Who ruled Granada?

Granada lies in southern Spain at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, where the River Darro joins the Genil on the edge of a fertile plain, the Vega. Its hills offered defence and its mountain streams fed irrigation, but what defines its history is a single long chapter: for two and a half centuries it was the capital of the last Muslim state in western Europe, the Nasrid emirate, whose palace-fortress, the Alhambra, still stands above the city.

An Iberian town called Iliberri occupied the Albaicín hill before Roman times, and under Rome it became the Municipium Florentinum Iliberritanum. A church council held there in the early 4th century, the Council of Elvira, is one of the oldest recorded in Spain. Visigothic kings ruled the area after the collapse of Roman power. The Muslim conquest of 711 brought it into the Umayyad Caliphate and then the emirate and caliphate of Córdoba. Granada itself, known in Arabic as Gharnata, was at first a lesser settlement near the regional capital at Madinat Ilbira, and was known for its Jewish community.

When the caliphate broke up early in the 11th century, the Zirids, a Berber dynasty, made Granada the capital of their taifa kingdom and fortified the Albaicín. Their Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrillah was one of the most powerful men in al-Andalus; in 1066 a mob killed his son and successor Joseph and attacked the Jewish population. The North African Almoravid dynasty annexed Granada in 1090, and the Almohad Caliphate followed in the mid-12th century.

After the Almohads were defeated at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, Castile advanced deep into al-Andalus, taking Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. Muhammad ibn al-Ahmar, founder of the Nasrid dynasty, made Granada his capital in 1238 and kept his state alive by accepting vassal status and paying tribute to Castile. The Emirate of Granada, covering roughly the modern provinces of Granada, Málaga and Almería, absorbed Muslim refugees from the lost lands and lasted until 1492. Its rulers built the Alhambra, largely in the 14th century under Yusuf I and Muhammad V, with the Generalife gardens on the hill beside it.

Dynastic feuds weakened the emirate in the late 15th century. Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon waged a ten-year war from 1482, taking the emirate town by town. Muhammad XII, known to the Christians as Boabdil, surrendered the city by treaty, and the Catholic Monarchs entered on 2 January 1492, completing the Reconquista.

The surrender treaty promised Muslims freedom of religion, but within a decade they were pressed to convert, provoking a revolt in 1499. The descendants of converts, the Moriscos, rose again in the Alpujarras mountains from 1568 to 1571 and were then deported from the kingdom of Granada; all Moriscos were expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614. Meanwhile the Crown rebuilt the city as a Christian capital, with a cathedral, the Royal Chapel where Ferdinand and Isabella are buried, and a Renaissance palace built for Charles V inside the Alhambra.

Granada declined into a provincial city in later centuries. In August 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist forces there shot the poet Federico García Lorca. Today Granada has about 230,000 people, a large university and the Alhambra, which UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site in 1984.