Granada and Almeria Garden Route

The Nasrid palaces are buildings arranged around water. Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of the Myrtles): a long pool and a hedge of myrtle. Patio de los Leones (Court of the Lions): a fountain on twelve stone lions — animals are rare in this architecture. The beds there were originally sunken; today you see paving more than planting. Patio de Machuca, Patio de la Reja and Lindaraja are later, Renaissance in taste, with a central basin.

El Partal sits on the ruins of an older Nasrid palace and is the largest planted area inside the precinct, laid out to echo the old lines. El Adarve is a steep Renaissance terrace with the view. San Francisco and El Secano are modern additions. None of this is a city park. You need the monument ticket. Map.

The summer estate above the palaces. Patio de la Acequia is the Nasrid water court — a long channel, jets, arcades. Patio del Cipres de la Sultana mixes that inheritance with later work. The Escalera del Agua (Water Stair) runs in an Italian-style terrace. Cypress hedges and the dense fountain garden below are early-twentieth-century planting on old orchard ground; Nasrid gardens did not use those clipped cypress walls. The deciduous wood on the climb up was planted in the eighteenth century. Map.

A carmen is a Granada house with a closed garden that still behaves like an orchard: fruit, a pool, a view, a wall. Carmen de los Cipreses keeps a Moorish pool. Carmen de los Chapiteles is seventeenth-century at the core with older motifs. Casa del Chapiz has a pool in the Comares manner and a later Renaissance garden; it is used as a study centre. Map.

Carmen de los Martires, from the early nineteenth century, is the largest: water used generously, not in the Nasrid way. Map. Others worth the name on a map — if the door is open that day — include Acosta, Nuestra Senora de las Angustias, San Agustin and the garden attached to Manuel de Falla’s house. They are not a circuit you can march.

Paseo del Salon is the long city avenue toward the Sierra Nevada road: trees and a promenade, not a patio. Map.

The “plan for an alpine garden” was built. Two Junta botanic gardens now sit in the Sierra Nevada park: La Cortijuela (lower, seasonal opening) and Hoya de Pedraza (near the ski road, about 2,000 m, closed in winter). They show summit and Alpujarra flora, including plants that grow almost nowhere else. They are not flower beds for a stroll in flip-flops.

Palacio del Cuzco in Viznar is an eighteenth-century house with an Italianate garden, magnolias and a view of Sierra Elvira. It is a listed building in private hands and is not a public garden. Do not drive there expecting a ticket office. Map.

On the coast, Parque El Majuelo in Almunecar is a public park of tropical and subtropical plants — especially palms — on top of the old Sexi factory site. It is the easy garden if you are already on that shore. Map.

The Alcazaba gardens sit on the fortress terraces: planting on archaeology, with the city and the sea below. Nicolas Salmeron is the wide garden boulevard along the port. The Italian wall lizard (Podarcis siculus) lives there — introduced, and the only established population of that species in Andalucia. Near the city, a private project at Pechina has tried to show what an arid-climate garden can be; it is not a second Alhambra. City: Almeria.

La Almunya del Sur, El Ejido, is a private garden-orchard built as an oasis on dry ground: more than a thousand taxa, natives and exotics, workshops for children. Ticketed. Map.

El Albardinal, Rodalquilar, is the Junta garden for Cabo de Gata: threatened locals, plants that tolerate this climate, palmetto and jujube (azufaifo) among the traditional crops. This is the serious dry-land collection. Map.

Cactus Nijar is a nursery that reads as a garden: aloes, agaves, cacti, free entry, Almeria light. It is a shop with a collection, not a state botanic institute. Map.

Umbria de la Virgen, in Maria, sits in the Sierra de Maria-Los Velez natural park: 42 hectares of mountain flora, traditional plots and threatened species. Open as a Junta garden, not a city stroll. Map.