Elvira Gate (Puerta de Elvira)

In front of you stands what was once the main entrance to Islamic Granada. Its Arabic name, Bab Ilbira, pointed the way: from here the road led to Madinat Ilbira, the old capital of the area, which lost that role in the early eleventh century, when power moved to these hills.

1A gate turned into a fortress

Chronicles already mention a gate on this spot in the ninth century, but the one you see was built by the Zirids, the Berber dynasty that made Granada the capital of a taifa kingdom in the eleventh century. Later, the Nasrid sultan Yusuf I (1333-1354) turned it into a true fortress, with four towers, three barbicans and several bent entrances. Today only the outer horseshoe arch survives, made of sandstone slabs, between rammed-earth walls crowned with battlements.

After 1492 it remained the city’s great entrance. In 1612 the barbicans were pulled down, the open ground was levelled and the houses you still see built against the wall went up. In the early nineteenth century, during the French occupation, other stretches of wall and several of Granada’s gates disappeared.

Federico García Lorca mentions the arch of Elvira in his ‘Gacela of the Morning Market’, from the collection Diván del Tamarit.

Behind the arch begins calle Elvira, which runs almost in a straight line to Plaza Nueva. To the left climbs the Cuesta de la Alhacaba, skirting the Zirid wall towards the top of the Albaicín: that is your way.

2What to look for

• The horseshoe arch, with its stone voussoirs, very similar to the one on the Alhambra’s Gate of Justice.
• The battlements crowning the rammed-earth tower.
• The houses built against the wall after the changes of 1612.