The gentle Granada

Granada, Spain

It was a hot summer afternoon, and the sun beat down on the city’s red-tiled roofs. At home we might have switched on the air conditioning. But we were in Granada, a city that awakens the senses, and somehow the heat had become a seductive companion.

My husband, Frank, and I sat in the shade of a loggia, sipping wine coolers and watching an orange and black butterfly flit around an acanthus blossom. Nearby, Marina, our 10-year-old daughter, had settled on a bench next to a murmuring fountain and was absorbed in the latest adventures of Harry Potter. I inhaled deeply. The air was sweet with the smell of jasmine, and a gentle breeze rustled the upper branches of the cypress trees.

We were enjoying the tranquillity of the University of Granada’s Carmen de la Victoria, a residence for visiting scholars that also boasts a beautiful terraced garden. The word carmen refers to a house with a walled garden that must, according to tradition, be perched high on a hillside.

Carmenes are unique to Granada, where generations of artists, musicians and writers have been inspired by the beauty and serenity of these little Edens.

“To live on a different plane, in a carmen,” 20th century poet Federico Garcia Lorca of Granada once rhapsodized. “All the rest is a waste of time! To live close to what one feels deeply, the whitewashed wall, the fragrant myrtle, the fountain!”

In June, while our family was preparing to visit Granada, Garcia Lorca’s ecstatic words floated back to me. So I decided to find some of these magical places to see whether we too could live, however briefly, on another plane.

Granada has been renowned for its luxuriant gardens since medieval times. By far the most famous are those of the Alhambra and its summer palace, the Generalife, built by the Moorish Nasrid dynasty in the 14th and 15th centuries. The gardens, preserved by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella after the Christian conquest in 1492, are among the oldest surviving Islamic gardens in the world and have become Spanish and Arabic archetypes, attracting more than 2 million visitors a year.

After touring their splendid patios and gardens, many tourists believe they have exhausted the charms of the city and head for the beaches of the Costa del Sol, never realizing the bounty that lies beyond.

On previous trips, we had made that mistake ourselves. But this summer we resolved to spend a full two weeks exploring Granada. In particular, we wanted to get to know the Albaicin, the medieval neighborhood of small white Arab-style houses and labyrinthine streets that covers the hill across from the Alhambra. As friends who know and love Granada had pointed out, this is the most ancient and beautiful part of the city.

We soon discovered that the Albaicin is better known for its carmenes than any other neighborhood in Granada. During our time in the city, we visited a few of them and peered longingly through the gates of others. The Carmen de la Victoria, halfway up the hill of the Albaicin, on Cuesta del Chapiz, was the first we gained entrance to.

Behind a high white wall and entered through a wrought-iron gate, the Carmen de la Victoria is one of Granada’s best-kept secrets. The garden, perfectly peaceful on summer afternoons, is open to the public but used infrequently. The city has dozens of garden sanctuaries like this one, discreetly concealed behind unassuming stucco. If it weren’t for the occasional cypress towering over a rooftop, few would suspect the presence of these little bits of paradise, tucked away on the hills that encircle the city center.

Some of these hidden gardens are public, and anyone who knows their whereabouts can enjoy their shady walkways, bubbling fountains and botanical pleasures.

We had arranged to meet the director of La Victoria, Jose Tito Rojo, who has researched and restored this and other important gardens in Granada. He joined us for a stroll. “We know there was a garden here in Arab times,” he explained in his soft Andalusian Spanish as we wandered under pergolas covered with orange-flowered trumpet vines, “but we don’t know what it looked like. No drawings of Granada’s medieval gardens have survived. But we have many poems that were written about them.”

He showed us a 19th century arbor covered with cypress that he had reconstructed, then led us to a mirador, or lookout, that yielded a startling vista of the red towers of the Alhambra, high on Sabika Hill.

Views of the Alhambra are a prized element in many gardens of the Albaicin, offering a constant reminder of the Islamic culture that shaped Spain for more than 800 years. We paused next to an old stone fountain, where the water looked temptingly cool and delicious.

“Did the Arabs ever swim in their fountains?” Marina asked hopefully. I could tell she was itching to kick off her shoes and step in.

“Oh, no. Their culture was very refined,” I answered quickly, hoping to derail any such ideas. “I think the pools were purely ornamental.”

Laughing, Tito Rojo said, “Actually, the medieval Arabs were quite a lot like you and me. In the hot weather, of course they swam in their pools. We know this from some of the poems they left behind.

“Here’s what the poet Ibn Jafaya wrote in the 12th century:

A black man was swimming in the pool.

Through its clear waters, you could see the pebbly bottom.

The pool was a wide blue eye,

And the man was its deep, black pupil.”

Marina shot me a triumphant look. To my relief, she kept her shoes on.

It was 3 p.m., the Spanish lunch hour. After thanking Tito Rojo for his tour, we headed up the hill of the Albaicin to a very different carmen, a garden restaurant called Mirador de Morayma. The word carmen comes from the Arabic root karm, meaning vineyard. In the medieval period, wine drinking was an honored pastime among the courtiers of Granada, and many poems from that age celebrate nights of love and wine in the gardens. Today, most carmenes incorporate grape trellises into their design, and the plump green fruit ripening overhead is both ornamental and symbolic.

