Sixteen days from Granada to Marrakech: one civilisation, two continents

Arrive, drop bags, and stay low. The Alhambra is tomorrow and today is for working out how the city sits under it.

Plaza Nueva is the oldest square in Granada and the hinge of the whole centre, with the sixteenth century law courts on one side and the Darro river running underneath the far end of it, culverted in the nineteenth century. Every walk in this city starts or ends here.

Go up the Calle Calderaria Nueva, which climbs from the square into the Albaicin and is lined with Moroccan tea houses, spice shops and hammams. It is unashamedly a tourist street and it is also the most obvious physical evidence of what Granada is: North African goods, sold in Arabic, three hundred metres from the cathedral.

Then take the Carrera del Darro back along the river, which is the prettiest street in the city, and finish at the Paseo de los Tristes, a square under the Alhambra walls where the funeral processions used to pass. Sit there at dusk with the palace lit above you, and eat afterwards on the free tapas that come with every drink.

Take the earliest slot you were given. The whole site is large and the ticket controls only one part of it, so the plan is: get through the Nasrid palaces at your printed time, then take the rest of the day slowly.

The Palacios Nazaries are the reason the Alhambra is famous and there is no useful way to describe them briefly. Fourteenth century, built mostly under Yusuf I and Muhammad V, three linked palaces of carved plaster, cedar ceilings and tiled dados around courtyards with water in them, arranged so that every room frames the next. The Court of the Lions has a fountain on twelve stone lions that is also a clock, or was. Move slowly and stand still often; the ornament is written text as much as pattern, and a great deal of it says that there is no victor but God.

Come out into the Palace of Charles V, which the emperor dropped into the middle of the Moorish complex in 1527: a square block with a perfectly circular colonnaded courtyard inside it, high Renaissance, unroofed for four hundred years, and completely uninterested in what it is standing next to. It is either an act of vandalism or the best building of its date in Spain, and looking at both in one morning is the argument.

Spend the afternoon in the Generalife, the summer estate up the hill, which is gardens, water channels and a small white palace with a courtyard that has a canal running down the middle of it. It is cooler up there and the crowds thin after four.

Today is the conquest, which is standing about three hundred metres from yesterday and is much less visited.

The Royal Chapel was built between 1505 and 1517 to hold Ferdinand and Isabella, who chose Granada for their burial precisely because they had taken it, and it also holds their daughter Joanna and her husband Philip. The marble effigies are upstairs; the plain lead coffins are in the crypt below, visible through a grille, and the contrast between the two is the whole point. The sacristy holds Isabella's crown, Ferdinand's sword and the Flemish paintings she travelled with.

The cathedral next door was begun in 1523 on the site of the great mosque and is Diego de Siloe's, a Renaissance interior of enormous white piers with a circular sanctuary at the east end that was meant to be a royal mausoleum and never was. It is bright, cold and vast, and it is worth going into straight from the chapel to feel the change of scale.

In the afternoon take a bus or a twenty five minute walk out to the Cartuja monastery, which is one of the great works of Spanish baroque and is not in the middle of town, which is why it is empty. The sacristy in particular is a room of carved and inlaid surfaces that goes considerably beyond decoration into something closer to hallucination.

Start low and climb. El Banuelo sits on the Carrera del Darro and is an eleventh century Moorish bathhouse, one of the oldest surviving in Spain, with brick vaults pierced by star-shaped skylights and Roman and Visigothic capitals reused in its columns. It survived because it was built into a private house and forgotten.

Then up into the Albaicin, which was the Moorish town and is a hill of whitewashed lanes, walled gardens and cisterns that has kept its street plan since the thirteenth century. There is no efficient route and there is not meant to be. Aim generally upward and come out at the San Nicolas viewpoint, where the Alhambra sits on the ridge opposite with the Sierra Nevada behind it, and which is worth doing twice, once in the morning light and once at sunset with everybody else.

In the afternoon cross to Sacromonte, the next hill, where Roma families dug houses into the soft rock from the sixteenth century onwards and where flamenco's zambra style was developed. The cave museum is a set of restored dwellings with the trades that went on in them, and it explains the quarter better than an evening show does.

