The mountain capital of the last Muslim state in Iberia: a Zirid taifa, then from 1238 to 1492 the seat of the Nasrid emirs and their Alhambra, whose surrender to Ferdinand and Isabella ended the Reconquista.
Granada sits where the Darro and Genil rivers leave the Sierra Nevada for the fertile plain of the Vega, on hills that face each other across the Darro valley: the Albaicín to the north and the Sabika hill of the Alhambra to the south. A modest town under the caliphate of Córdoba, it became a taifa capital in the eleventh century and, from 1238 to 1492, the capital of the Nasrid emirate, the last Muslim state in the Iberian peninsula.
The Nasrids ruled for two and a half centuries by paying tribute to Castile, balancing Castilian and North African powers against each other, and exploiting the mountains that made their kingdom hard to invade. Their palace-city, the Alhambra, is the best-preserved medieval Islamic palace in the world, and its surrender to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492 brought the Reconquista to its end.
Roman Iliberris and a small settlement called Gharnata stood near the Albaicín, but the city's rise began in the chaos after 1013, when the Berber Zirid chief Zawi ibn Ziri moved his followers from the exposed town of Madinat Ilbira to the defensible hill above the Darro. His nephew Habbus and Habbus's son Badis ruled a taifa kingdom from there until the Almoravid conquest of 1090.
For a generation the Zirid state was run by a Jewish vizier, Samuel ibn Naghrela, poet, Talmudic scholar and commander of the kingdom's armies. His son Joseph succeeded him, and on 30 December 1066 a Muslim mob, stirred up by a poem denouncing him, killed Joseph and massacred much of Granada's Jewish community. The last Zirid king, Abd Allah, wrote an unusually frank memoir of his reign after the Almoravids deposed him.
The kingdom of Granada was the creation of Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, known as Ibn al-Ahmar, a frontier lord from Arjona who took the city in 1238 as Almohad Spain fell apart. He survived by becoming the vassal of Ferdinand III of Castile, sending troops to help him besiege Seville in 1247–1248 and paying heavy tribute, and the emirate he founded held the mountains and the coast from Almería to Málaga, crowded with refugees from the conquered cities.
The emirate endured because its rulers balanced between Castile and the Marinid sultans of Morocco. Its high point came under Yusuf I (1333–1354) and Muhammad V (1354–1359 and 1362–1391), who built the Comares palace and the Palace of the Lions (the Generalife, the summer palace and gardens on the hill above, had been laid out under their predecessors early in the century), and whose vizier-poet Ibn Zamrak had his verses carved into their walls. The historian Ibn al-Khatib served Muhammad V as vizier before he fled and was murdered in Fez in 1375.
The fifteenth century brought civil war inside the Nasrid family. The sultan Abu'l-Hasan Ali, his brother Muhammad al-Zagal and his son Muhammad XII of Granada, called Boabdil by the Castilians, fought one another while Ferdinand and Isabella's armies took the kingdom piece by piece after 1482: Alhama that year, Ronda in 1485, Málaga in 1487, and Baza and Almería in 1489.
By 1491 only the city remained. Ferdinand and Isabella besieged it from the camp they built as a walled town, Santa Fe, and on 25 November 1491 Boabdil agreed the Capitulations of Granada, which promised the Muslims their mosques, property, law and faith. He handed over the Alhambra on 2 January 1492 and withdrew to a lordship in the Alpujarras, and then into exile in Morocco.
The promises were broken within a decade. Archbishop Cisneros's campaign of forced conversion from 1499 provoked the revolts of the Albaicín and the Alpujarras, after which the Muslims of Castile were ordered in 1502 to convert or leave. Granada's converted Muslims, the Moriscos, rose again in 1568 and were deported, and the Alhambra became a royal residence where Charles V began a Renaissance palace inside the Nasrid walls.
Nasrid Granada was among the most populous cities of fifteenth-century Europe, with perhaps 50,000 people or more, swollen by refugees. The Albaicín, the old Zirid town, was a dense quarter of houses, mosques and cisterns; the lower city held the Great Mosque, the silk market of the Alcaicería and the madrasa founded by Yusuf I in 1349; and the Alhambra above was a walled palace-city with its own mosque, baths, workshops and the fortress of the Alcazaba.
The kingdom's wealth came from silk, dried fruit and sugar, exported through Genoese merchants in Málaga and Almería. Its water was carried from the Sierra Nevada by channels such as the Acequia Real, which fed the Alhambra and the gardens of the Generalife, and made the Vega one of the most intensively irrigated landscapes of medieval Europe.
The Alhambra's palaces were built as a sequence of courtyards rather than a single building: the Mexuar, where the sultan heard petitions; the Comares palace around its long pool, whose tower holds the Hall of the Ambassadors under a wooden ceiling representing the seven heavens; and the Palace of the Lions around its fountain of twelve stone lions. The Nasrid motto, 'There is no victor but God', is carved thousands of times across their walls.