At Mirador de Morayma, once a private mansion, potted geraniums line the garden walls and Moroccan lanterns hang among the grapevines. We savored a cold melon soup flavored with mint, then ordered grilled rosada, a delicate pale pink fish. For wine, we chose a dry white from a vineyard on the slopes of the nearby Alpujarras mountains.

At the next table, a merry man was plying his raven-haired lady love with the same wine and waxing poetic about the charms of Granada. We wouldn’t have been surprised if he had pulled out a lute and begun to serenade her. In Granada, it seems some things never change.

That evening we were invited to take a paseo, a stroll, with our friend Leopoldo Cerezuela Garcia, a painter who lives in the Albaicin and knows its history well. He was eager to tell us how the Arabs had irrigated this dry hillside and made it blossom, channeling water down from the snowcapped Sierra Nevada and collecting it in large cisterns, called aljibes. Just before sunset, he led us through cobblestone streets where flamenco echoed off the stucco walls, children played ball and their elders drank beer in the pocket-sized plazas. We walked down Calle del Agua (Water Street), made several turns and finally stopped next to the Church of San Cristobal. Cerezuela Garcia pointed to a deep pit. At its bottom you could see a brick structure.

“In Moorish times this church was a mosque, and that brick cistern held the water that flowed down from the mountains,” he explained, as proudly as if he’d built it himself. “There are still 28 public aljibes left in the Albaicin. Many of them were built well before the Alhambra.” The complex irrigation system the Arabs designed allowed their farms and gardens to flourish.

Fountains and fruit trees

Historians today think Granada’s first ornamental gardens were laid out in the 11th century by Ismail Ibn Nagrel’a and his son, Yosef, important Jewish viziers who ruled on behalf of the Arab king. The younger Nagrel’a designed flower beds encircled by water channels and planted pomegranate trees. That tradition of incorporating fruit trees into gardens continues to this day.

Yosef may have been Granada’s first innovative garden designer, but his father holds the greater claim to fame. Besides being the king’s vizier and the leader of Granada’s large Jewish community, Ismail was a brilliant intellectual and poet, who wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew.

Today many of his poems are considered gems of the golden age of Hebrew poetry. Those works are not widely known in modern Spain.

To get a sense of how the good life must have looked to those early Jewish and Muslim aristocrats, who managed to live and love together in Granada’s palaces and gardens, the next day we decided to visit the Casas del Chapiz, just across the street from the Carmen de la Victoria.

Its property, built around two actual (though much transformed) houses from the Moorish period, now belongs to Spain’s School of Arabic Studies. A stunning patio in this complex, featuring a long, rectangular pool filled with carp and waterlilies, is reminiscent of the patios of the Alhambra. That’s partly because the Casas del Chapiz were restored in the 1930s by Leopoldo Torres Balbas, the designer who was reconstructing the patios of the Alhambra at the same time.

Frank and I stood watching carp cruising through the green water, sunlight glinting off their sleek golden bodies. “I can see medieval courtiers kicking off their slippers to dip their feet into the water here,” mused Frank. “And the poets probably declaimed their verse from the shade of arcades, like those over there. But the lovers, I suspect, disappeared into the bushes.”

As we wandered through the second Chapiz garden, filled with pomegranate, apricot and orange trees, I heard a little boy’s voice calling “Senora! Senora!” Peering over the garden wall, I saw a child standing in the private garden next door. “Please, throw me an apricot!” he pleaded. I plucked one and tossed it to him, imagining, as I did so, that the same scene might easily have taken place 500 years ago.

While adults enjoy the peace and medieval style of Casas del Chapiz, children like the Carmen de los Martires, a sprawling 19th century confection built near the Alhambra on the ruins of a Carmelite convent. At its entrance, a ferny grotto encircles the statue of a nymph, while streams of water pour down in front of her. A secret path, Marina quickly discovered, runs behind the waterfall, allowing children to enter the cave. Peacocks strut among the garden’s other Romanesque statues, and one vast, shady terrace showcases an imposing fountain, surrounded by towering date palms.

Best of all the surprises at Los Martires is a large pond filled with ducks and swans. In the center sits an island you can reach by bridge and a “ruined castle,” with spiral steps to the pinnacle.

“It is fabulous,” said Miriam Lopez-Burgos, a travel historian and garden-loving native of Granada. “But in truth, I would not call Los Martires a real carmen.”

We were having dinner with her in a plaza called Campo del Principe, in the Realejo neighborhood, on our last night. The talk had turned to the gardens we had visited. “A carmen should have a feeling of privacy,” she said pensively. “And there must be a high white wall surrounding it. Also, there is something else.... It doesn’t matter whether it is big or small, rich or poor. There is something almost ineffable that defines a carmen.

“Over time you will learn to feel it.”

A cool evening breeze blew across the plaza, as the waiter came to clear our table. “I’ll tell you what,” said Miriam impulsively, “why don’t you come for dessert at my house. I have only a small, humble place, but nobody would doubt that it is a real carmen!”

