The citadel two centuries before the Alhambra
Most visitors who climb to the Alhambra never learn that Granada already had a fortified capital two centuries earlier, on a different hill entirely. That earlier citadel was the Alcazaba Cadima (the 'Old Citadel', al-Qasba Qadima), founded on the Albaicín hill by the Zirid ruler Zawi ben Ziri, who refounded the city here around 1010, after the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba collapsed[4]. The fuller story of that dynasty, its Jewish vizier Samuel HaNagid, its Golden Age, its fall to the Almoravids, is told in the Zirid dynasty's medieval history. This piece stays with the stones: the wall Zawi ben Ziri's engineers raised around that hilltop, and what is left of it now.
The citadel occupied the highest ground of today's Albaicín, roughly the area around Aljibe de la Gitana, Cuesta María de la Miel and Callejón de San Cecilio, reaching down as far as the church of San Nicolás[5]. It was ringed by at least four gates: Bib Cieda on the north front (the only one still standing, known today as Puerta de las Pesas, or Arco de las Pesas), alongside Bib Caxtar and Bib Elbis, also on the north side, and Bib Albonud to the east[6]. No gate is recorded on the south or west fronts, where the terrain did the defensive work a wall would otherwise have to do. Walk the modern grid today and you won't see a fortress; you'll see a dense Albaicín block of whitewashed houses. The citadel is there anyway, folded into foundations nobody excavates because people still live in them.
None of this is the fortress most tour itineraries call 'the Alcazaba': the compound on the Alhambra hill is a separate, later Nasrid rebuild. The Zirid citadel is older, smaller, and largely swallowed by the streets around it: no ticket booth, no queue, and until recently, barely a plaque.
Before the Zirids: Iliberis and the walls beneath the walls
Centuries before any Zirid stone was laid, the same hilltop carried a walled town its Iberian founders called Ilturir, later Latinised as Iliberis or Eliberri. Archaeologists place its founding in the first half of the seventh century BC: an oppidum of roughly six hectares on the right bank of the Darro, centred between today's Mirador de San Nicolás and Plaza de San Miguel Bajo[7]. Its wall was enlarged in the sixth century BC as the town grew; excavated stretches show it running three to seven and a half metres thick and around four metres high[8], serious fortification for a small Iberian hilltown.
Rome absorbed and renamed the settlement Municipium Florentinum Iliberitanum. It sent three senators and a consul to Rome, and in 304 AD hosted the church gathering remembered as the Council of Elvira[9]. Then, oddly, the record goes quiet. Archaeology has turned up almost nothing from the town's Late Antique and Visigothic centuries, which reads as depopulation, and would explain why the Arab conquerors, arriving in the eighth century, founded their regional capital nearby at Medina Elvira instead of resettling the Albaicín hill at all[10]. Not every historian accepts a total emptying-out; some cite a tenth-century Córdoban calendar that mentions a celebration in the civitate Granata as evidence the town never fully died.
Either way, when the Zirid wall itself was excavated during its 2017 restoration, the dig confirmed a walled Roman and Iberian precinct still underlying the ground around Puerta de las Pesas and the Ermita de San Cecilio[11], the ancient circuit, buried directly beneath the medieval one, waiting under a wall that was itself waiting to be noticed.
Walking the surviving stretch: Monaita to Arco de las Pesas
The best place to actually see Zirid stonework is the roughly 350-metre run of tapial wall, studded with fourteen towers, that descends from Puerta de las Pesas at Plaza Larga down to Puerta Monaita on Carril de la Lona[1]. The material itself is tapial, rammed earth poured into wooden forms and compacted layer by layer, cheaper and faster to raise than dressed stone, and the reason so much of Zirid Granada either survives as a solid mass or vanishes into rubble with nothing in between. It splits into two distinct building campaigns: roughly 200 metres of large towers nearest Puerta de las Pesas (three square, three semicylindrical), followed by seven smaller rectangular towers running the rest of the way to Monaita[12]. A self-guided walk through the Albaicín takes in several vantage points along this line, including the Cuesta de la Alhacaba, where the wall is visible at street level.
350 m
Puerta Monaita itself, Bab al-Unaydar in Arabic, was integrated directly into this wall, linking west to Puerta de Elvira and east to Puerta Nueva, the tax checkpoint better known as Puerta de las Pesas[13]. Its surviving gatehouse still shows the defensive trick that made it notable: two horseshoe arches facing each other across a small guarded courtyard, reached through a deliberate right-angle turn rather than a straight approach, one of the earliest gates in al-Andalus built this way[14]. It was declared a national monument in 1931 and restored in 1998-99, though conservation groups have repeatedly reported it neglected and vandalised since[15].
For most of the twentieth century this whole stretch was not an attraction; it was a hazard. Reports describe it abandoned and progressively degraded, overgrown, littered, and, around Puerta Monaita specifically, a known gathering point for parties[16]. A 1990 urban plan called for a proper walkway along the inside of the wall. Construction on one stretch began in 2006, stopped in 2007 with unfinished concrete left standing, and after more than half a million euros spent, the project was declared unfeasible in 2009[17]. It is still unfinished today.
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What changed the picture was a Ministry of Culture restoration that ran eighteen months from January 2017, thorough enough that the wall came off Hispania Nostra's Red List of endangered heritage[2]. Several sections can now be viewed from public Albaicín streets: Cuesta de la Alhacaba, Puerta Monaita, Arco de las Pesas, though other stretches still sit on restricted land or built into private plots.
Puerta de Elvira and the gates that vanished
The grandest gate to survive is the Puerta de Elvira (Bab Ilbira), the main entrance into Islamic-era Granada, carrying travellers from the Medina Elvira road onto the Cuesta de Alhacaba and Calle Elvira[18]. Some form of gate here is mentioned in written sources as early as the ninth century[19]; the structure whose walls still stand, though, belongs to the Zirid rebuilding of the eleventh century, later remodelled by the Nasrid sultan Yusuf I into an autonomous fortress with four towers, three barbicans and gates of its own[20]. Its full history, arch by arch, is told on the Puerta de Elvira monument page; here it matters as one working part of a bigger system, linked east to Puerta Monaita and southwest to the Puerta del Sulfuro de Antimonio, popularly the Arco de las Tinajillas[20].
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Puerta de Elvira
The 11th-century Zirid gate at the edge of the Albaicín — the western entrance to medieval Granada, free to enter, open 24/7, and older than the Alhambra.
Much of the fortress version did not survive modernity. In 1612 its three barbicans were pulled down, the forecourt in front of them levelled, and twelve houses built directly against the wall, houses still standing today, largely unchanged[21]. The French occupation destroyed further gates and stretches of wall; in 1879 the Puerta del Hierro, a fourteenth-century addition that had linked the old medina to the Albaicín, was demolished outright[22]. Federico García Lorca still gave the arch a line in his poem Gacela del mercado matutino[23], proof it mattered to Granada's imagination long after its towers stopped mattering militarily.
The medina counted thirteen historic gates in total. Several tied directly to the Alcazaba Cadima and the old city have simply vanished, with nothing left to mark where they stood:
- Puerta de los Conversos
- Puerta de los Estereros (Bab al-Hassarin)
- Puerta de las Cuatro Fuentes
- Puerta del Molino (San Jerónimo)
- Puerta del Alcón
No arch, no wall stub, no plaque[24].
