How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra

Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iber­ian Penin­su­la, includ­ing mod­ern-day Spain, was under Mus­lim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Tole­do in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the ter­ri­to­ry was called, con­tin­ued to lose cities over the sub­se­quent cen­turies. Cór­do­ba and Seville were recon­quered prac­ti­cal­ly one right after the oth­er, in 1236 and 1248, respec­tive­ly, and you can see the inva­sion of the first city ani­mat­ed in the open­ing scene of the Pri­mal Space video above. “All over the land, Mus­lim cities were being con­quered and tak­en over by the Chris­tians,” says the com­pan­ion arti­cle at Pri­mal Neb­u­la. “But amidst all of this, one city remained uncon­quered, Grana­da.”

“Thanks to its strate­gic posi­tion and the enor­mous Alham­bra Palace, the city was pro­tect­ed,” and there the Alham­bra remains today. A “thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry pala­tial com­plex that’s one of the world’s most icon­ic exam­ples of Moor­ish archi­tec­ture,” writes BBC.com’s Esme Fox, it’s also a land­mark feat of engi­neer­ing, boast­ing “one of the most sophis­ti­cat­ed hydraulic net­works in the world, able to defy grav­i­ty and raise water from the riv­er near­ly a kilo­me­ter below.”

The jew­el in the crown of these elab­o­rate water­works is a white mar­ble foun­tain that “con­sists of a large dish held up by twelve white myth­i­cal lions. Each beast spurts water from its mouth, feed­ing four chan­nels in the patio’s mar­ble floor that rep­re­sent the four rivers of par­adise, and then run­ning through­out the palace to cool the rooms.”

The fuente de los Leones also tells time: the num­ber of lions cur­rent­ly indi­cates the hour. This works thanks to an inge­nious design explained both ver­bal­ly and visu­al­ly in the video. Any­one vis­it­ing the Alham­bra today can admire this and oth­er exam­ples of medieval opu­lence, but trav­el­ers with an engi­neer’s cast of mind will appre­ci­ate even more how the palace’s builders got the water there at all. “The hill was around 200 meters above Granada’s main riv­er,” says the nar­ra­tor, which entailed an ambi­tious project of damming and redi­rec­tion, to say noth­ing of the pool above the palace designed to keep the whole hydraulic sys­tem pres­sur­ized. The Alham­bra’s heat­ed baths and well-irri­gat­ed gar­dens rep­re­sent the lux­u­ri­ous height of Moor­ish civ­i­liza­tion, but they also remind us that, then as now, beneath every lux­u­ry lies an impres­sive feat of tech­nol­o­gy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Roman Baths

A 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cook­book Fea­tur­ing 475 Recipes from Moor­ish Spain Gets Pub­lished in a New Trans­lat­ed Edi­tion

His­toric Spain in Time Lapse Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.