Granada sits at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, a city of a little over 230,000 people — a quarter of a million, not the half million often quoted — and it holds the Alhambra, the most visited monument in Spain.
It was never simply a Castilian city. Granada was the capital of the Nasrid emirate, the last Muslim-ruled state in Iberia, a tributary of Castile from 1246 but independent until Boabdil surrendered it on 2 January 1492.
The Alhambra has a page of its own, but one point belongs here because it governs the whole trip: tickets must be booked well in advance, they are personal and non-transferable, and the original passport must be produced at the gate in the name on the ticket. Entry to the Nasrid Palaces is a timed half-hour slot and missing it forfeits that part of the visit.
Granada without the Alhambra is still a good city. Granada with an Alhambra ticket nobody can use is a bad day. Book first, then book the hotel.
Two adjoining buildings, usually visited together, and the chronology is worth getting straight because most accounts garble it.
The Royal Chapel came first. Isabella ordered it by charter in September 1504 and died that same year; it was built between 1505 and 1517, and her remains were moved into it in 1521. She is buried there with Ferdinand, their daughter Joanna, Philip the Handsome and the infant Miguel.
Accounts inviting visitors to sit where Isabella sat before receiving Christopher Columbus are describing something that could not have happened. The chapel did not exist in her lifetime, and the agreement that sent Columbus west was signed in April 1492 at Santa Fe, the siege camp outside the city, not in any chapel.
The chapel's sacristy-museum holds the paintings — a Botticelli Agony in the Garden, two panels by Rogier van der Weyden, work by Memling and Dieric Bouts, and Alonso Cano. These are in the chapel museum rather than the cathedral proper, which older accounts confuse.
The cathedral next door was begun in 1523, nearly twenty years after Isabella's death and under Charles V — so the phrase "at the height of the Queen's reign", which appears in a good many descriptions, is simply wrong. It was finished on Christmas Eve 1704, which makes 181 years from first stone to completion, and the Gothic-to-Renaissance shift across that span is visible in the fabric.
The old Moorish quarter climbs the hill opposite the Alhambra: whitewashed, stepped, and deliberately disorienting. It is part of the same UNESCO listing, added to it in 1994.
The Mirador de San Nicolás, beside the church of that name, gives the view of the Alhambra with the Sierra Nevada behind it — the one on every cover. It is reached on foot from Plaza Nueva or by the small C31 and C32 buses, which exist because the lanes defeat ordinary vehicles. It is busiest at sunset and worth arriving before.
Older accounts describe sitting there to the sound of "castanets and bongos". Bongos are Afro-Cuban and have nothing to do with it; what is actually heard is guitar, hand-clapping and, if fortune allows, singing.
Granada is inland and high — about 738 metres above sea level, which is why it is colder in winter than the rest of Andalucia and why the Sierra Nevada ski resort is less than an hour away. It is a long way from the other three cities: roughly three hours from Seville, two and a half from Cordoba, an hour and a half from Malaga, which is the usual airport for it. General practicalities for the region are on the Andalucia page.