Pssst! Hello! Yes, you. Please, keep your voice down… Please come over here a minute. Just for a moment! Come and wander through the Wall-Walk Garden. Then you can take a secret message for a gentleman of the Abencerrajes family. In exchange for your kindness, I will tell you about the origins of these tranquil gardens. Let us walk together for a while.

The pathway on top of fortress walls is called a Chemin de Ronde, or a wall- walk. This walk was built as a canon emplacement in the mid- 16th century, long after the Christians conquered Granada. When in 1609 the Moriscos, who had preserved the Arab culture of their ancestors, although they were no longer Muslims, were banished from Spain, the risk of them rising up against the monarch disappeared along with them, and this whole section of wall was no longer needed for defence purposes.

These Wall-walk Gardens were created in around 1628. The two fountains attached to the walls have the Neo-Classical features of the period. The circular alabaster fountain in the centre of the garden, however, is in the purest style of the Nazrid period. Its original location had long been forgotten so, for centuries, it was wrongly placed on the top of the Lions’ Fountain, which you will be visiting later.

Now please listen to me, for mercy’s sake… I am a noble Muslim woman, and I am in love with a handsome Abencerraje gentleman. Although some say that I am Moraima, Queen of Granada and the wife of Sultan Boabdil. But that is not so. Please do not ask my name, nor that of my beloved… The Christians are about to conquer Granada, and I know that you will find him somewhere in the Nazrid palaces. Will you take him a message from me? Ask him to meet me in the Generalife, the Sultans’ summer residence. Tell him that I will wait for him under a tree in the garden until I see him again.

Thank you, my unknown friend.




(c) (R) 2013, MUSMon com S.L.
Text (a) Carlos Madrid (2012)

Picture:
Source: Own work
Author: Julián Hernández Martínez (2013)