In the fall of 1922, after leaving Haarlem, Escherembarked on his first sea voyage by freighter, a trip from Amsterdam to Tarragona in Spain. He found it marvelous and would repeat this relaxing and adventurous form of travel several times over the years. 

Once in Spain, he journeyed by train to several cities, and in Granada, visited the beautiful Alhambra (Al-Hamra' : The Red Palace), a palace which had been built to serve as an administrative center for the Moorish Umayyad court in Spain. There he saw for the first time the decorative majolica tilings, stone decoration,  and  Islamic stucco designs that encrust many surfaces of the buildings and was surprised at his own reaction. The great wealth of decoration, the dignity and simple beauty of the whole place moved him. However, he noted in his diary, "The strange thing about this Islamic Moorish decoration is the total absence of any human or animal form, save elaborate plant form and intricate geometric shapes." 

He spent an afternoon carefully sketching an intricate star-burst tile design that fascinated him by its "great intricacy and geometric artistry"; that evening he worked on the sketch in his hotel room and finished it the next morning. 

Later Escher wrote in an article in the art periodical De Delver (The Digger) in 1941, "The problem of how to fit congruent figures together . . . particularly when the shape of such figures is meant to arouse within the viewer associations with an object or natural form-began to intrigue me even more after my first trip to Spain in 1922. Although my interest at that time was mainly focused on free graphic art, every now and then I would return to the mental gymnastics of my puzzles thanks to the inspiration of the cerebral Moorish decoration."