The Alhambra Palace of the future will offer visits tailored to visitors' interests

In early 2026, the Patronato de la Alhambra, the organisation that manages Granada's historic Alhambra palace, will begin drafting a new master plan: the guide that will set the course for the next decade and which will replace and modernise the previous document still in force, which had set the guidelines for 2007 to 2020. Some of the ideas of the old plan are "very outdated" and a new approach is needed, according to the Patronato.

On Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 December a conference took place to compile the visions and opinions that will be reflected in the master plan. After specific sessions throughout the year on heritage, sustainability, public visits and security in monuments, the ideas of the experts will now be combined with the reality of the Nasrid monument.

Under the title 'Rethinking the future of the Alhambra', the premises for designing the next decade of the palace were discussed. "This conference will provide us with the vision of the world's leading experts in conservation on the great challenges for the next ten years," said director of the Patronato, Rodrigo Ruiz-Jiménez.

The plan will have to look to the future and read how the tourist market will behave to predict what the document should look like. Just like the Alhambra builders with the water routes that were ahead of their time, now it will be necessary to invent the Alhambra of 2030, what its visitor flows will be like and how this jewel will coexist with artificial intelligence and other technological advances.

The new document will look to the future, "but the beauty is that the essence does not change", Ruiz-Jiménez said, adding: "The great love for the Alhambra, the desire to preserve it for future generations and the focus not only on the visit but on all cultural activities will continue. The monument will go from being an engine of growth for the city to an engine of progress."

Architect Pedro Salmerón, co-author of the current document, will be involved in drafting the next one. "We are facing new climatic risks and tourist overcrowding," he explained.

Salmerón highlighted that the Alhambra's greatest conservation resource, the income from visitors, "is becoming the monument's greatest threat". Faced with this, "we have to have a vision". Salmerón suggests starting from an optimistic point of view "and not a defeatist one" and creating a commission to monitor the plan to ensure its implementation.

The director of the Alhambra has proposed as two key points of the new document the revision of the public visit and the application of new technologies. "The visit has to be more about quality than numbers. It has to be a magical experience, we have to go up as if it were a pyramid until we reach what interests each person who enters the Alhambra. It has to be personalised and generate an emotion, it has to be tailor-made for each person," he explained.

Technology and data will be used to personalise the visit and it will take years to design different routes, times and interests, in a new route that modifies the flows (how the tour develops) and the quotas (the maximum number of visitors that enter per year). "There are people who may like the Alhambra of the engineers, how the water works, how the towers were built, the geometry, the history, the art," describes the director of the Patronato.

The trend in conservation "will be preventive" and that visitors know that it is something that depends a lot on them, according to Ruiz-Jiménez. To carry out this new plan a conservation heat map will be drawn up "to be clear about where the weakest and strongest points are and to be able to apply this type of technology and be more proactive", concluded Ruiz-Jiménez.