The Alhambra Sells Out. The Rest of Granada Doesn't.

Most travellers give Granada a single day, and the Alhambra takes all of it. Tickets go on sale months ahead and sell out; the half-hour slot printed on yours decides when you get up, where you eat, and how far you are willing to wander beforehand. It is a magnificent day. It is also a day in which you see almost nothing of the city the palace looks down on.

The second and third days are where Granada stops being a monument and starts being a place, and they are unexpectedly easy to arrange. Almost nothing below is timed. Almost nothing sells out. A surprising amount of it costs nothing at all, and the rest is cheap enough that a whole third day can come in under the price of one Alhambra ticket. Spring is the season on record here, and it shows: snow still sitting on the Sierra Nevada behind the Albaicin rooftops, the walled gardens in flower, the courtyards not yet baking.

What follows is ordered to spare your legs, which in Granada matters more than it sounds.

The Albaicin has interiors, and hardly anyone goes inside

The Albaicin is the most photographed neighbourhood in Granada and one of the least entered. Visitors climb it, point a phone at the Alhambra from the Mirador de San Nicolas, and come back down having opened no doors. Behind those whitewashed walls sit half a dozen Nasrid and Morisco houses, and between them they tell you more about how Granada actually lived under the emirate than the palace does.

Start low, on the Carrera del Darro, at El Banuelo. These are eleventh-century Arab baths, older than the Alhambra by a long way, and what survives is the bare architecture: brick vaults pierced with star-shaped skylights, columns reused from earlier Roman and Visigothic buildings. Ten minutes uphill, the Casa de Zafra is a late fourteenth-century Nasrid house built around a pool and a portico, given away to the Catholic Monarchs' secretary after the conquest and now doubling as the neighbourhood's interpretation centre. It is the clearest surviving picture of a wealthy Granadan home of the period. The Casa Morisca del Horno de Oro is a smaller, more domestic version of the same idea.

Keep climbing to the Palacio de Dar al-Horra, tucked behind the old city wall near the Convento de Santa Isabel la Real. It was the residence of Boabdil's mother, and its upper gallery gives you the Albaicin from inside the Albaicin rather than across it, which is the rarer view. The Casa del Chapiz, higher again on the edge of Sacromonte, now houses a university institute for Arabic studies; its gardens look straight across the ravine at the Alhambra's north wall with no crowd in front of you.

All of these, plus the Corral del Carbon down in the centre, are sold together as the Dobla de Oro. The headline version bundles a night visit to the Nasrid Palaces and runs to around EUR 30 at the time of writing, which is not what you want on a second day. There is a cheaper ticket covering only the Andalusi houses, and the houses also sell entry individually for a few euros each. The Corral del Carbon is free: a fourteenth-century merchants' inn with a horseshoe-arched gateway, sitting unremarked a two-minute walk from the cathedral, and quite possibly the single most overlooked building in the old centre.

One more Albaicin door, and it costs nothing: the Casa-Museo Max Moreau, the house of a Belgian painter who settled here, kept as a carmen with its terrace intact. Carmen is the local word for a walled house-and-garden, and this is the easiest way to stand inside one. It typically opens mornings and late afternoons from Tuesday to Saturday, closes on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays, and shuts for the whole of August, so check before you climb.

A note on the Mirador de San Nicolas: at sunset it is a scrum, three deep, with buskers. The Placeta de Carvajales, a few minutes away, gives you nearly the same composition with a fraction of the people.

Sacromonte once the flamenco buses have gone

Sacromonte is sold to visitors almost exclusively as an evening flamenco product, and the shows in the cave tablaos are the real thing in origin even where they are now staged for coaches. Go in daylight instead, and it becomes a neighbourhood.

The Museo Cuevas del Sacromonte sits in the Barranco de los Negros, up a rough lane off the Camino del Sacromonte. It is an open-air complex of restored cave dwellings, each furnished for a trade, plus rooms on the geology of the hillside and on the Roma families who cut these houses out of the rock. It opens daily, with longer hours from mid-March to mid-October, and admission is in the region of five euros. The terraces are where it earns its keep: the Alhambra and the Generalife laid out across the valley, and nobody jostling you.

Further out along the same road, where the tarmac stops climbing, is the Abadia del Sacromonte. This one you must book. It can only be seen on a guided tour, groups are small, and the standard adult ticket is around seven euros. What you get is the church, a small museum, and the catacombs cut into the hill, where the remains attributed to Saint Cecilius, Granada's patron, were supposedly found in the 1590s alongside a set of inscribed lead books. The books were later judged forgeries by Rome; the abbey was built on them anyway. It is the strangest story in the city, and it is told underground in about an hour.

Getting up there is simple. The small C34 minibus leaves Plaza Nueva for Sacromonte roughly every twenty minutes; the Albaicin lines C31 and C32 cover the other hill. A single ride costs a little over a euro. Walk one direction and ride the other, and do the walking downhill.

If you want the view that beats the postcard, keep going up to the Mirador de San Miguel Alto, the whitewashed hermitage on the ridge above the Albaicin. Expect roughly forty minutes of steady climbing from the centre, some of it on dirt. From up there you get the Alhambra, the Albaicin, the cathedral and the Sierra Nevada in one frame. Take water, start about an hour before sunset, and come down while there is still light in the sky.

The Baroque half of the city, and it is all on the flat

Everything above involves a hill. This section does not, which makes it the obvious rainy or tired-legs option.

The Monasterio de San Jeronimo, a few minutes' walk from the Gran Capitan tram and bus stops, is a sixteenth-century Renaissance church largely shaped by Diego de Siloe, with every surface of the apse painted and the tomb of Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, the soldier known as the Gran Capitan, set in the transept beside his wife. Entry is around five euros. Note the long Spanish midday closure: it generally opens mid-morning, shuts for several hours after lunch, and reopens late afternoon.

