Alhambra Negra

A sultan stabbed in the main mosque, two friars executed before its principal gate, a governor who turned one of its towers into a tomb for his own family—these events are as much a part of the Alhambra as its coffered ceilings or its fountains. To refrain from recounting them, or to look the other way, would be a subtle form of falsifying that which we have been entrusted to protect. The dark history of a monument is not an inconvenient appendix to its official biography; it is its biography—in its entirety, with all that this entails. Those who manage a site of this magnitude know that the beauty that draws millions of visitors from around the world today coexists—and has always coexisted—with episodes of violence and tragedy. In their own way, these events helped shape what this place is and what it signifies today: a site so deeply imbued with a sense of evocation and mystery. For this reason, we at the Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife in Granada particularly appreciate that this book does not force a choice between these two Alhambras—the luminous and the dark—but rather presents them as what they truly are: a single, indivisible whole, where one is as real as the other. Furthermore, it is commendable that the book avoids the easy temptation to turn the Alhambra into a lurid backdrop for a mere catalog of sensational events. On the contrary: each of the eleven episodes recounted here—from the assassination of Sultan Yusuf I to the "voodoo" crime—is handled with a documentary rigor that honestly distinguishes historical fact from legend, all while maintaining a narrative momentum that keeps the reader engaged from beginning to end. As someone responsible for the preservation of this monument, I value this rigor just as much as the storytelling itself; one cannot properly safeguard what one does not fully understand. This book adds an uncomfortable, yet necessary, piece to the complete biography of the Alhambra.