Generalife Canal

Water gave life to the gardens of the Alhambra, which reached the zenith of beauty, turning a walled city into a paradise for the senses. They made Nasrid architecture a world landmark for making its inhabited spaces a natural landscape.
The Generalife palace estate was built in the 12th century, with some modifications to its architecture up until the 14th century. In this almunia (villa and farmhouse), there are two well-differentiated areas. On the one hand, there is a nucleus of landscaped residential buildings and, on the other, a vast expanse of farmland and pasture that gave rise to its famous vegetable gardens and orchards. Both the flower gardens and the vegetable and fruit gardens needed water from the Acequia de los Dos Tercios irrigation canal, which came from the Royal Canal or Acequia Real, built by Muḥammad I in 1238. Never has hydraulic infrastructure been as integrated into architecture as at the Generalife’s Canal Courtyard (Patio de la Acequia). The Acequia Real thus serves as the central axis of the courtyard. On either side of it are flowerbeds with seasonal flowering plants, forming a secluded garden that can be seen from the pavilions surrounding the courtyard.
The painter Santiago Rusiñol i Prats (1861-1931) is recognized as the ideologist of the Catalan Modernista movement. After an initial period in Barcelona and Sitges, he settled in Granada in 1897. It was in the city of the Alhambra that he painted his first garden, the starting point of his predilection for this pictorial theme, which he developed uninterruptedly until his death.
For the composition of the painting, Rusiñol used linear perspective with a single vanishing point, located on the roof of the Generalife’s main pavilion, which provides a backdrop for the scene. This work belongs to Rusiñol’s pictorial Naturalism stage, prior to his evolution towards Modernista Symbolism.