Day three belonged almost entirely to the Alhambra, a place that doesn’t so much meet expectations as render them irrelevant. Beginning with a quiet, uphill dawn approach and building deliberately from the stark pragmatism of the Alcazaba to the almost disorienting refinement of the Nasrid Palaces, where light, water, and geometry conspire to create something closer to atmosphere than architecture. The Generalife followed as a necessary counterpoint, earthy, and quietly restorative, before the descent back into Granada required its own kind of recovery: shade, a drink, more Albaicín, and the steady generosity of a tapas culture that asks very little and gives quite a lot. Then an afternoon pivot into history at its most concentrated in the Royal Chapel and Cathedral, where the weight of 1492 sits uncomfortably close to the surface, before the day loosened its grip again into wandering, a cocktail in an unlikely setting, a small square coming alive on its own terms, and finally a dinner dictated less by plan than by opportunity, anchored by Iberian pork done exactly right.
Get up early. Not slightly early. Actually early. This is not advisory.
Dawn Approach: The Uphill Walk to Puerta de la Justicia
There's a reason everyone advises going early. The Alhambra receives approximately 2.6 million visitors per year, making it the most visited monument in Spain. On a busy summer day, the queue at the Nasrid Palace's entrance looks like the boarding gate for a large aircraft. At 8:30 in the morning in early spring, on a weekday, it looks like a small gathering of determined people who read travel blogs. Which is to say: manageable, pleasant, and deeply preferable.
The ticketing situation deserves reiteration, because the internet has made it more treacherous than it should be. The only legitimate booking site is https://tickets.alhambra-patronato.es. There is an entire ecosystem of third-party sites (many of them professionally designed, some using .org domains, a few presenting themselves as "official" partners) that sell the same tickets at prices ranging from mildly inflated to genuinely scandalous. Book direct. Book early. Tickets, especially for the Nasrid Palace timed entry (which is separate from the general complex and must be booked simultaneously), sell out weeks or months in advance in high season. Don't count on same-day availability under any circumstances. And bring your passport or national ID. They check it at the gate, and they may not let you in without it.
Our timed slot for the Nasrid Palace was later in the morning, so we began with the Alcazaba.
The Alcazaba: Where the Story Begins
The Alcazaba sits at the western tip of the Alhambra complex, the oldest part of the entire site, perched at the highest strategic point on the Sabika hill. It is not the most decorated part of the Alhambra and not as well preserved. It is, by design, a military fortress: thick reddish walls, towers built for function rather than beauty, the archaeological remnants of the residential district that once housed the Nasrid guard.
Muhammad I, the first Nasrid sultan, who chose this hill for his new capital in 1238, built the Alcazaba as his first priority. Before the palaces, before the poetry inscribed in stucco, before the paradise gardens, there had to be something that could defend all of it. The construction began on older foundations dated as far back as the 9th century. Muhammad I strengthened the enclosure walls, built three of the major towers, and lived here (in the Torre del Homenaje, the fortress's keep) while the palaces below were still being planned and constructed.
The Torre del Homenaje (Tower of Homage): 26 meters high, the tallest structure in the Alcazaba, with solid walls and four interior floors that once served as royal residence, military command post, and, later, under Christian rule, a prison. The views from the top take in the entire Alhambra complex spreading east, with the outline of the Nasrid Palace visible beyond the Plaza de los Aljibes.
The Torre de la Vela (Watch Tower), at the western extreme of the fortress, is where to stand for the defining view. On January 2, 1492 (the date the last Nasrid sultan Muhammad XII surrendered Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella) the Spanish royal flag was raised from this tower for the first time, signaling the end of nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia.
From the Vela tower, the panorama is extraordinary: the entire city of Granada below, the Albaicín directly across the ravine (the Darro River threading between them at the bottom), the plains of the Vega extending west, and the Sierra Nevada visible to the south and east, still snow-capped and improbably white above the terracotta rooftops. It is one of those views from which the strategic logic of a site becomes immediately, viscerally clear. Standing here, you understand exactly why every powerful dynasty that passed through southern Spain wanted control of this particular hill.
After the Alcazaba, the Jardín de los Adarves, a garden laid out in the 17th century along the southern ramparts of the fortress, on what was originally a defensive walkway for soldiers. Small fountains, sculpted hedges, views over the valley below through the battlements. A quiet, unexpected reprieve before the main event.