Then go to an evening show anyway. The zambra caves are small, hot and close, and the good ones are still family businesses.

About three hours west by train across the interior, through Antequera and the olive country, with a change on some departures. You arrive on the new side of the gorge, ten minutes' walk from the middle of everything.

Go straight to the Puente Nuevo, which was finished in 1793 after forty two years of building and joins the two halves of the town across a hundred metre drop. There is a chamber inside the central pier that has been a prison and a torture room, and there is a footpath on the far side that takes you down to a viewing platform below the arch, which is where the photographs come from and which is twenty minutes of steps each way.

Then the Alameda del Tajo, a nineteenth century park whose far side is a balcony built out over the cliff with nothing under it, and which looks north across the whole Serrania.

Finish at the bullring, which was built in 1785, is one of the oldest in Spain, and is where the Romero family effectively invented the modern corrida on foot rather than on horseback. It is a museum most days, the arena is sand and completely empty, and whatever you think of the sport the building is remarkable.

Today is entirely inside the old Moorish town, which is small enough to cross in ten minutes and dense enough to take a day.

Start at the Casa del Rey Moro, whose garden is pleasant and whose real feature is underneath: a water mine cut into the cliff in the fourteenth century, about two hundred steps down through the rock to a chamber at river level, so that a besieged town could still drink. Christian slaves carried the water up. It is wet, dark and steep and there is a handrail; it is the single most memorable thing in Ronda.

Then the Banos Arabes, which are thirteenth century, the best preserved Moorish baths in Spain, and unusual in having their roof: three vaulted chambers with star skylights, the horseshoe arches still standing, and the hydraulic tower that fed them outside.

In the afternoon, the Palacio de Mondragon, a Moorish palace rebuilt after the conquest and now the town museum, with three courtyards, a mudejar ceiling and a terrace on the cliff edge looking over the valley. The archaeology inside is about the prehistory of these mountains, which is more interesting than it sounds given what is in the caves around here.

Then dinner. Ronda is in a wine region and the local reds are cheap and genuinely good.

The train to Algeciras is one of the best railway journeys in Spain and takes an hour and three quarters. A British company cut it through the Serrania in 1892 so that the Gibraltar garrison could get to the hills in summer, and it is still single track, still slow, and runs through cork oak forest and over viaducts with nothing else in sight.

At Algeciras the port is a ten minute walk from the station and the Ceuta ferry takes about an hour. There is no passport control in either direction, because both ends are Spain, but there is an identity check and a customs desk.

You land in a Spanish city with African hills behind it. Walk to the Royal Walls, which are Portuguese and Spanish work of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and carry the Foso de San Felipe, a moat cut clean through the isthmus from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, deep and wide enough that boats use it. It is the only navigable moat left in Europe and you can walk the ramparts on both sides of it.

Then the House of the Dragons, a 1900s apartment block on a corner of the main street with four enormous bronze dragons on the roofline, and dinner in the streets behind it, which is Spanish and cheap and served at ten.

Ceuta's peninsula is a single hill with a road round it, and the walk or drive of that loop is the day. It is about eight kilometres and there are buses if you would rather not.

The Fortress of Monte Hacho crowns it: a fort of Roman or Byzantine origin, rebuilt by everybody since, with more than forty circular towers on its wall. Monte Hacho is one of the two mountains identified since antiquity as the southern Pillar of Hercules, the other being Jebel Musa further west, and from up here you can see both the Rif and the Spanish coast, which is the point of the whole trip in one view.

On the seaward side, the Fort of El Desnarigado sits in a cove below the road, a nineteenth century coastal battery now holding a military museum, and it is worth going down to for the position rather than the collection.

In the afternoon come back into town for the shrine of Our Lady of Africa and the Arab baths, a Merinid bathhouse excavated under the modern centre and left open under a canopy. Then a last Spanish dinner, because tomorrow lunch is in Morocco.

