Part of the explanation of why it looks the way it does is that it was built in a sunny part of the world.

At a much more down-to-earth level, the Alhambra looks very different from Versailles or Buckingham Palace and, though there are all sorts of complex cultural reasons for this, part of the explanation of why it looks the way it does is that it was built in a sunny part of the world.

R. Irwin, The Alhambra (2004), 127