Hotel Alhambra Palace

Start your autumn Arabian adventure at Hotel Alhambra Palace. It opened in the early twentieth century when it was fashionable to build homes and public buildings in a revivalist Moorish design known as neo-Mudéjar - so why not a glamorous hotel in the same style for the tourists that wanted to visit the Alhambra next door? So thought a wealthy duke who used engineers of Gustave Eiffel to build the first multi-storey hotel using a steel framework - essential considering it's built on the mountainside below the Alhambra. This grand dame hotel has hosted royalty, celebrities, and renowned artists over its 100 years of history, including the actors who starred in the spaghetti westerns of the '60s, filmed a little further east in Almeria. Oh, and you can be sure that Orson Welles was a guest; and so was Douglas Fairbanks.