I was once conversing with a Moor in Madrid with whom I was very intimate, about the Alhambra in Granada of which he had visited. Did you not weep, I asked, when you passed through the courts, and thought of the Abencerrages? No, said he, I did not weep; wherefore should I weep? And why did you visit the Alhambra? I demanded. I visited it, he replied, because being at Granada on my own affairs, one of your countrymen requested me to accompany him thither, that I might explain some of the inscriptions. I should certainly not have gone of my own accord, for the hill on which it stands is steep.
-The Bible in Spain, George Borrow, 1843
Mounting my horse, I followed up the route of the Moslem monarch from this place of his exit…I spurred my horse to the summit of a rock where Boabdil uttered his last sorrowful exclamation as he turned his eyes from taking their farewell gaze; it is still denominated el ultimo suspiro del Moro.
-The Alhambra, Washington Irving, 1832
Upon a rock, Sigh of the Moor, they call/Boabdil sat and cast/On far Granada and Alhambra’s wall/A long look and the last.
-The Sigh of the Moor, Theophile Gautier, 1890
The Moor’s Last Sigh, a myth perpetuated by Irving and updated by Rushdie, painted by Pradilla and poetasted by Gautier, can almost make you lose your breath from laughing so hard at its tired maurophilic cliche. The Moor’s Sigh Pass is at 865m on the autopista south to Motril, at the last point of land where Granada is still visible before cresting the Alpujarras and heading downhill to the Costa Tropical’s nude beaches. There you can sleep at the Moor’s Sigh Campground, buy food from the Moor’s Sigh Groceries, swim in the Moor’s Sigh Pool, and sell tin cans to the Moor’s Sigh Scrapyard.
Borrow’s Moorish friend was right. The Alhambra is up too steep a hill to weep over. I walked there one morning from my hotel down near the Plaza Nueva and huffed and puffed right through the employees entrance before it opened and had the Partal Garden to myself for a few minutes before the tourists poured in. I was moved by its tranquility but not to the point of a sigh or a tear.
I had been interviewing Spanish historians and philologists at the Escuela de Estudios Arabes in the 15th C. Moorish mansion Casa de Chapiz in the San Pedro district. They were all fully versed in Washington Irving’s maurophilia and how to temper it with the counter-narrative of the Reconquista’s religious fervors. Even better, Read George Borrow, they said. He was an anti-papist Protestant bible salesman who disliked both Muslims and Catholics.
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Francisco Pradilla Ortiz