For it was from the Alhambra's watchtower that Christian conquerors unfurled their flag in 1492, marking the end of almost eight centuries of Islamic rule in Spain. It seems at once a reminder of lost glories and a spur for their restoration. A dispenser of iced lemonade sits invitingly by the door of the newly whitewashed building - hospitality for summer visitors coming to the first mosque built in Granada in over 500 years.īut looming over the freshly planted garden, seeming to quiver in the furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra, a 14th-century Muslim fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything this mosque is not: ancient, battle-scarred, monumental.
