The Realejo sits at the southern foot of the Alhambra hill, where the palace complex meets the city. For more than a thousand years, from Roman times through the Nasrid era, this was Garnata al-Yahud — Granada of the Jews — a Sephardic quarter that at its peak housed more than 20,000 people and functioned as one of the intellectual and commercial centres of Al-Andalus. Poets, physicians, and merchants worked here under a relative tolerance that was unusual for medieval Europe. Samuel ibn Naghrela, the 11th-century Jewish vizier of the Granadan caliphate, had his palace somewhere in these streets.
In 1492, the same year Columbus sailed west, the Catholic Monarchs expelled Granada's Jewish population. Synagogues were demolished. The quarter was renamed Realejo and given over to military use, then gradually absorbed into the city's ordinary fabric. What remained was the street plan: sinuous lanes that still follow the logic of medieval property lines, punctuated by carmen gardens that spill white and pink over old stone walls in spring.
Today the Realejo is among Granada's most appealing neighbourhoods for a half-day without an agenda. The Campo del Príncipe — a wide square at the neighbourhood's heart — is ringed by restaurants and bars and fills up in the early evening when locals come down from the surrounding streets. The area has also become Granada's centre for street art: large-scale murals on the blank walls of residential blocks, most of them commissioned rather than unauthorised, with work by Spanish and international artists. The contrast between Renaissance palace facades and contemporary painted murals one block apart is one of the more interesting accidental juxtapositions in the city.
Monuments and memory
No synagogue survives from the medieval Jewish quarter. What the Realejo holds instead is architecture from the decades after 1492: the Casa de los Tiros, a 16th-century fortified palace with five arquebus barrels projecting from its facade, now a provincial museum of Granadan history and culture; the Corral del Carbón, the only surviving Nasrid funduq (merchant inn and warehouse) in Spain, now used as a cultural venue and box office; and the quiet lanes around Calle de los Molinos, where 15th and 16th-century cármenes preserve some of the oldest inhabited gardens in the city.
