For locals, Granada might mean40-plus centigrade summers and snow-huddled winters, mopeds zipping around narrow alleys, plaza nightlife, Corpus Christi and Semana Santa, flamenco and reggaeton, traffic and smog, graffiti, foreign students, and the notoriously grumpy temperament of its denizens, the untranslatably rude ‘malafollá’. But for tourists, Granada is all about the Alhambra.

For many people, folk rock is a genre unto itself, patronised by gnomish white men with mutton chop sideburns nursing tankards of ale, rollie cigarettes, and ambitions to warlockhood, typically found in grimy pubs themed around shamrocks or Stonehenge.

Imagine a valley where orange trees nestle among gnarled, millennia-old olives; where figs, mulberries and pomegranates hang heavy with juice.

Exotica has its uses. There was a time when Muslim fashion was seen as exotic: Asian women with their colourful scarfs, Arab women with their vibrant headgear, the African women with flamboyant turbans. Not anymore.

On a sweltering hot day in August 1982, in an apartment in the heart of the Albaicín, the Moorish quarter of Granada, with my mum looking up at the Alhambra with ice cubes in her mouth – as she tells me every year on the same date – I was born.

In my husband’s suitcase there are sixteen different kinds of homemade jams and pickles, mostly made by his five older sisters, some of fruits that do not even grow outside of Iran. One such is the Cedrate citrus: an orange without segments.