the Alhambra in 1914, which was charged again with overseeing the site's conservation and Cendoya's work. In 1915 it was linked directly to the Directorate-General of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Public Education (later the Ministry of National Education). Like Mariano Contreras before him, Cendoya continued to clash with the supervisory body and to obstruct their control. He was eventually dismissed from his post in 1923. After Cendoya, Leopoldo Torres Balbás was appointed as chief architect from 1923 to 1936. The appointment of Torres Balbás, a trained archeologist and art historian, marked a definitive shift to a more scientific and systematic approach to the Alhambra's conservation. He endorsed the principles of the 1931 Athens Charter for the Restoration of Monuments, which emphasized regular maintenance, respect for the work of the past, legal protection for heritage monuments, and the legitimacy of modern techniques and materials in restoration so long as these were visually recognizable. Many of the buildings in the Alhambra were affected by his work. Some of the inaccurate changes and additions made by the Contreras architects were reversed. The young architect "opened arcades that had been walled up, re-excavated filled-in pools, replaced missing tiles, completed inscriptions that lacked portions of their stuccoed lettering, and installed a ceiling in the still unfinished palace of Charles V". He also carried out systematic archeological excavations in various parts of the Alhambra, unearthing lost Nasrid structures such as the Palacio del Partal Alto and the Palace of the Abencerrajes which provided deeper insight into the former palace-city as a whole. The work of Torres Balbás was continued by his assistant, Francisco Prieto Moreno, who was the chief architectural curator from 1936 to 1970. In 1940 a new Council of the Alhambra was created to oversee the site, which has remained in charge ever since. In 1984 the central government in Madrid transferred responsibility for the site to the Regional Government of Andalusia and in 1986 new statutes and documents were developed to regulate the planning and protection of the site. In 1984 the Alhambra and Generalife were also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Alhambra is now one of the most popular tourist destinations in Spain. Research, archeological investigations, and restoration works have also remained ongoing into the 21st century. Layout The Alhambra site is about in length and about at its greatest width. It extends from west-northwest to east-southeast