The Nasrid Palace: Through the Portal into Another World
The timed entry for the Nasrid Palace is strictly enforced. Your ticket specifies a thirty-minute window; arrive later and you don't enter, regardless of circumstances or appeals to fairness. It’s not bureaucratic meanness. It's crowd management for one of the most fragile and intensively visited architectural sites in the world. Arrive on time. Budget your Alcazaba visit accordingly.
Passport check at the entrance. Then you step through.
I have tried, several times, to write a description of the first impression of the Nasrid Palace that does the thing justice. I have failed each time, because the experience doesn't translate to language any more than music translates to a diagram. What I can say is this: the transition from the brisk morning air and the functional stone of the Alcazaba to the interior of the Mexuar (the first section of the palace complex, a semi-public administrative hall) registers as a physical shift, not just a visual one. The temperature drops slightly. The light changes. The proportions of the space do something to your breathing. And then you start noticing the surfaces.
The stucco is the first thing to arrest you. Not plasterwork in the sense you might expect from the word. Not smooth, not painted, not a surface coating, but deep-carved, intricate, geometric and calligraphic patterns covering every wall from the tile dado to the carved wooden ceiling. Arabesques, technically: endlessly interlocking vegetal and geometric motifs that recur without quite repeating. The visual equivalent of a mathematical proof that keeps generating new results from the same set of rules. This is deliberate. Islamic art's prohibition on depicting the human or divine form pushed its decorative energy into pattern, and the Alhambra represents that energy at its absolute apex: craftsmen working in wet plaster with specialized tools, carving over 5,000 individual pieces per square meter in some sections, creating surfaces of such complexity that the eye cannot fully resolve them. You keep looking for the repetition, the shortcut, the moment it becomes mechanical. It doesn't come.
From the Mexuar, through the Patio del Cuarto Dorado, you come face to face with the extraordinary southern wall, the most commanding single wall in the entire complex. A soaring stuccoed tapestry topped by elaborately carved eaves, framing two doors. One leads to the sultan's presence, the other leads nowhere (a deliberate confusion to disorient any would-be assassin who hadn't been shown the way). Pass through to enter the Comares Palace.
The Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of the Myrtles): a long rectangular courtyard centered on a still reflecting pool, flanked by myrtle hedges and porticoed galleries. The pool is so perfectly calm that the northern tower (the massive Comares Tower) reflects in it with architectural precision, creating the doubling effect that is one of the most photographed images in Spain. What the photographs don't tell you is that the pool is shallow enough to see the bottom, that the water is fed by a centuries-old hydraulic system that still functions essentially as it was designed in the 14th century, and that the sound of it, the almost inaudible movement of water entering from one end and exiting at the other, fills the courtyard with a barely perceptible murmur that is, somehow, exactly the right acoustic for the space.
The Hall of the Ambassadors (Salón de los Embajadores) is the throne room of the Comares Palace. It’s the most important room in the entire Alhambra, where the sultan received foreign dignitaries, conducted state business, and projected the power and sophistication of the Nasrid court. It is a square room rising 18 meters to a muqarnas dome ceiling made of 8,017 interlocking pieces of cedarwood, geometric and star-patterned, representing the seven heavens of paradise, with the Divine Realm on the eighth, above all. The walls are covered in stucco, calligraphy, and tile in a continuous textural symphony that rises and changes and never stops. Quranic inscriptions, poems in praise of the sultan, geometric patterns that lock into each other with the logic of crystallography.
Standing in the center of that room, looking up at the wooden dome, I had the distinct thought that I was inside a building designed to make the person standing in it feel precisely this combination of diminishment and elevation: small relative to the universe, but privileged to be shown it. It worked on ambassadors from foreign courts in the 14th century. It still works on tourists with smartphones in the 21st.
It was here, in the Hall of Ambassadors, on April 17, 1492, three months after the conquest of Granada, that Columbus presented his plans for a westward voyage to Ferdinand and Isabella, and where they signed the contract authorizing the expedition that would reach the Americas later that year. The room that launched the modern world.
From the Comares Palace, walk through a connecting passage, into the Palace of the Lions.
The Patio de los Leones (Court of the Lions) was built by Muhammad V in his second reign (1362–1391), during the cultural and political apogee of the Nasrid emirate, at a moment when Granada was simultaneously the most sophisticated court in Western Europe and very clearly aware that it might not last. Muhammad V was a patron who understood that beauty was a form of political speech, and the Court of the Lions is his most eloquent sentence.
