On 2 January 1492 Boabdil, the last Nasrid emir, surrendered Granada to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile — ending the last Muslim state in Iberia and, with it, the Reconquista.
The Fall of Granada on 2 January 1492 was the surrender of the last Muslim state in Iberia, the Nasrid Emirate of Granada, to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Its emir, Boabdil, handed over the Alhambra and went into exile.
The event is the conventional end of the Reconquista, the centuries-long and often-interrupted struggle for the peninsula. It came at the close of a ten-year war and in a year — 1492 — that also brought the expulsion of the Jews and Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic.
The united crowns of Castile and Aragon brought overwhelming resources — money, artillery, and a war of methodical sieges — against an emirate torn by civil war between rival Nasrid claimants. The struggle was not a single campaign but a decade of attrition, 1482 to 1492.
Alhama fell in 1482, then a string of strongholds: Loja, the great port of Málaga in 1487 after a bitter siege, Baza in 1489. As the towns fell, Granada itself was isolated. The captured Boabdil was played off against his relatives, deepening the Nasrid collapse.
With his capital blockaded and no relief possible, Boabdil negotiated a surrender on generous paper terms — the Capitulations of Granada guaranteed the Muslims their property, laws and faith. On 2 January 1492 the Christian monarchs took possession of the Alhambra.
Those guarantees were soon broken: within a decade came forced conversions and, in time, expulsions. Boabdil left for exile in North Africa, and later tradition gave him the sorrowful backward look known as "the last sigh of the Moor". Muslim political rule in Iberia, begun in 711, was ended.