Alhambra

The fountain at the centre of the Court of the Lions rests on the backs of twelve carved marble lions, fed by the Acequia Real, a gravity-fed canal that Nasrid engineers ran six kilometres from the Darro river to supply the whole palace city without a single pump. Muhammad V built the courtyard in the 14th century as the private core of the palace, ringed by muqarnas ceilings carved into stalactite-like plaster. Sabika hill held a fortress two centuries before the Nasrids arrived: Samuel ibn Naghrillah, the Jewish vizier who effectively ran the Zirid kingdom of Granada, built his own palace here in the early 11th century, of which nothing survives. Charles V later demolished part of the Nasrid palace's private apartments and baths to build a Renaissance palace beside it, a square building wrapped around a circular courtyard left roofless for more than three centuries before it was finally finished in 1967. A gunpowder explosion in a nearby house destroyed one of the Court of the Lions' original muqarnas ceilings in 1590; the Baroque plaster ceiling that replaced it in 1714 still stands.