The Palaces of Granada

The most important thing about Granada is that it's out of the way and very hard to access. The city is hemmed in by mountains, with a single route in that's extraordinarily secure. This is why the Nasrid Emirate, the puny final holdout of Moorish Spain, was able to resist the Reconquista for long enough to build Hispano-Arabic architecture's crown jewel: the Alhambra.

Andalusada has no final Islamic holdout in Granada. It has no Nasrids. Instead of the beauty of the Alhambra, the city of Granada becomes legendary for the palace that rises there instead.

The other most important thing about Granada is that once you're in there, it's very hard to get out.

The prison of Granada

Umayyad Seville was not the most stable place. The Umayyads had to secure its control over al-Andalus, the Five Families, and later over the entire New World. (Spoiler: they failed.) There was always somebody causing problems, and they had various ways to deal with them. The Sufis were sent soul-searching in the Sonora Desert, the political dissidents were exiled, the rebels were killed, the Christians were sent as missionaries to Peru or as monks to Algeria.

The troublemakers of the Banu Umayya usually pissed away the rest of their lives in Granada. And there were a lot of troubled ones.

• Like the firstborn son of al-Mujadid, groomed as the first heir to the Caliphate - placed under house arrest in Granada after he told his dad about the new ayas that the angel Jibril left out of the Qur'an. That kind of trouble.
• Or two of the kids of the second, shuffled away to spend their lives in Granada, away from the public eye.

Or that other one [who?], who gave us the palaces of Granada that Andalusada knows about.

If that last one had not suffered from paranoid schizophrenia

That last one was, very simply, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He suffered from it in the worst way: he did have enemies out to get him, above and beyond the ones that existed in his mind. To this day, scholars are unsure exactly what perceived antagonists were real. (For obvious reasons, the Inquisition was probably not foremost among his enemies. Probably.) When he was politely damned to Granada, he was still a prince of the Banu Umayya, and decided that if he was damned to Granada, he was going to make in Granada a kingdom.

One that his killers would never be able to find him in.

Construction started in as soon as he could arrange his finances, and lasted right up to his untimely demise. That in itself is no mean feat, because the construction was extraordinarily expensive. None of the architects could ever really work to his satisfaction, and he insisted on hiring day laborers rather than buying slaves to do the work. The last one was also not above doing things like changing the blueprints in the middle of the night, totally screwing up the work plans for the next few days, and then dismissing the architect for refusing to work with him.

Eventually the architects started demanding payment in advance. The last one agreed happily. When he ran out of Moorish architects, there were others from abroad who were more than willing to work for as long as the work would last.

The smart ones were able to leave their mark in the labyrinthine Palace of Granada. Tour guides today are able to point out the subtle details to the visitors; by the time o patron died, his crazy kingdom had been built by a veritable Who's Who of European architects.

The method in the madness

You probably guessed what was going on here.

O Patron was building himself a Winchester Mansion: an enormous geographic security blanket. The reason he edited the blueprints was to make sure nobody knew what the hell was going on there. The reason the workforce had such a huge turnover rate was to make sure that no individual actually had any idea of the full scope of the building.

It was a perfect place to hide. Right up until the point where he hid too well, and starved to death before anybody found him.

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