Saturday we had an early departure to visit the Alhambra, a fortress/palace built overlooking the modern city of Granada. When Boabdil, the last king of Moorish Granada, was exiled to North Africa in 1492, he took the bones of his ancestors with him. But he left behind their fortress-palace, the Alhambra, and a legacy of nearly eight centuries of Islamic culture. Fernando and Isabel may have won the war and completed the reconquest of al-Andalus, but today people come for the intricate ornamentation of the Alhambra. Muslim architecture in Spain reached its peak with the “red palace.” Although the Alhambra was converted into a lavish palace in the 13th and 14th centuries, it was originally constructed for defensive purposes on a rocky hilltop outcropping above the Darro River. Because of ongoing preservation work, visitors only visit a portion of the huge complex and its intricate, lush gardens. Later, we did a walking tour of old town Granada, but for us it was kind of anticlimactic.