Granada's culture runs deeper than its Nasrid walls: a Renaissance cathedral that reinvented Spanish architecture, Isabel's Flemish panel paintings, Manuel de Falla's untouched piano, and flamenco sung in Albaicín back rooms for members rather than tour buses.
Isabel and Fernando lie under Renaissance marble here, but the sacristy-museum is the real draw: Rogier van der Weyden, Botticelli and Memling panels from Isabel's private collection. Open 10:15–18:30, no photography inside.
Diego de Siloé's 1528 rotunda grafted Renaissance geometry onto a Gothic ground plan, creating Spain's first fully classical cathedral interior. Alonso Cano painted the seven large canvases ringing the main chapel.
The first church built in Granada after 1492, with a two-tier cloister of 36 arches and a presbytery carved for El Gran Capitán, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, whose tomb sits below the altar. Cloistered nuns still sing vespers.
Six floors devoted to Granada-born abstract painter José Guerrero's New York School years, plus rotating contemporary shows on the lower levels. The top-floor window frames the Cathedral roof at eye level.
Housed in the Casa de Castril, a 1539 mansion with a plateresque portal facing the Darro. Iberian, Roman and Nasrid rooms include Phoenician alabaster vases from Almuñécar and carved Nasrid ceramics and tilework.
The whitewashed carmen where the composer lived from 1922 to 1939, left much as he abandoned it for Argentina: piano, cane chairs, ceramics and a terrace looking straight across to the Sierra Nevada.
A hillside carmen built 1916–1930 by painter José María Rodríguez-Acosta as a Symbolist labyrinth of white terraces, cypress tunnels and sunken pools. The Gómez-Moreno wing holds medieval sculpture and drawings.
Founded in 1949 in an Albaicín placeta, this is the oldest flamenco peña in Spain — a members' club rather than a tablao. Recital nights are open to visitors and the cante is judged by the room, not applauded on cue.
Eleven restored cave dwellings on the Barranco de los Negros show how Roma, Morisco and day-labourer families actually lived inside the hillside, with separate caves for weaving, basketry, pottery and the zambra dance.
The 15th-century palace of Aixa, mother of Boabdil, the last Nasrid emir: a compact mirador house with a wooden armadura ceiling, plasterwork panels and lattice windows looking out over the whole Albaicín.
Granada's 14th-century caravanserai is the only complete Nasrid funduq left in Spain: horseshoe entry arch, brick courtyard and three galleries where merchants stored goods. The Alcaicería silk lanes start a minute away.
The old Jewish and Morisco quarter is Granada's open-air gallery: Raúl Ruiz, known as El Niño de las Pinturas, has painted portraits and hand-lettered verse across its walls since the 1990s, thickest around Calle Molinos.