The Monasterio de la Cartuja is further out, on the northern edge of the centre near the university's Cartuja campus, and reachable by several city bus lines running up that way. It is worth the detour for one room. The sacristy, built through the middle of the eighteenth century and generally attributed to Francisco Hurtado Izquierdo, is a white-and-brown storm of plasterwork and inlaid cabinetry, the chests of drawers reportedly the work of a single craftsman over some three decades. Spanish guidebooks habitually name it the finest Baroque sacristy in the country, and whether or not you buy that, it is nothing like anything else you will see here. The refectory holds still lifes associated with Sanchez Cotan, a Carthusian monk of the house. Admission is around six euros, and an hour is about right.

One free extra, if you are going up to the Alhambra hill anyway on another errand: the circular courtyard of the Palacio de Carlos V can be walked without a monument ticket, and the Museo de la Alhambra on its ground floor is free to enter. It holds the Nasrid woodwork, ceramics and the great blue amphora that were taken out of the palaces. If your Alhambra slot was rushed, this is where you get to look at the details properly.

Realejo, where the poet and the murals are

The Realejo, Granada's old Jewish quarter, sits below the Alhambra on the south side and has become the city's street-art district. The work that matters is by Raul Ruiz, who signs as El Nino de las Pinturas: enormous figurative faces, children and fragments of text painted straight onto residential facades. The densest run is in the lanes around Calle Molinos and along the long school walls nearby. Give it an hour on foot and finish in the Campo del Principe, the neighbourhood's main square.

Two more things belong to this half of the city. The Centro Jose Guerrero, beside the Capilla Real in the centre, is free and almost always empty: a small museum to a Granada-born painter who spent his working life in New York among the abstract expressionists and came back with a palette that looks nothing like Andalusia. It generally opens Tuesday to Saturday with a midday break.

And the Huerta de San Vicente, the Garcia Lorca family's summer house, now marooned in a public park south-west of the centre. The piano is there, the desk is there, the balcony he wrote from looks at a park where there were once fields. Visits are guided only, leave roughly every three quarters of an hour, last about half an hour, cost in the region of three euros, and are typically free on Wednesdays. It is closed Mondays. If you have read any Lorca at all, this is the most affecting thirty minutes in Granada.

On the way back, the gardens of the Carmen de los Martires on the Alhambra hill are free, open most of the day, and contain a lake, a romantic folly and a population of peacocks. Few people walk the extra ten minutes to reach them.

A gorge at the end of a city bus route

If your third day wants air rather than architecture, Granada has a genuine mountain walk at the end of a suburban bus ride. Los Cahorros, above the village of Monachil, is a limestone gorge on the Rio Monachil with a path threaded along the rock face, a set of hanging bridges including one long swaying span, and a few low tunnels where you will want a phone torch and a willingness to crouch.

Catch the 183 on weekday mornings or the 181 on Saturday afternoons, Sundays and holidays, from the stops near Paseo de los Basilios, over the river from Plaza del Humilladero. The fare is somewhere around a euro and a half each way, and the ride takes twenty to forty minutes depending on the line. Stay on to the last stop in Monachil; everyone gets off there. From the village, signs point to Los Cahorros. The short out-and-back to the bridges takes a couple of hours; the full circular loop is closer to eight kilometres and half a day. Spring is the good season for it, with real water in the river and the rock not yet radiating heat, but that same water makes the streambed sections slippery. Wear grip, not sandals, and check the return bus times before you set off, because they thin out considerably in the afternoon.

Eating on the second and third day

Granada still keeps the free tapa, and it is not a token. Order a drink in most bars in the centre, the Realejo or the Albaicin and food arrives with it, unrequested and unbilled; order three rounds and you have had dinner. Expect to pay roughly three to four euros for a beer, wine or soft drink with its tapa, which is why the city's price grade is what it is. The convention is that you take what the kitchen sends on the first round and may be offered a choice later, so do not start by asking for a menu.

Bodegas Castaneda, just off Plaza Nueva, is the one everyone has heard of and still deserves the traffic: hams overhead, barrels, a standing crush at the bar. Casa Julio, in the lanes by Plaza Bib-Rambla, has been frying seafood since the 1940s in a room that holds barely a dozen people. In the Realejo, Taberna La Tana on the Placeta del Agua is the wine-first option, with a very long list and plated tapas that take themselves a little more seriously, while Bar Los Altramuces near the Campo del Principe is the plainer, more local counterweight. Up in the Albaicin, Plaza Larga is where the neighbourhood actually drinks, and it holds a small morning market several days a week.

An order that works

On day two, do the Albaicin houses in the morning while the lanes are cool and the interiors are empty, eat around Plaza Larga, take the C34 to Sacromonte for the caves museum and a pre-booked abbey tour, then walk up to San Miguel Alto for the light and come down into the Albaicin for tapas.

On day three, choose. If the weather is good, take the early bus to Monachil, walk Los Cahorros, and spend the evening on the Realejo murals and the Campo del Principe. If it is not, do the flat Baroque run instead, San Jeronimo in the morning and La Cartuja after the midday closure, and slot in the Huerta de San Vicente or the free Centro Jose Guerrero around them.

What to leave out: the tourist tea houses on the stepped lanes below the Albaicin look the part and largely sell hookahs and sugar to people who came for the photograph, and the sunset crowd at San Nicolas is not worth an hour of standing. Everything else here is a door that is simply open, which after the Alhambra's timed-entry choreography is most of the pleasure of staying on.