The Generalife gardens

Ibn al-Jaṭīb (Loja, 1313 – Fez, 1374) in the Iḥāṭa described the farms cultivated inside the wall of Granada as in the almunias outside the walls: country houses surrounded by a garden, orchards for agricultural crops and, eventually , Recreational property. Within the latter, he speaks of the Generalife: Ŷanna al-ʽArīf or Huerta del Alarife.

Santiago Rusiñol y Prats (1861-1931), leader of the Catalan modernist movement, settled in Granada in 1897. Very soon he fell in love with the gardens of the Alhambra. There he painted his first garden, the starting point of his predilection for this pictorial subject. The Generalife Garden oil painting is good proof of this. For the composition of the scene he uses linear perspective with a vanishing point determined by the intersection of the two lateral lines of the corridor that runs between the characteristic Granada cypresses. Cypresses are considered funeral trees due to their common presence in cemeteries and graveyards. However, in Granada they are ornamental trees in which, due to their luxuriance and evergreen leaves, they provide shelter to birds that keep their surroundings clean of insects and act as a windbreak. The Nasrids, following Roman custom, used a path between cypresses as a symbol of social recognition of the owners of the property and leads to a point with water: a fountain that, through passive evaporation, refreshes the environment. Rusiñol knew how to interpret this use that he masterfully captured in this work.