Description
The neighborhood the Arabs called Garnata al-Yahud hides three secrets tourists almost never find: a 13th-century Nasrid palace with €2 admission, Granada's last public laundry in use until 1965, and the highest concentration of murals by Raúl Ruiz — the artist the world knows as El Niño de las Pinturas.
In Arabic the neighborhood was called Garnata al-Yahud: Granada of the Jews. The Jewish community of Granada had lived here for nearly fifteen centuries when on March 31, 1492, the Catholic Monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree from the palace itself, ordering the expulsion of all Jews from Spain. Within three months, the neighborhood stood empty. The Nasrids had called it Realejo — from the Arabic ar-Rabad al-Yahudi, suburb of the Jews — and that name survived the expulsion, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the 20th century. Today the Realejo is one of Granada's most student-populated neighborhoods, a mix of authentic local life and archaeological traces that surface between buildings if you know where to look. The Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo is the most surprising: a 13th-century Nasrid salon that the Convent of Santo Domingo built around without demolishing, and which the city council has been restoring for decades with limited funding and limited publicity. A few meters away, the Lavadero de la Puerta del Sol is the last of the city's public laundries — collective spaces where neighborhood women hand-washed clothes — built in 1862 and closed in 1965 when running water in homes made them obsolete. And on Calle Molinos, Raúl Ruiz has spent 25 years painting the walls of the neighborhood where he lives with the faces that have made him famous worldwide.
