The Alhambra in Granada, a fortified palace complex perched on a hill above the city, reached its greatest splendour under the Nasrid sultans in the fourteenth century, with the completion of the Comares Palace and the Court of the Lions. Combining military fortification with the most refined decorative arts of Islamic civilisation — stalactite vaulting, geometric tiling, carved plasterwork, and garden water-features — it represented a unique fusion of fortress and paradise garden. Its conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 ended the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia.

The Alhambra entered European literary consciousness powerfully through Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (1832) and through Romantic travellers including Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, who wrote poems on the palace. Spanish poetry of the Golden Age — including Garcilaso de la Vega and Lope de Vega — absorbed the Moorish castle tradition into its pastoral and romantic forms. The Alhambra's Arabic inscriptions, many of them poems, established the integration of poetry and architecture as an Islamic cultural ideal that would influence Romantic aesthetics.