Charterhouse of Granada (La Cartuja)

The Charterhouse of Granada stands on the northern edge of the city, near today's university campus, and from outside it gives little away: a plain walled monastery with a sixteenth-century Plateresque portal. Inside is one of the summits of Spanish Baroque, a sequence of rooms in which stucco, coloured marble, inlaid wood and painting are fused into something closer to a single, blazing work of art than to architecture in the usual sense.

The monastery was decided on by the Carthusians of El Paular in 1458 and begun in 1506, after the Great Captain, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, offered land; when the community built elsewhere he withdrew, and work was restarted in 1516. Building went on for some three centuries without the original plan ever being completed. The monks were expelled in 1835, the great cloister and cells were demolished in 1842, and the prior's house was lost in 1943. What remains is the small cloister with its Doric arcade, the refectory with late Gothic ribbed vaults, the chapter house, and the church, finished in 1602 and divided into separate sections for the public, the lay brothers and the monks.

Two spaces behind the high altar are the reason to come. The Sancta Sanctorum, designed by Francisco Hurtado Izquierdo, centres on a baldachin of Lanjarón marble beneath a dome painted by Antonio Palomino. Beyond it lies the sacristy, begun in 1732 and completed in 1764, most likely from Hurtado's design with José de Bada directing the work. Its white walls are covered in stucco worked into restless, broken geometric mouldings that seem to fold and multiply in the light, set off by reddish marble and a floor laid in a diamond pattern that deepens the room. The inlaid cabinets were the work of the Carthusian brother José Manuel Vázquez over some three decades, and the dome was painted by Tomás Ferrer in 1735 with Saint Bruno and other figures of the order.

Do not skip the rooms around the small cloister. The refectory and the chapter rooms hold paintings by the Carthusian painter Juan Sánchez Cotán, including a Last Supper in the refectory that plays with painted illusion, while the lay brothers' chapel and the chapter house hang canvases by Vicente Carducho.

Getting there

The Charterhouse is on Paseo de Cartuja in Granada's northern district, around 2 km from the city centre; city buses stop nearby. Federico García Lorca Granada-Jaén Airport (GRX) is about 16 km away.