Galleries of 124 white marble columns along all four sides of the rectangular courtyard, their archways carved in muqarnas so intricate they resemble frozen lace or the inside of a coral formation. At the center, the famous fountain: a basin carried on the backs of twelve marble lions meant to symbolize power (although, frankly, they don’t look much like lions today) yet, an extraordinary anomaly in Islamic art, which prohibits figurative sculpture. Four shallow channels run from the fountain to the four pavilions at the cardinal points of the courtyard, the water symbolizing the four rivers of paradise described in the Quran (of water, milk, wine, and honey). The Nasrids called this space Qasr ar-Riyad as-Sa'id - the Palace of the Joyous Garden. It was their vision of earthly paradise made architecturally explicit.
The Sala de los Abencerrajes opens from the south side of the courtyard. An octagonal muqarnas vault of extraordinary complexity fills the ceiling. The stalactite-like plaster forms multiplying and subdividing as they rise toward the central star, in shades of gold and blue (traces of the original paint are still visible in sheltered corners). It is the most dazzling ceiling in the Alhambra, which says a lot! The room also has one of the darker legends attached to it: it is said that the sultan Muhammad XII, having been warned of a conspiracy, invited 36 of his senior men to a feast in this room and had them slaughtered. The rust-colored stains on the central fountain base, local tradition holds, are the blood that will never wash away. They are almost certainly natural mineral deposits. This doesn't make the story less compelling.
The Sala de las Dos Hermanas (Hall of the Two Sisters), on the north side of the courtyard, has an even more elaborate muqarnas vault: over 5,000 individual honeycomb cells suspended above the center of the room in a configuration that, from below, seems to collapse the distinction between ceiling and sky. Ibn Zamrak's poems inscribed around it compare it to the vault of heaven itself. Again: they were not wrong.
We went around twice. Both times, I caught myself with my mouth open. It is not possible to adequately prepare for the Alhambra. You just have to go.
The Generalife: Paradise as a Working Farm
After the Nasrid Palace, a brief and necessary exhale in the open air, then across the terraced ravine to the Generalife, the sultan's summer estate, the Yannat al-'Arifa ("Garden of the Architect," though the precise Arabic etymology is debated), built on the slopes of the Cerro del Sol to the east of the main Alhambra complex.
The contrast is deliberate. Where the Nasrid Palace is enclosed, ceremonial, and overwhelmingly interior, the Generalife is open, terraced, and agricultural. It was not just a leisure garden; it was the working farm that supplied the palace with fruit and vegetables. Orchards of orange, lemon, and almond. Terraces of spinach and artichoke and peach, crops the Moors had introduced to the region. A place where the sultan could escape state business, breathe clean air, and observe the mundane miracle of things growing.
The Patio de la Acequia (Courtyard of the Water Canal) is the heart of it: a long rectangular courtyard with a central water channel flanked by flowerbeds on either side. The whole thing is framed by pavilions at each end and, on the western wall, a mirador that once allowed the sultan to look across the ravine to the Alhambra below. The sound of the water, in the open air of the garden, is a completely different sonic experience from the whispered trickle of the Comares Palace pool. Generous, unapologetically present.
The Escalera del Agua (Water Stairway) is one of the more quietly astonishing features of the entire Alhambra complex. A four-flight staircase ascending the hillside to the high gardens, with water channels built into the stone balustrades on either side. As you climb, cool water runs alongside your hands, fed by the same Acequia Real canal that has been diverting the Darro River's snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada to this hilltop since the 13th century. The engineering is medieval. The sensation is immediately, physically pleasurable in a way that reminds you that the people who built this place understood human experience with considerable precision. Walk up slowly. Touch the water.
Early spring didn't offer the Generalife in full bloom. The roses and wisteria that reportedly fill it with color and scent in April and May were not yet fully awake. The grounds staff was working steadily with shovels, rakes and pruning shears, preparing for the season. But even half-awake, the layered terraces and views offer enough to understand what this place becomes in season. Come in April/May if you can. The Generalife is particularly extraordinary in early morning light, when the long shadows of the cypresses fall across the paths, the fountains catch the sun at low angles and the whole garden seems to hold its breath for a moment before the day begins.
The combined Alhambra experience - Alcazaba, Nasrid Palace, Generalife - took us nearly three hours. We could easily have spent five and not felt extravagant. The audio guide is useful but not essential; what it offers in context it sometimes takes away in pace. I'd recommend it for first-timers, particularly for the Nasrid Palace, where the inscriptions and the history of each room add considerably to the experience. For subsequent visits, and I suspect this will become a place people return to, trust your own eyes.
