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Updated: June 13, 2025
Once on the Alhambra day, we have had Irving's story of the Arabian astrologer, and again a description of the palace and the Generalife who had just come from Spain.
The gardens of the Generalife form its principal attraction, and the number of exotic trees and plants gathered here is remarkable. The place is now owned and cared for by the Genoese family of Grimaldi, who keep a few people on the premises to protect the property and cultivate the gardens. We were told the owner had never visited Granada.
There were plenty of flower-beds, box-bordered, but there were no flowers in them; the flowers preferred standing about in tall pots. There was an arbor overhung with black forgotten grapes before the keeper's door and in the corner of it dangled ropes of fire-red peppers. This detail is what, with written help, I remember of the Generalife, but no loveliness of it shall fade from, my soul.
Passing through a small rear door of the Generalife, the guide conducted us by a steep path to what is called the Moor's Seat, the apex of the neighboring heights, and between which and the mountain range of snow-clad peaks lies the heavily-wooded valley of the Darro on one side, and on the other the wide-spread vega of Granada.
The view includes some fifteen villages, dotting plains more fertile than any other we had seen in the country. The atmosphere was clear, rendering the comprehensive view very fine, taking in as its foreground both the Alhambra and the Generalife. The visit to the Moor's Seat was not hurried.
What a pleasant sight and sound to those to whom stair climbing in a broiling sun is too much exercise! The cypresses in the garden are very fine, but they give none too much shade. The present owner's agent has Bû Abd Allah's sword on view at his house in the town, and this is a gem worth asking to see when a ticket is obtained for the Generalife.
He observed that no one heeded their conversation, and that the soldier made his way through the various groups of idlers unnoticed, as if invisible. "Crossing the bridge, the soldier led the way by a narrow and steep path past a Moorish mill and aqueduct, and up the ravine which separates the domains of the Generalife from those of the Alhambra.
If you have been at Granada you can picture this as rather a thin Hindoo edition of Generalife Villa. It is moresque in style, but small in structural forms, smaller still in geometrical ornament, and without breadth or much harmony of colour schemes. Some small rooms were passable in gold and silver and primary colours, but the principal halls and galleries were extremely crude.
The Moor whose thought and genius wrought those works for many moons Received each day a princely pay five hundred gold doubloons Each day he left his labor deft, his guerdon was denied; Nor less he lost than his labor cost when he his hand applied. And yonder I see the Generalifé with its orchard green and wide; There are growing there the apple and pear that are Granada's pride.
The arms of this family decorate the roof and walls of the colonnaded belvedere from which you look out over the city and the plain and the mountains; and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many places, but otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian as the noble Pallavicini who possess it.
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