The Alhambra night

“This isn’t really hot,” explained our taxi driver as we drove up the winding roads to the Alhambra through a haze of Saharan sand. “46 degrees is hot, 42 is nothing.”

The Alhambra is a palace and fortress complex in Granada. It is one of the most famous monuments of Islamic architecture and one of the best-preserved palaces of the historic Islamic world. It also where we are staying for the next two nights.

Luckily, we are literally staying in the Alhambra so we don’t even need to move to appreciate the beauty of the place. We arrived in time to enjoy a cocktail on the terrace and then dinner, before embarking on a nighttime visit to the Nasrid Palaces.

Night time is a good time to visit because it’s marginally cooler, but also because the darkness and light lends additional atmosphere to this stunning place. And the palaces truly are a stunning bit of architecture.

The lack of people in the decoration means the beauty lies in the detail of the mosaic and tile work and in the perfect alignment of fountains and doorways in clever sight-lines. I am going to fully admit to failure to capture this in the photos, partly because it’s a juxtaposition of grand scale and recursive details that really only lends itself to walking through.

We can, in any case, report that by midnight it was still – at least to these weak Australians – still really hot.