Recovery: The Essential Post-Alhambra Tapa(s)
Coming down from the Alhambra, back through the forest, we needed to stop. Not for cultural reasons. For purely biological ones. The combination of three hours of sensory overload and the persistent uphill nature of Granadan pedestrianism had created a physiological state that required intervention in the form of cold liquid and some form of fried something. There are some touristy places just outside the exit. Avoid them. Walk back into Centro, via a more lively Paseo de los Tristes.
The Paseo de los Tristes, the riverside walk at the foot of the Alhambra hill, is where to land. There are several terrace bars and restaurants along the river here, with views of the palace walls above and the Darro below. The energy is pleasingly calm: not tourist-destination frantic, not entirely local. Somewhere agreeable in between. We found a table, ordered tintos de verano (see yesterday's note on this subject), and consumed a series of free tapas that arrived with each round and were uniformly excellent.
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| Paseo de los Tristes view, right under the Alhambra |
A note on the food culture in this part of Andalucía, because it deserves more than a passing mention. The Granada-area food traditions run deep and strange and wonderful. Ajoblanco (cold almond soup, the "white gazpacho") predates its tomato-based cousin and was likely brought by the Moors. Gazpacho Andaluz (the classic, with tomato, cucumber, pepper, garlic) is everywhere and is not the watered-down version you've had elsewhere. Here it is properly seasoned, properly chilled, properly thick. Piononos, small cylinders of sponge cake rolled with cream (soft inside) and topped with toasted custard, are worth the extra calories. And any tapa menu in this province will eventually present you with sweetbreads, brains, or other "everything but the squeal" option, because the local tradition has always been to waste nothing. An acquired taste for some. Not for me, an adventurous eater, Andrew Zimmern style.
Restaurant note for the post-Alhambra afternoon: Pilar del Toro (Calle Hospital de Santa Ana) is one of the better-regarded restaurants in the old town; ask for a table in the beautiful courtyard if you can get one. Antigua Bodega Castañeda (nearby, on Calle Almireceros) is an atmospheric old bodega with excellent wines and reliable tapas, particularly well-placed if you're planning to visit the Cathedral next. Los Diamantes (on Calle Navas, two locations) is the classic fried fish spot. Bright, simple, reliably good. We had tried, later that evening, to get into El Rincón de Julio and Los Diamantes for dinner and been rebuffed by long waits; midafternoon on a weekday is a much better entry strategy for both.
The Royal Chapel: History at Rest
Refreshed and fed, the afternoon took us into the historic center for the visit that provides the most pointed human context for everything we'd seen in the Alhambra: the Capilla Real (the Royal Chapel of Granada).
Built between 1505 and 1517 and attached to the Cathedral, the Royal Chapel is the burial place of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. The Catholic Monarchs whose marriage in 1469 united the crowns of Castile and Aragon, and whose combined forces completed the Reconquista in this very city in January 1492. They signed the expulsion of the Jews and funded Columbus. They were given the title Reyes Católicos by Pope Alexander VI in recognition of their zeal in enforcing religious uniformity.
They chose Granada for their tomb deliberately. The city that crowned their achievement. The one that had held out longest. The final Moorish stronghold, the last domino, the symbolic completion of a seven-century project. They wanted to be here. Isabella died in 1504. Ferdinand, 8 years later. Their grandson, Charles V had them transferred to the chapel in 1521.
The chapel's exterior, compressed between the Cathedral, the Lonja exchange building, and the Church of the Sagrario, shows only one facade, an ornate Plateresque stonework, with the initials F and Y (for Ysabella, in the spelling of the time) worked into the decoration alongside yokes and arrows (the heraldic symbols of Ferdinand and Isabella, the yoke for Ysabel, the flechas (arrows) for Fernando). Inside, a magnificent 16th-century wrought iron screen, separating the nave from the high altar.
And then the tombs.
In the center of the transept, raised high to symbolize their closeness to God, the carved marble figures of Ferdinand and Isabella recline in eternal state. Ferdinand wears armor, hands resting on his sword. Isabella wears a simple court dress, plain, unadorned, in accordance with her wishes for humility in death.
Descend the steps beneath the transept to the crypt: five lead coffins, smaller than you expect, holding the actual physical remains. The figures above are art and symbols. These are the people themselves, or what time has left of them.
