It's not long before I am back in the Albaicin. I have never spent much time in this hillside barrio of Granada. I wander the narrow winding streets. It is easy to imagine the Moorish past of the barrio, which was declared a world heritage site in 1984, along with the famous Alhambra. (See my blog, Winter in Andalucia). It can be seen in the background of this photo. Today is an interesting contrast to my time here in January, which was damp, cold and cloudy. Nevertheless, the views were beautiful in their own way.
A town has existed on this spot since Roman times. It was later occupied by Visigoths until the Moors took the city in the eigth century. For the next three centuries, it was an important city under the control of the Cordoban caliphate. This fell in 1031, to be followed by the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of Seville. An Arab prince of the Nasrid tribe, driven south from Zaragoza by the Christian Reconquista was the next to create an independent state at this site.
Nasrid Granada was well run but in the rest of Spain the Christian kingdoms were taking hold and by 1273 Granada was the only surviving Spanish Muslim kingdom. It's territory was significant, stretching from just north of the city down to a coastal strip between Tarifa and Almería. And, thanks to an influx of Muslim refugees, it developed a flourishing commerce, industry and culture. Over the next two centuries, Granada maintained its autonomy, but by the mid fifteenth century a series of coups and internal strife destabilised the kingdom. In 1479 the kingdoms of Aragón and Castile were united by the marriage of Fernando and Isabel, who within ten years had conquered Ronda, Málaga and Almería. The city of Granada stood alone. The Reyes Católicos made escalating and finally untenable demands upon it, and in 1490 war broke out. Boabdil, the last Moorish king, appealed in vain for help from his fellow Muslims in Morocco, Egypt and Ottoman Turkey. Fernando and Isabel marched on Granada with an army said to total 150,000 troops. For seven months, through the winter of 1491, they laid siege to the city. On January 2, 1492, Boabdil formally surrendered. The Christian reconquest of Spain was complete. There followed a century of repression for Granada, during which Jews and then Muslims were treated harshly and finally expelled by the Christian state and Church, both of which grew rich on confiscated property. The loss of Muslim and Jewish artisans and traders led to gradual economic decline. The city also suffered under Napoleonic occupation, when even the Alhambra was used as a barracks, causing much damage. The Romantic movement of the nineteenth century ensured that the Alhambra suffered few more violations, whilst at the same time showed little interest in it's upkeep.
Over the last century and a half, they have covered over the Río Darro, which now flows beneath the town centre, and demolished historic buildings to build avenues through the centre of the city. In 1936, following Franco’s coup, a fascist bloodbath was unleashed during which an estimated seven thousand of the city’s liberals and Republicans were assassinated, among them poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. In recent years the Andalucian parliament has had to block a plan by the city council to cover much of the Alhambra hill with a luxury housing estate.
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