\n
The general theme of a traditional Islamic garden is water and shade, not surprisingly since Islam usually came from a hot and arid climate. Unlike English gardens, which are often designed for walking, Islamic gardens are intended for rest and contemplation. For this reason, Islamic gardens usually include places for sitting, and is quieter for contemplation.<\/li>\n
There are two types of water fountains in the gardens in Alhambra:\u00a0 A quieter type that typifies a Muslim garden, and a louder type with water pump that typifies an English garden.<\/li>\n
There is a story that Catholics take a bath only once a year, because they believe that the body’s dirt helps to prevent infection.<\/li>\n

This is one of the tales told by Washington Irving in his book Tales of the Alhambra<\/em>.\u00a0 The story revolves around a poor mason and a rich priest.\u00a0 The priest wanted to build a safe deep inside his house to keep his bags of gold in a secret place.\u00a0 So he hired this poor mason and blindfolded him to take him to his house, and didn’t remove the blindfold from the mason until they were inside the house in a room with a fountain.\u00a0 Then the priest asked the mason to build a burial vault, and asked him to help carry the bags of gold and put inside the vault.\u00a0\u00a0 Then the priest blindfolded the mason again and took him home.\u00a0 Later the priest died, but didn’t leave any money with anyone.\u00a0 The person who was taken care of the old decaying house of the priest asked the mason if he was willing to take the job with little pay to fix up the house so he can rent it out.\u00a0 When the mason was shown the house and saw the room with the fountain, he immediately agreed to do the job and only asked as his compensation to live free in the house while he was doing the repair.\u00a0 Since he asked for such small compensation, he immediately got the job.\u00a0 So the mason took apart the burial vault and took away the gold.\u00a0 The poor mason became very rich.\u00a0 People frequently heard the sound of clinking of gold coins coming from the pockets of the mason, whereas in the old days of the priest they often heard the sound of clinking of gold coins from inside the house of the priest.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Other tales of Alhambra can be found in Washington Irving’s book Tales of the Alhambra<\/em>.\u00a0 If you are ever in this part of Spain, I highly recommend that you visit and take a tour of Alhambra.<\/p>\n
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[1] Washington Irving actually contributed to the fictional story which is still widely believed even today that medieval Europeans (including scientists and church leaders) believed that the earth was flat, which was not true, because the predominant belief for many centuries before and during the Middle Ages (5th century-15th century) of historians, scientists, and church leaders was that the earth was round.\u00a0 Irving’s writing A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus<\/em> is romanticized biography and is a mixture of history and fiction.\u00a0 He gave a largely fictional account of the meetings of a commission established by the Spanish sovereigns to examine Columbus’s proposals. One of his fictional stories was that the ignorant and bigoted members on the commission meeting in Granada had raised scriptural objections to Columbus’s assertions that the Earth was spherical.<\/p>\n
[2] The Nasrid dynasty was the last Arab Muslim dynasty in Iberia, ruling the Emirate of Granada from 1230 until 1491. The word “emir” means a Muslim ruler or a Muslim military commander of a region of land known as his emirate.\u00a0 But an emir is usually lower rank than a sultan.\u00a0 A sultan is like the king of a region of land, and an emir is like a military commander of that region of land or a ruler of a part of the sultan’s territory.<\/p>\n
[3] The Christian Reconquista refers to the period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula<\/a> of about 780 years between 711 when Muslims first ruled all of Iberia and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1491.<\/p>\n
[4] Many more beautiful photos of Alhambra can be found in the book “Reading The Alhambra:\u00a0 A visual guide to the Alhambra through its inscriptions.<\/em>“<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During July 25-27, 2018, I participated at the 13th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University of Granada in Granada, Spain.\u00a0 The theme of the conference was “Autonomy in Times of Turmoil:\u00a0 What to Make of the Social?”\u00a0 I presented a talk titled “10,000 Cries for Justice” (to see the Powerpoint presentation, click […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5217"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5217"}],"version-history":[{"count":50,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5323,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5217\/revisions\/5323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}