The Nasrid Sultan Muḥammad ibn al-’Ahmar founded the last Muslim dynasty in Spain, and built another city in the sky over Granada. Originally a hilltop fortress on Roman ruins, it grew into a complex of palaces, gardens, bath houses, and dwellings that seem to float between the Sierra Nevada mountains behind and the narrow streets below.

Today, no-one visits Granada without also seeing the Alhambra. Your guided visit takes you deep inside one of the great expressions of Islamic art and science – a wonder of engineering but also a book of Arabic literature rendered into stone and marble, with prayers and poems carved across the walls in florid script. You pass through the Royal Complex, the Courts of the Lions and the Myrtles, the Hall of the Ambassadors, and finish in the Generalife gardens, where herbs, flowers and water features were arranged by royal botanists and landscapers to heighten the senses and restore health. As a Renaissance-era bonus you can also take in the 16th-century Palace of Charles V with its sweeping circular patio of colonnades.