This study examines the composition of Manuel de Falla's Noches en los jardines de España (1909-1916), through close reference to the manuscript sketches of this work, preserved at the Archivo Manuel de Falla and the Archivo de Valentín Ruiz-Aznar, and reproduced in the same volume as the present article. The first part explores the genesis of the work, its extra-musical sources of inspiration (including the Martinez Sierras' Granada: Guía emocional and Santiago Rusiñol's Jardins d'Espanya), the evolution of the work's external structure (from four movements to three, with changes to the movement titles along the way), and the generation of its thematic content. This section concludes with an account of the first performances of the work and the publication of the score. The second part investigates Falla's compositional process as revealed by a rigorous analysis of the manuscript evidence. This demonstrates that the musical content and structure of each movement were conceived at an early stage in the compositional process, and that subsequent amendments were few. The third and final part of the study considers the composer's aesthetic intentions in composing the work. This discussion hinges upon the composer's later description of Noches (1928) as a kind of tribute to nineteenth-century Romanticism: a description that is justified not only by the work's pictorial and evocative nature, but also by its allusions to folk-like material, and by its employment of sonata-, variation- and rondo-form structures.