Granada Cathedral and Royal Chapel: Ask What a Building Was Before

Almost every building in Granada's center was something else first. An inn became a playhouse and then a coal yard. A college of the Nasrid sultans became the city hall. A silk market burned and came back looking older than it was. A river vanished under the streets. And over that Nasrid town, after 1492, Isabel and Fernando laid down their tomb, their court of appeal and their cathedral. The walk through the lower city hands you one habit, and it works everywhere in Granada: ask what a building was before.

An inn that locked at sunset

The Corral del Carbón is the clearest lesson. It was built in the first half of the 1300s as the New Corn Exchange, an inn where merchants stored and sold wheat and slept. Its brick gate is a tall pointed horseshoe arch with carved plaster panels and a band of writing from the Qur'an. Behind it, the inn had no windows at all apart from the keeper's over the door, so nothing could be stolen, and the one door shut at sunset. After the conquest it became a playhouse, then a coal store with families living upstairs, thirty-six of them at one point. The Alhambra's own funds bought it, and it was restored between 1929 and 1931.

A tomb and a college, face to face

On Calle Oficios the two halves of the city's story stand across one lane. The Royal Chapel's long Gothic wall, all buttresses, pinnacles and the monarchs' initials, is the tomb Isabel and Fernando decided on in September 1504. The queen died that November, before work began; the king died in 1516, and the chapel was finished in 1517. In 1527 a carved Renaissance doorway was added to the Gothic wall. Inside, an inscription lists among the monarchs' deeds the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews.

Facing it is the Madraza, the college founded in 1349 by a Nasrid sultan, which became Granada's city hall in 1500 and now wears a later Baroque front. Next door is the Lonja, the silk exchange of 1518.

Moorish-looking does not mean old

The Alcaicería, the silk market, is the walk's warning. It sold silk well into the 1800s and was a small enclosed town of its own, with gates. In the small hours of 20 July 1843 a fire destroyed most of its shops. The rebuilders gave it a strongly Nasrid look, and the Alhambra's own staff call it the first imitation of Alhambra style in the city. What you see is an 1840s idea of a Moorish bazaar.

The same goes for the squares. Bib-Rambla lay just outside the Nasrid wall; its name comes from the Arabic for a gate. It became the Christian town's main square almost at once and was enlarged over more than sixty years from 1516; its fountain only arrived in the 1940s. Plaza de la Trinidad, a garden square with spoke paths and corner kiosks, stands where a Trinitarian convent stood from 1517 until it was taken by the state in 1835, used as the tax office and pulled down in the 1880s.

A painter's front, a sculptor's door

The cathedral itself was begun as a Gothic church in 1523 and turned Renaissance from 1528 by Diego de Siloé. Its west front came much later, from the Granada painter and sculptor Alonso Cano, who was made master of works on 4 May 1667, brought the chapter his plan and died on 3 September. Three huge arches, a strong cornice, four massive piers and openings so deep the sun fills them with shadow: as the cathedral puts it, Cano turned the column into the pier. Two towers of 81 meters were planned; one was built, and it stopped at 57.

Round the side, Siloé's Puerta del Perdón of 1537, which the cathedral calls his masterpiece as a sculptor, carries an S for his name above the lower niche on the left, and figures of Faith and Justice holding a Latin tablet in which the virtues say they gave this land to the Catholic Monarchs.

A river turned into streets

The last layer is underfoot. The Darro once ran open through the center. The first stretch of vault, about seventy meters under what became Plaza Nueva, was finished by 1515, and the Royal Chancery, the monarchs' court of appeal for southern Castile, rose on that new ground. The river was covered under Calle Reyes Católicos only from 1854, and the Gran Vía de Colón was cut through the medieval lanes between 1895 and 1903 with money from the sugar industrialists of the Vega, lined with blocks the city's catalogue says copy the Paris of 1900. At Plaza de Santa Ana, under the brick Mudéjar tower of its church, the Darro finally comes out into the open again.

Walking it

The walk is eleven stops over about 1.3 kilometers and takes about an hour, flat with six steps at one point and a way round them. It runs from the Corral del Carbón to Plaza de Santa Ana. The cathedral and Royal Chapel are ticketed inside, but every stop works from outside, so you can do it on your own schedule, early before the lanes fill or late when the stone turns gold.

Begin at stop 1 of Granada Cathedral and Royal Chapel: The City Made Over. See all routes on the Granada page.

Sources

• Capilla Real de Granada, history: the decision of 13 September 1504, construction from 1505, completion in 1517.
• Catedral de Granada, side doors: the Puerta del Perdón finished in 1537, Siloé's S above the lower niche, Faith with the chalice and Justice with a sword, the 1608 verse translation, the upper body of 1610.
• Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife, Corral del Carbón: the Nasrid corn exchange and its later uses.
• Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife, the Nasrid column from the Alcaicería: the 1843 fire and the rebuilding in imitation of Alhambra style.