The frontier at Bab Sebta is fifteen minutes from the centre by bus or taxi and you cross on foot: Spanish exit, a walk, Moroccan entry, a form and a stamp. It can take twenty minutes or two hours. On the far side, shared taxis and buses run the forty kilometres to Tetouan in about an hour along a coast road with the Rif on one side.

Tetouan arrives as a surprise, because the first thing you see is not a medina but a Spanish colonial city: white art deco blocks, a pedestrianised Avenida Mohammed V running from a Spanish-built square to the royal palace gates, and cafes in which the whole city sits in the early evening. Madrid ran its Moroccan protectorate from this city for forty three years and the architecture never left.

The medina is through a gate at the end of it, and it is unlike the others in Morocco: whitewashed, laid out by people expelled from Granada at the end of the fifteenth century, and organised into quarters by trade rather than sprawling. It is a UNESCO site, it takes about twenty minutes to cross, and almost nobody in it is selling to visitors.

Eat in the medina or on the avenue. The cooking here is more Andalusian than anywhere else in Morocco, which after Granada you will notice.

The Ecole des arts et metiers was founded by the Spanish administration in 1919 to keep the traditional crafts of the medina alive, and it worked: it is still a working school, students are still learning zellij cutting, plaster carving, wood inlay and embroidery in it, and you can walk round the workshops while they do. It is the best hour in Tetouan and hardly anybody knows it is open.

Then the archaeological museum, which is small and holds the finds from Tamuda, the Mauretanian and Roman town just outside the city, and from Lixus down the Atlantic coast. There are Roman mosaics in the garden and a good deal of bronze.

In the afternoon, Bab El Okla at the eastern edge of the medina holds the ethnographic museum, in the gate tower itself, with Tetouani wedding dress, weapons, instruments and a reconstructed domestic interior. From its terrace you get the medina roofs and the mountain behind them.

Walk back through the medina afterwards by a different route from yesterday's. The tanners' quarter, the leather souk and the silversmiths are all in separate streets and finding them is the pleasure.

A CTM coach south takes about five hours, through the western Rif and then down the Atlantic plain past Larache and Kenitra. Book it the evening before at the office; take the morning departure.

Rabat in the afternoon is a relief after two land crossings. Go straight to the Kasbah of the Oudaias, a twelfth century Almohad fortress on the headland where the river meets the ocean, entered through a monumental gate of carved stone. Inside it is a village: lanes painted white above and blue below, cats, doorways, and an Andalusian garden laid out in the 1920s at the far end. The platform at the end of it looks straight out at the Atlantic.

The Cafe Maure is on the terrace below the kasbah walls, over the estuary, and it does mint tea and almond pastries to people who have been sitting there for two hours. Do that.

Then walk or take a taxi to the Hassan Tower at the other end of town, where an Almohad minaret begun in 1195 stands unfinished over a field of broken columns, the mosque under it never completed. The mausoleum of Mohammed V beside it was finished in 1971 to a Vietnamese architect's design, is open to visitors, and is guarded by men on horses.

Chellah is twenty minutes' walk beyond the palace walls and is the best hour in Rabat. It was a Phoenician trading post, then the Roman town of Sala Colonia, then abandoned, then walled by the Merinids in the fourteenth century as a royal necropolis with a mosque and a minaret. Nobody has lived in it since. What is there now is a garden inside a gate, with Roman street foundations, Merinid tombs, a ruined minaret and a colony of white storks nesting on top of everything, clattering their bills at each other all morning.

Then the archaeological museum in the middle of town, which is small and holds the thing worth crossing Morocco for: the bronzes from Volubilis, including a head of Juba II and a bust known as the Ephebe, Hellenistic work made for a Berber king who married Cleopatra's daughter and ruled a kingdom that was Roman in everything but name.

In the afternoon cross the river to Sale, either by the bridge or on a rowing boat from the beach for a few dirhams, which is the better way. Sale's medina is older than Rabat's, narrower, and almost completely untouched by tourism; the Marinid madrasa next to the great mosque is a small fourteenth century college with carved cedar and zellij and a roof terrace, and it is the one building to pay to enter.

