Alhambra
— — the red fort the sun walks across all day.
Not only on a wall.
“The Nasrid palace-fortress on the hill above Granada, with the Sierra Nevada white behind it. The stone reads red in the late sun, which is where the Arabic name al-Hamra comes from. Inside the palace courts the water runs in straight thin lines, and the carved stucco holds lines of Qur'an cut fine enough to catch the light like lace. The Generalife gardens keep the cooler hour. — from the studio
Alhambra, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Alhambra sits on the Sabika ridge above the city of Granada, in the Spanish region of Andalusia, with the Sierra Nevada rising to the south-east. Most of what survives was built by the Nasrid sultans between the mid-thirteenth and late fourteenth centuries, the last Islamic dynasty on the Iberian peninsula. The complex was surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, the same year Granada fell. UNESCO inscribed the site, with the neighbouring Generalife summer estate and the Albaicín quarter, in 1984.
The walls take their colour from the iron-rich clay of the Sabika hill itself, packed into rammed-earth tapial and washed in the late sun. Inside, the surfaces shift to carved stucco, cedar ceilings, and tile dadoes in eight-fold geometric patterns. The Court of the Lions, completed under Muhammad V in the 1370s, rests on 124 white marble columns, and the muqarnas vault above the Hall of the Two Sisters is cut from more than five thousand small cells of plaster.
Entry to the Nasrid Palaces is by timed ticket, with a thirty-minute admission window stamped on each one, and tickets sell out weeks in advance during the high season. The full site, including the Alcazaba fortress and the Generalife gardens across the ravine, asks for three to four hours. The first slot of the morning and the last admission of the day give the quieter rooms, and a night ticket to the Nasrid Palaces runs on selected evenings.