This hall was once known as the Salón de la Media Naranja (Hall of the Half Orange) from the elegant shaping of its carved wooden ceiling. This rests upon a frieze decorated with the Tower and Lion, and supporting this again are beautiful carved and gilded stalactites or pendants. On the intervening wall spaces are Cufic inscriptions on a blue ground, and female heads painted by sixteenth-century vandals. Then follows another frieze with the devices of Castile and Leon, below which is a row of fifty-six niches, containing the portraits of the kings of Spain from Receswinto the Goth to Philip III. The earliest of these seem to have been painted in the sixteenth century, while the little columns and trefoil windows that separate them may be ascribed to the end of the fourteenth. The series is interrupted by four rectangular spaces, formerly occupied by windows, but now taken up by elegant balconies in wrought iron, the work of Francisco López (1592). The decoration of this magnificent chamber is completed by a high dado of white, blue, and green glazed tiles. It was probably in this hall that Abu Saïd, “the Red King,” was received by Don Pedro prior to his murder.
In an apartment to the right of the Ambassadors’ Hall, a plaster frieze of Arabic origin, showing figures in silhouette, may be noticed; and in a room to the left, other silhouettes, apparently referring to the qualities attributed by his admirers to Pedro I.
On the north side of the Patio de las Doncellas lies the so-called Dormitorio de los Reyes Moros (Bed-chamber of the Moorish Kings). The entrance arch is semicircular, and includes three graceful lattice windows, richly ornamented. On either side of the door is a beautiful double-window with columns dating from the Khalifate. The doors themselves are richly inlaid, and painted with geometrical patterns. The interior of the chamber is adorned, like all other apartments in the Alcazar, with plaster friezes, and is so richly decorated that scarcely a hand’s-breadth (remarks Herr Schmidt) is without ornamentation. To the right of the entrance lies a small apartment known as the Sultan’s Alcove. Opposite the entrance from the _patio_ are three horse-shoe arches belonging to the earliest period of Spanish-Arabic art, leading to an _Al-Hami_ or alcove.