This estate, formed by a garden with a beautiful pavilion surrounded by orchards, belonged during the Muslim period to the kings of Granada. After the conquest of the city in 1492, the Catholic kings acquired the estate and founded there the convent of Santa Cruz la Real. Andrea Navagero recorded some myrtles and orange trees in the garden of the Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo in the sixteenth century. Some nineteenth-century images and descriptions show that the garden remained little transformed until 1850. The excavation undertaken in the 1990s unearthed a garden formed by a fountain in the portico of the pavilion, in front of which were two symmetrical flowerbeds and an octagonal pool.
The property remained under the friars' rule until the nineteenth-century confiscation. Then, a private house was built beside the pavilion and a new garden planted over the original.
Andrea Navagero, Viaje por España, 49.
Antonio Orihuela Uzal. Casas y palacios nazaríes, 315–33.
Sources: Travel Account, 16th century | Travel Account, 19th century
-Antonio Almagro, Luis Ramón-Laca
Resources:
Viaje por España y Portugal, 1494-1495 (Open in Zotero)
El Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo de Granada (Open in Zotero)
Casas y palacios nazaríes: siglos XIII-XV (Open in Zotero)
Originally published at: Almagro, Antonio, and Luis Ramón-Laca. “Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo.” Middle East Garden Traditions. Dumbarton Oaks, November 18, 2014. https://www.doaks.org/resources/middle-east-garden-traditions/catalogue#b_start=0&c6=Andalusian++Gardens. Archived at: https://perma.cc/J8KF-DV5P
