The last Muslim dynasty of Iberia, which ruled the Emirate of Granada for over two and a half centuries, built the Alhambra, and fell to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492.
The Nasrid dynasty, the Banu Nasr, ruled the Emirate of Granada from about 1230 until 1492. It was the last Muslim dynasty in Iberia, holding the mountainous south-east after the great Castilian conquests of the 13th century had swept away the rest of al-Andalus.
The Nasrids survived largely by becoming a tributary of Castile and by exploiting Christian divisions, and in their long twilight they raised the Alhambra of Granada, the finest surviving palace-complex of the medieval Islamic west.
For two and a half centuries the emirate endured through diplomacy, tribute and the strength of its mountain frontier, a wealthy and cultured state even as it shrank. Its court sustained a brilliant late flowering of Andalusi art, architecture and letters.
In the end the union of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Nasrids' own dynastic civil wars, proved fatal. The Granada War of 1482–1492 dismantled the emirate town by town, and with the surrender of Boabdil in 1492 the dynasty and the last Muslim state in Iberia came to an end.