The three of us followed her up the steep, hilly streets of the Realejo until we arrived at a door in a white wall. Miriam unlocked it, and soon we were climbing up narrow stone steps, a sliver of a moon barely lighting our way. Suddenly the sweet, astringent smell of lavender filled the night.

Miriam seated us at a little table. There was no electricity, so we ate our ice cream by candlelight.

Beside us, a tangle of jasmine vines grew up an old wall, and somewhere among its little white flowers, a lone cricket sang to the moon. The hushed intimacy of the moment cast a spell.

“To live close to what one feels deeply,” poet Garcia Lorca had said. Suddenly his words became palpably real.

Miriam was right: A true carmen is more than just architecture and botany. It’s a way of living and feeling. It’s an approach to life that, even today, remains rooted in the world of those medieval Muslims and Jews, who celebrated the pleasures of nature, friendship and love in Granada’s first gardens.

Talking into the night as the lights of the city twinkled far below, I was filled with amazement, not only at the unexpected magic of Miriam’s carmen. It struck me that the passion of granadinos for their gardens, which bloom in the most surprising places, had not waned, despite the passage of a thousand years.

*

‘To live on a different plane, in a carmen -- all the rest is a waste of time! To live close to what one feels deeply, the whitewashed wall, the fragrant myrtle, the fountain!’

-- Poet Federico Garcia Lorca

Rhapsodizing about the joys of the carmen, a house with a walled garden, which must, according to tradition, be perched high on a hillside

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Seeing Granada in full flower

GETTING THERE:

From LAX, connecting service to Granada (change of planes) is available on US Airways. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $973. For the same price you can also fly to Malaga with a connecting flight on Air France, Lufthansa or Aer Lingus.

TELEPHONES:

To call numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 34 (code for Spain), 958 (code for Granada) and the local number.

WHERE TO STAY:

Hotel Carmen de Santa Ines, 7 Placeta de Porras/15 San Juan de los Reyes; 22-63-80, fax 22-44-04, www.carmensantaines.com. This beautiful carmen, in the lower part of the Albaicin, is a medieval Arabic house that was redesigned in the 16th and 17th centuries. It has a small, charming garden with fruit trees, a myrtle and a fountain. Doubles start at $100.

Hotel Carmen, 62 Acera del Darro; 25-83-00, fax 25-64-62, www.hotelcarmen.com. A large hotel in the center of downtown Granada. Swimming pool on the roof. Doubles start at $132.

For rentals: ViveGranada, Plaza Aliatar, Albaicin; 20-55-89, www.vivegranada.com. An online rental agency that offers apartments and houses by the day, week or month. It’s run by granadinos who specialize in the Albaicin but cover other neighborhoods too.

WHERE TO EAT:

Mirador de Morayma, 2 Calle Pianista Garcia Carillo, Albaicin; 22-82-90, www.alqueriamorayma.com/mirador.htm. An excellent restaurant in a carmen. Entrees start at about $13.

Restaurante Carmen Verde Luna, 16 Camino Nuevo de San Nicolas, Albaicin; 29-17-94, www.terra.es/personal2/carmenverdeluna. Wonderful food and friendly service in a carmen with views of the Alhambra. Entrees start at about $12.

Casa Torcuato, 22 Calle Pages, Albaicin; 20-28-18, www.casatorcuato.com. Good food at great prices draws the residents of the Albaicin to this popular eatery. Entrees start at about $7.

Restaurante Arrayanes, Cuesta Maranas, near Plaza Nueva, Albaicin; 22-84-01. Wonderful Moroccan food and friendly service. Entrees start at $9.

Pilar del Toro, 12 Calle Santa Ana, Plaza Nueva; 22-38-47. A restaurant and bar housed in a fine old mansion on Plaza Nueva. The bar, in a lovely, covered patio, is tranquil. Entrees start at about $11.

GARDENS:

Carmen de la Victoria, 9 Cuesta del Chapiz, Albaicin; 22-31-22.

Casas del Chapiz, 22 Cuesta del Chapiz, Albaicin; 22-22-90.

Carmen de los Martires, Paseo de los Martires (just west of the Alhambra); 22-79-53.

Carmen Max Moreau, 12 Camino Nuevo de San Nicolas, Albaicin; 20-06-88.

Carmen de la Fundacion Rodriguez-Acosta, Callejon Ninos del Rollo, Realejo; 22-74-97. Open by appointment.

Parque de Federico Garcia Lorca, Calle de la Virgen Blanca, off Calle Recogidas; 25-84-66.

The Alhambra and Generalife. Buy tickets in advance; admission spaces are limited and lines can be long. From the U.S. call 011-34-91-537-91-78 or check www.alhambratickets.com. For more information about the Alhambra, go to www.alhambra-patronato.es.

TO LEARN MORE:

Tourist Office of Granada, Plaza de Mariana Pineda, 22-59-90.

Tourist Office of Spain, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 960, Beverly Hills, CA 90211; (323) 658-7188 or (323) 658-7192, fax (323) 658-1061, www.okspain.org.

-- Mona Molarksy