Granada is the last great city of Moorish Spain and one of the most intensely historic places in Europe. When Boabdil surrendered the Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, he ended eight centuries of Islamic civilization in Spain and gave the Catholic Monarchs a prize that still draws millions of visitors each year. The palace complex on its hill above the city — the Nasrid Palaces, the Generalife gardens, the Alcazaba fortress — is the finest surviving example of Islamic architecture in the western world.
The city below the Alhambra is equally compelling. The Albaicín neighbourhood across the valley is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its own right: a tangle of whitewashed lanes, hidden courtyard gardens (carmenes), and North African tea houses that retained its Moorish urban character after the Reconquista. Sacromonte, further east, is the hillside cave district of Granada's Roma community, where the most authentic flamenco in the city happens in intimate whitewashed caves.
The Cathedral and the Royal Chapel — where Ferdinand and Isabella are buried — anchor the city centre, along with the Alcaicería silk market and the 14th-century Corral del Carbón, the only surviving Moorish caravanserai in Spain. The Carrera del Darro riverside walk connects it all.
Granada has a huge student population (60,000 at the university) and a tapas culture that has survived long enough to seem like a birthright: order a drink in most bars and a free plate of food appears. The Parque de las Ciencias is a surprisingly good science museum for a rainy day, and the Sierra Nevada ski resort is 30 km away — making Granada, implausibly, the only city in Europe where you can ski in the morning and be at the Mediterranean in the afternoon.