Then back for a last calm evening. Tomorrow the trip changes gear.

Three and a half hours south on the train, past Casablanca and Settat and out onto the Haouz plain, with the Atlas coming up on the horizon in the last half hour. It is a comfortable train and first class costs very little more.

Get to the riad, drop everything and fix two landmarks in your head before dark. The Koutoubia minaret is seventy seven metres of twelfth century Almohad work, visible from most of the city, and it is what you navigate by. It is also the direct sibling of the Giralda in Seville, built by the same dynasty within a few decades, which after two weeks of Andalusia is worth standing under and thinking about. The mosque itself is working and closed to non-Muslims, so this is a walk through the gardens on the south side.

Then east into Djemaa El-Fna, and stay for the change. Through the afternoon it is orange juice carts and henna; from about six the food stalls are wheeled in, the lamps come on, the drum circles start, and the crowd turns from visitors to Marrakchis. It is loud, faintly absurd and completely unfaked.

Eat on the square at a numbered stall, or above it on a terrace if you would rather watch than be in it.

Start at the Ben Youssef Madrasa, which is one of the largest Quranic colleges in North Africa, founded in the fourteenth century and rebuilt by the Saadians in the 1560s. It closed as a school in 1960, reopened after a long restoration a few years ago, and what you get is a courtyard of carved cedar, cut plaster and zellij around a marble pool, with a hundred and thirty student cells on the floor above, most of them the size of a bed. Go at opening.

A hundred metres away is the Almoravid koubba, which is a small domed pavilion that almost everybody walks past and which is the oldest building in Marrakech and the only Almoravid structure left in the city. It is twelfth century, it sits in an excavated pit below street level, and the ribbed vault inside it is where the entire vocabulary of Moorish ornament that ends at the Alhambra begins. Seeing it after the Nasrid palaces rather than before is the right order.

Then the souks, which run north from Djemaa El-Fna in a lattice of covered lanes organised roughly by trade: dyers, leather, metal, wood, slippers. You will get lost, and the way out is downhill and south. Nobody needs a guide for this; a firm no thank you handles the offers.

Come back to the square for the evening, which is different every night and never once feels like a repeat.

The southern quarter is where the sultans built and it is quieter and more spread out than the souks.

Start at the Saadian Tombs, the sixteenth century necropolis of the dynasty that ruled from Marrakech at its richest. Moulay Ismail walled them up rather than destroy them, they were forgotten, and they were rediscovered in 1917 when aerial photography showed a garden nobody could reach. The Chamber of the Twelve Columns, with its Italian marble and carved cedar, is a room built to be worth dying into. It is small and it queues, so go early.

Then El Bahia Palace, built at the end of the nineteenth century for a grand vizier who wanted the most beautiful house in Morocco and largely got it: eight thousand square metres of courtyards, painted ceilings and glazed tile, done fast by the best craftsmen available and stripped of its furniture within days of his death.

In the afternoon, El Badi, which is the opposite. Ahmad al-Mansur built it from 1578 with Italian marble bought with Sudanese gold, and Moulay Ismail took everything portable out of it a century later to build Meknes. What is left is a vast rectangular ruin of red walls and sunken orange gardens with storks nesting on the parapets, and it is far more affecting than the intact palaces.

Spend the last morning out of the medina. The Majorelle garden is in Gueliz, the French-built new town, and it was laid out from 1923 by the painter Jacques Majorelle, who spent forty years on it and invented the particular cobalt blue that everything in it is painted. Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge bought it in 1980 when it was about to be sold for development, restored it, and Saint Laurent's ashes are scattered in it.

It is small, it is extremely busy, and the timed tickets are worth buying the night before. Go at opening. Bamboo, cactus, water and that blue, and after two weeks of ochre and white it lands hard.

Then breakfast in Gueliz, which is a completely different city from the medina: wide streets, cafes with tables on the pavement, and everybody in it going to work.

The airport is fifteen minutes from Gueliz by taxi and the train station is ten. Agree the fare before you get in.