SPAIN
THE ALHAMBRA and GENERALIFE GARDENS
No matter how much you have read or how many pictures you have seen of Granada's Alhambra palaces, this Moorish pleasure palace will still take your breath away. The Nasrid dynasty's royal palace is the artistic highlight of Spain's Islamic period, when Al-Andalus — as they called Andalucía — represented the epitome of culture and civilization in Europe's Middle Ages.
THE GREAT MOSQUE OF CORDOBA (MEZQUITA)
Once the principal mosque of western Islam and still known as the Mezquita, Cordoba's mosque is one of the largest in the world and the finest achievement of Moorish architecture in Spain. In spite of later alterations that carved out its center to build a Catholic cathedral at its heart, the Great Mosque ranks with the Alhambra in Granada as one of the two most splendid examples of Islamic art and architecture in western Europe.
PRADO MUSEUM
The Prado alone ranks with the world's top art museums for the riches of its collections. But add the Reina Sofia National Art Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and the CaixaForum, all along Madrid's mile-long, tree-shaded boulevard, and you have what may be the world's highest concentration of priceless art treasures. It's no wonder this is known as El Paseo del Arte — Boulevard of the Arts.
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
You really have to see this building to believe it — no photograph has ever done justice to this symphony of shapes, so alive that they seem ready to take wing. American architect Frank Gehry used blocks of limestone and undulating sheets of titanium to turn the notion of modern architecture on its ear. Inside the museum are traveling exhibitions and rotating displays of its own collections of modern art.