In the sacristy, which functions as a small museum: Isabella's crown and scepter (her crown is small and plain, less diadem-of-conquest than the cultural imagination suggests). Ferdinand's sword. Isabella's personal missal, illuminated and evidently used. Her mirror, later converted into a monstrance. And her personal art collection: Flemish masterpieces, a Botticelli, works by Berruguete and Machuca, assembled by a queen who was one of the most discerning art collectors in 15th-century Europe. The altarpiece inside the chapel includes carved panels depicting the surrender of Granada, and the subsequent forced baptisms of the Muslim population. History told plainly, without apology, by the victors in their own monument.
Standing in front of those tombs, with all of 1492 in mind (the Reconquista completed, Columbus contracted, the Jews expelled, the Inquisition already running) I had the complicated feeling that history gives you when you're standing very close to it: admiration for what these two people achieved combined with a clear-eyed reckoning with what it cost others. No single sentence does justice to that combination. The chapel doesn't try to offer one.
The Granada Cathedral: The Big Sibling Next Door
The Catedral de Granada is directly attached to the Royal Chapel, on the site of a former mosque (of course). Construction began six years after the Chapel was completed, and lasted over two centuries. The result is something more contradictory than most cathedrals: a Renaissance nave of extraordinary proportions (second largest in Spain by volume, after Seville's), with a circular end inspired by the Roman Pantheon rather than the Gothic apse tradition, with details accumulated across two hundred years of changing taste. It is enormous, luminous, but lacking the accumulated character that centuries of singularity of vision produce.
The comparison to the Royal Chapel immediately next door is instructive. The Chapel is smaller, darker, and architecturally more coherent; the product of a single commission and a single purpose. The Cathedral is grander and more spatially impressive, but feels like a building that was designed by committee over several generations, which is approximately what happened. Still worthwhile. The Giralda-like tower (Granada's bell tower, modeled on the Seville original) is under its own perpetual state of renovation. The interior's enormous organ (said to contain 4,000 pipes) is both enormous and not currently playable, which is a shame. The yellow and white interior is unusually bright for a Spanish Gothic-Renaissance cathedral and gives the whole space an unexpectedly cheerful quality.
La Alcaicería, Bohemia Jazz Café, and the Surprise Dance
The afternoon dissolved into wandering. First, through La Alcaicería, the old silk market rebuilt in the 19th century in vaguely Moorish style after a fire, now a dense warren of shops selling everything from genuine Granadan crafts to the kind of mass-produced souvenir that exists in identical form in every tourist destination on earth. Still, the physical form of the place, narrow covered lanes, ceramic tiles, carved archways, gives it an atmosphere that rewards a slow wander, particularly if you're looking for hand-painted pottery, hand-tooled leather, or marquetry woodwork (the latter a genuine Granadan craft tradition with Moorish roots).
A stop at the achingly eccentric Bohemia Jazz Café, where every single visible surface, including the ceiling, is covered in jazz memorabilia, photographs, album covers, instruments, and other knick-knacks. The drinks were very good, but slightly overpriced. The atmosphere was the kind of aggressively idiosyncratic that either charms or overwhelms, and I found it charming, partly because it was so completely out of place in the middle of medieval Islamic Granada, and partly because the music was excellent, especially to a jazz aficionado.
From there, back towards Pilar del Toro for dinner. But first, a stop at an impromptu dance show in the town square. Spanish “oldies” blaring from a large speaker. A dozen or more older people dancing like nobody was watching (although a large crowd already started gathering with applause). My wife got invited by a lady in her 80’s. You can tell she did some dancing in her life. It seemed like, for a few minutes, nothing outside that little square mattered. People here just have a very natural, nonchalant way of simply enjoying life…That moment, more than the Alhambra, more than the Nasrid Palace, more than the cave Flamenco, was my clearest single image of what Granada actually is.
Dinner: Ibérico, Ibérico, Ibérico
In typical Spanish fashion, most places don’t open for dinner until 8-8:30. We were first in Pilar del Toro, and the place looked deserted. Got seated at a hidden corner table and a quick look at the menu didn’t spark much enthusiasm, so we promptly left. We walked back towards the apartment and settled on one of the restaurants just down the street. Unfortunately, reservations seemed to be required at some of my top choices (El Rincón de Julio, Los Diamantes, Entre Brasas) and the waiting lists were quite long. We settled for Casa Ángeles, with an excellent selection of tapas and grilled iberico.
