Prince Abdelaziz Bin Fahd and his connection with the Alhambra

Prince Abdelaziz Bin Fahd (49) is the youngest and favorite son of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

Abdelaziz was, like his father, in love with Spain and when he visited him in summers at his Mar Mar palace in Marbella, he used to stop in Granada to contemplate a monument that was his obsession: the Alhambra. He was so attracted to the beautiful Nasrid complex where Boabdil, the last Andalusian Moorish king, resided, that in 1997 he camped with tents, carpets, food and a large entourage at Llano de la Perdiz, a plateau located above the Alhambra, from where you can see the snowy peaks of Sierra Nevada and Sacromonte turning red at sunset.

They say he asked to stay inside the Alhambra, but was denied, and they even assure that he offered a substantial sum to buy part of the plateau and build himself a palace above the Alhambra, but he didn’t succeed either because it is public land. Desperate to make his dream come true, he made a decision: to build his own Alhambra in the desert, a millionaire whim that King Fahd granted to his favorite son. The chosen location was a plot on the outskirts of Riyadh, the Saudi capital, of 10.6 hectares, next to which an artificial promontory similar to Granada’s was erected.

The sumptuous palace was covered with 1.6 million bricks, 500 white marble columns from the Almeria firm Camar, and more than 4,500 m² of floor tiles, ceramics and tiles handmade at the Ruiz Muros pottery in Otura. Their artisans, whose ancestors settled in the Albaicín in the 16th century, went secretly every night for three years to the Alhambra to measure each piece they reproduced. In addition, Ramón Rubio, head of the Alhambra’s Plasterwork Restoration workshop, spent two months in Riyadh leading the workers.

Of the 13 fountains, the mythical Fountain of the Lions was the most laborious to imitate: they had to tear down the entire courtyard because it was too small, and the fountain, composed of twelve different lions, required Camar personnel to travel to Arabia to set the materials.

You can read the complete news article in the newspaper El Mundo: King Fahd: the exact copy of the Alhambra in Riyadh of his disgraced favorite son | Celebrities (elmundo.es)