The Alcaicería

You are standing in what was the great silk market of Nasrid Granada. The word alcaicería comes from the Arabic al-qaysariyya, which is usually linked to the name of Caesar. A traditional explanation says that Arab merchants gave their bazaars this name in memory of an imperial privilege to trade in silk.

1A citadel of commerce

The Alcaicería was almost a city within the city: a warren of alleys with tiny shops between the Zacatín, calle Oficios and Bib-Rambla. Its gates were shut at night and guards watched over the inside. This was where silk, one of the kingdom’s great sources of wealth, was sold and controlled.

After the conquest it passed to the Crown as the Real Sitio y Fuerte de la Alcaicería, under the authority of the governor of the Alhambra. In the sixteenth century it had nearly 200 shops, each with a single hinged door painted red ochre. Chains hung from the entrance arches to keep out horses and mules. As the silk trade declined, only 117 stalls were left by 1787.

2The fire of 1843

On 20 July 1843, a fire that broke out in a match shop on calle Mesones swept through the whole complex. It was rebuilt in Neo-Moorish style, very much to Romantic taste: stucco arches, latticework and columns that evoke the Alhambra, with streets straighter and wider than the originals.

What you see is not Nasrid: it is the Romantic dream of what a Nasrid souk ought to have looked like.

3What to look for

• The stucco arches on columns, from the nineteenth-century rebuilding.
• Fajalauza pottery, blue and green, typical of Granada.
• The taracea boxes, inlaid with different woods and bone.