The Ibérico pork section of the menu at Casa Ángeles demands full attention. The secreto ibérico, that magical hidden cut from between the shoulder blade and loin of the black Iberian pig, marbled with fat in a way that makes Wagyu seem like it's trying too hard, arrived on a hot plate, barely rested, with a few potatoes and two slices of tomato on the side. The meat was the argument; the rest was punctuation.
Brief taxonomy for those who plan to order Ibérico and want to do it right . Secreto (hidden cut): thin, heavily marbled, cooked quickly over high heat, almost absurdly juicy, richest flavor. Pluma (feather cut, from near the loin): leaner, longer fibers, still remarkably tender, slightly more refined in flavor. Presa (shoulder cut): thickest of the three, closest to a conventional steak experience, slightly firmer but still with that distinctive Ibérico sweetness and depth. All three are outstanding. If you can only order one, order Secreto. If you can order all three and claim you're "sharing," do that.
One of the small revelations of the trip was realizing that Ibérico pork can (and should) be served medium-rare, something that feels almost counterintuitive if you grew up thinking pork must always be cooked through. The difference lies in the Iberian pig itself: a semi-wild breed with extraordinary intramuscular marbling, more akin to a good steak than conventional pork, whose fat melts at lower temperatures and keeps the meat tender, juicy, and deeply flavorful even when still pink at the center. In Spain, this isn’t a novelty but the standard. High-quality Ibérico, properly sourced and handled, is cooked just enough to unlock its texture and richness without drying it out, and once you’ve had it that way, the idea of well-done pork starts to feel like a missed opportunity rather than a safety precaution.
Nightcap at Fogón de Galicia, below the apartment, where the Galician octopus at the neighboring table remained just as tempting as it had been the night before. I had a glass of Albariño. I looked at the octopus. I had another glass of Albariño. I did not order the octopus. There simply was no more room. This is one of my few regrets from the trip.
Tomorrow: south. Very south. The coast, the Mediterranean, a beach shack lunch, and a city that has a film festival.
Practical Notes: Day 3
Alhambra tickets: Book through https://tickets.alhambra-patronato.es only. The Nasrid Palace requires a separate timed entry booked simultaneously with your general ticket. High season (April–September): book at least 4–6 weeks in advance. Shoulder season: 2–3 weeks. Off-season weekdays: sometimes available with less notice, but don't count on it. Bring photo ID; the gate check is real. The ticket includes Alcazaba, Nasrid Palace (timed), Generalife, and general gardens. Audio guide rental available at the entrance; worthwhile especially for first-timers. No large backpacks inside the Nasrid Palace (coin lockers available at the entrance plaza).
Timing strategy: Arrive early. The palace opens at 8:30am, and the first Nasrid entry slots begin at that time. The Alcazaba and Generalife are less crowd-dependent; the Nasrid Palace is where timing matters most. If your timed slot is late morning or afternoon, start with Generalife (less crowded, naturally beautiful in morning light), do Alcazaba, then Nasrid Palace. If your slot is early morning (best option), do Alcazaba first as a warm-up, Nasrid Palace in its prime light, then Generalife for the decompression walk.
Post-Alhambra eating: Any terrace on Paseo de los Tristes or Carrera del Darro works for recovery. For better food, Pilar del Toro (courtyard table if possible), Antigua Bodega Castañeda, or Los Diamantes for fried fish. Ajoblanco (cold almond soup) is the local specialty to order; most places in the Centro do a decent version.
Royal Chapel: Calle Oficios, attached to the Cathedral. Open Monday to Saturday 10am–6:30pm, Sundays 11am–6pm. Entry fee. The sacristy museum is included. Don't skip it. Photography is not permitted inside. The audio guide is useful for the tomb details and historical context. Allow 30 minutes at least.
Granada Cathedral: Adjacent to the Chapel. Tickets can be combined. Less essential than the Chapel if time is short, but worthwhile for the proportions alone.
La Alcaicería: Free to wander. Genuine craft shops for ceramics, leather, and marquetry woodwork; but mostly the full gamut of mass-produced souvenirs. Best in the late afternoon when it's slightly less frantic.
One more thing on the Alhambra: The Washington Irving connection deserves a mention. The American writer lived in the Alhambra in 1829 (before its full restoration, when it was partly inhabited by squatters and partly ruined) and wrote Tales of the Alhambra, the book that brought international romantic attention to the palace and arguably triggered the modern preservation effort. Copies are available in every bookshop in Granada. Read it before or during the visit; it adds considerably.
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