The first day I went to the Alhambra I realized I would need another day.

The second day I went to the Alhambra I realized I would need another day.

The third day I went to the Alhambra I realized I would need another lifetime.

Al Hamrá was conceived, constructed and maintained as a paradise inhabited by men and dedicated to God, aka Allah.

Its story is the same as that other paradise, the Garden of Eden, in that both involve an expulsion. It could be said that the forbidden fruit in this earthly paradise was excess, which was scarcely surprising amid such opulence, and eagerly indulged in by the inhabitants to the neglect of more prosaic matters.

Their big mistake was to believe that paradise must, by definition, be eternal. They were disillusioned, and after the expulsion the Alhambra became first a wreck, and then a ruin.

Today the ruin is being repaired in an attempt to recover the wreck of former days. Nothing can be done to recover the pre-expulsion version. Paradise lost. But unlike the original Garden of Eden, enough remains of this one to give us an idea of what its inhabitants must have been like.

It was made by people who had a sure sense of design as fitness for purpose. As a defensive stronghold it was simple, heavy and strong while as a place in which to live it was light and ravishingly beautiful.

The proportions of the buildings were designed according to advanced mathematical principles, but always to a human scale, making interior space as important as the fabric itself. Architectural decoration was mostly abstract or based on fine writing. The writing celebrated a supreme creator either directly or poetically in the form of an exultation of beauty. In short, it was a celebration of life and living.

The enigma of the Alhambra has intrigued and exercised the curiosity and in many cases the hearts and minds of its inheritors (ie all of us) for almost two centuries now. This was as a result of the occupation of the place by the French army during the Peninsular War. The French had to abandon it hurriedly in 1812, and it was the stories about it that got back to France and eventually to England that led directly to the influx of intrigued (and wealthy) tourists to Spain in the mid 19th century.

It was this wider knowledge that was responsible for the Spanish government, in 1870, changing its status from a local ruin to a national treasure. Conservation and restoration work has been going on since that time, and has been greatly accelerated over recent years.

Today, we can say with some irony that the Garden of Eden is now a World Heritage Site and tourist attraction.