Alhambra
Recovery and modern restorations

As early as the second half of the 18th century, the Alhambra's appearance and details began to be documented by Spanish illustrators and officials. By the first decade of the 19th century, other European writers began to bring attention to it and the site subsequently became an object of fascination for Western Romanticist writers, whose publications frequently sought to evoke a contrast between the ornate architecture of the former Moorish palaces and their current state of ruin and neglect. This also coincided with a growing European interest in the Orient (Orientialism), which encouraged an emphasis on exoticism and on the "oriental" attributes of the Alhambra. This rediscovery of the Alhambra was led mostly by French, British, and German writers. In 1830, the American writer Washington Irving lived in Granada and wrote his Tales of the Alhambra, first published in 1832, which played a major role in spurring international interest in southern Spain and in its Islamic-era monuments like the Alhambra. Other artists and intellectuals, such as John Frederick Lewis, Richard Ford, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Owen Jones, helped make the Alhambra into an icon of the era with their writings and illustrations during the 19th century.

Restoration work on the Alhambra was undertaken in 1828 by the architect José Contreras, endowed in 1830 by Ferdinand VII. After the death of Contreras in 1847, it was continued by his son Rafael (died 1890) and his grandson Mariano Contreras (died 1912). The Contreras family members continued to be the most important architects and conservators of the Alhambra up until 1907. During this period, they generally followed a theory of "stylistic restoration", which favoured the construction and addition of elements to make a monument "complete" but not necessarily corresponding to any historical reality. They added elements which they deemed to be representative of what they thought was an "Arabic style", emphasizing the Alhambra's purported " Oriental " character. For example, in 1858–1859 Rafael Contreras and Juan Pugnaire added Persian-looking spherical domes to the Court of the Lions and to the northern portico of the Court of the Myrtles, even though these had nothing to do with Nasrid architecture.

In 1868, a revolution deposed Isabella II and the government seized the properties of the Spanish monarchy, including the Alhambra. In 1870 the Alhambra was declared a National Monument of Spain and the state allocated a budget for its conservation, overseen by the Provincial Commission of Monuments. Mariano Contreras, the last of the Contreras architects to serve as director of conservation of the Alhambra, was appointed as architectural curator in April 1890. His tenure was controversial and his conservation strategy attracted criticism from other authorities. In September 1890, a fire destroyed a large part of the Sala de la Barca in the Comares Palace, which highlighted the site's vulnerability. A report was commissioned in 1903. This resulted in the creation of a "Special Commission" in 1905. The Special Commission was tasked to oversee conservation and restoration of the Alhambra. The commission ultimately failed to exercise control due to friction with Contreras. In 1907, Mariano Contreras was replaced with Modesto Cendoya, whose work was also criticized. Cendoya began many excavations in search of new artifacts but often left these works unfinished. He restored some important elements of the site, like the water supply system, but neglected others. Due to continued friction with Cendoya, the Special Commission was dissolved in 1913 and replaced with the council (Patronato) of the Alhambra in 1914, which was charged again with overseeing the site's conservation and Cendoya's work. In 1915, it was linked directly to the Directorate-General of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Public Education (later the Ministry of National Education). Like Mariano Contreras before him, Cendoya continued to clash with the supervisory body and to obstruct their control. He was eventually dismissed from his post in 1923.

After Cendoya, Leopoldo Torres Balbás was appointed as chief architect from 1923 to 1936. The appointment of Torres Balbás, a trained archaeologist and art historian, marked a definitive shift to a more scientific and systematic approach to the Alhambra's conservation. He endorsed the principles of the 1931 Athens Charter for the Restoration of Monuments, which emphasized regular maintenance, respect for the work of the past, legal protection for heritage monuments, and the legitimacy of modern techniques and materials in restoration so long as these were visually recognizable. Many of the buildings in the Alhambra were affected by his work. Some of the inaccurate changes and additions made by the Contreras architects were reversed. The young architect "opened arcades that had been walled up, re-excavated filled-in pools, replaced missing tiles, completed inscriptions that lacked portions of their stuccoed lettering, and installed a ceiling in the still unfinished palace of Charles V". He also carried out systematic archaeological excavations in various parts of the Alhambra, unearthing lost Nasrid structures such as the Palacio del Partal Alto and the Palace of the Abencerrajes which provided deeper insight into the former palace-city as a whole.

The work of Torres Balbás was continued by his assistant, Francisco Prieto Moreno, who was the chief architectural curator from 1936 to 1970. In 1940, a new Council of the Alhambra was created to oversee the site, which has remained in charge ever since. In 1984 the central government in Madrid transferred responsibility for the site to the Regional Government of Andalusia and in 1986 new statutes and documents were developed to regulate the planning and protection of the site. In 1984 the Alhambra and Generalife were also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Alhambra is now one of the most popular tourist destinations in Spain. Research, archaeological investigations, and restoration works have also remained ongoing into the 21st century.
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