First of all, asks the curious traveller, who was Carlos Quinto? Before answering the question, I must increase your confusion by specifying that in Spain, although he has always been known as Carlos Quinto (Charles the Fifth), his real title was King Charles I. He was the grandson of Isabel and Ferdinand,whose daughter Juana married the Hapsburg prince Philip,whose home was in Ghent,where Charles was born. Philip came to live in Castile with his wife, the Queen Juana, but there was great fear that a foreigner might inherit the throne, and this is thought to have been the cause of his sudden death...

        Whether the handsome Philip was assassinated or not, Juana went mad with grief and had to be shut away for the rest of her long life. Her son Charles was brought up by his grandparents in Ghent, and when he reached the age to become King was sent to Spain to take his mother's place as Charles I of Castile.

        But, soon after, he inherited from his grandfather the throne of the Holy Roman Empire (which was the rather pretentious name given to Germany), as Charles V, in Spanish Carlos Quinto. He always used this second, and in political terms inferior title - Spain was then the first world power - for the simple reason that, while his insane mother lived, and even though she was hidden away in the cell of a monastery, sleeping on the floor in her own excrement, she continued to be the Queen. Charles, therefore, although recognized as King, was in reality the Regent until she died, just several months before his own abdication.

        The young King married his cousin Isabel of Portugal, in Seville, and then brought her, with a huge following of courtesans and dignitaries, to Granada for their honeymoon in 1526. Charles fell in love with the city, which still resembled the Arab medina it had been before the conquest, and decided to have a great palace built for himself, next to the bucolic patios and gardens of the Moorish kings,which he planned to use as a recreational area for outdoor events.

        But he wanted his palace to have the modern European comfort befitting a man of the Renaissance, with amenities such as doors,windows and fireplaces, for those winter nights when the wind blows down from the sierra. This was quite understandable, since the Moorish palaces,if one considers them as everyday living places, are more similar to desert tents than real shelters against the winters of a region which half the year,at least at night, is quite cold. To finance the construction,which required the importation of architects and craftsmen, the King decided to levy yet another tax on the city’s beleaguered moriscos, who agreed to pay rather than face further repression.

        Even though we may find the palace, in these surroundings, rather obtrusive, it is historically important for several reasons: not only was it the first great building in the Renaissance style built outside of Italy, but it was also the first full-fledged royal palace ever to have been built in Spain, given that Charles’ forefathers had all lived in uncomfortable, rugged fortresses in the north. But the project proved to be ill-fated from the very beginning.

        First,during the otherwise idyllic summer the Monarchs spent in Granada, there was an earthquake which frightened Isabel so badly that she could not later be persuaded to return. And once the work began, the tribute of the moriscos soon proved to be insufficient to finance a building of that scale, as a result of which the pace of the work had to be geared to the collection of the tax. The construction ended up taking no less than 110 years, twice that of Notre Dame Cathedral! The man who was to be the occupant of the house, Charles, died when the work was still “only” in its thirtieth year... and in its fortieth year, just when the workers were going to lay the beams for the roof, the main source of funds dried up with the expulsion of the moriscos, in reprisal for the rebellion of 1568.

        Nevertheless, the work moved forward unstoppably, swallowing up generation after generation of workers. It is awesome to read the account of the construction: the first architect, Pedro Machuca, devoted his whole life to one part of the palace,and after his death was replaced by his son, until he also died of old age and was replaced by another, who continued until his death... until the whole thing was abandoned during the economic decline of the 18th century, slowly collapsing into a great ruin. It was restored and completed under the Franco dictatorship, not as a palace but a national museum. In fact, no king of Spain ever lived there at all.

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