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HISTORY OF BIG SUR COAST

  A new dawn:              Locals had long called for a road along the coast to aid shipwreck victims and improve access to isolated communities.  Construction started in 1919, and 18 years, 32 tonnes of dynamite and 33 bridges later, the Big Sur stretch of California Highway One was complete.               The implausible route, with its myriad twists and turns and dramatic drop-offs, became an instant classic.  The author and painter Henry Miller fled to Big Sur in 1944 and stayed for nearly two decades.  Photographer Edward Weston and Beat Generation bard Jack Kerouac fell under its spell.  By the late 1960’s San Francisco’s counterculture revolution had swept down to Big Sur, and the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell performed on the cliff tops.              ...
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ALHAMBRA

 

Towering Horizons:


                      The Palace sits on a 14 ha (35-acre) plateau over a rocky outcrop of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  Even today, the forbidding walls with their 23 towers and four gates dominate the Granada skyline.  The foundations were laid by Sultan Muhammad ibn Nasr in the 13th century, and the palace complex was completed in the 14th Century by Yusuf I (reigned 1333-54) and Muhammad V (who reigned 1354-59 and 1362-91). 

                         The self-contained city has palaces, prisons, homes for craftsmen, bathhouses, barracks, workshops and mosques.  At one point it housed 40,000 people.  The site also included the Royal Mint and necropolis.  Only two of the original six main palaces survive – the Comares Palace and the Palace of the Lions.  A separate summer palace sits in the Generalife  gardens on a neighbouring hill. While traces of daily life here have vanished, the surviving palaces still give a glimpse into the life of the Nasrid Sultans in all their splendour.

                         “In the old Moorish palace of

                           the  Alhambra I lived in the midst

                           of an Arabian tale ..... everything

                           spoke and breathed of the

                           glorious days of Granada, when

                           under the dominion of the crescent”

 

                                                                -  WASHINGTON IRVING

                                                                TALES OF THE ALHAMBRA (1832)

Location: Calle Real de la Alhambra, s/n, 18009 Granada, Spain

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