How do you imagine the area where Granada is today, say, three thousand years ago? We imagine it more or less a deserted area and travelled by nomadic tribes looking for trouble, who camped in different places every day. Because what is known doesn’t give us much more to fantasise about, since it seems that to the most civilised people, being by the sea was more appealing.
read more
How do you imagine the area where Granada is today, say, three thousand years ago? We imagine it more or less a deserted area and travelled by nomadic tribes looking for trouble, who camped in different places every day. Because what is known doesn’t give us much more to fantasise about, since it seems that to the most civilised people, being by the sea was more appealing.
The Turduli was one of those towns, and they got to make friends with the Carthaginians, to whom their Phoenician blood pushed to explore around those seas. But of course, the Romans were also around the Mediterranean. Rome could not stand the Carthaginians and ended up crushing them in the Punic Wars a couple of centuries B. C. When the enemy was swept away, the “Ave Caesar” people took little time to look around these lands to see what the city of Iliberis looked like, which they say to have been the seed of Granada.
The Roman era lasted a good while, but it would end as all things do when their time is over. It was the turn of the Barbarian hordes, those with such a bad press and great names such as Vandals, Alans and Silingos. However, the Goths were the more magnificent beasts and became the masters around the year 419. They were in charge of this lands for almost three centuries, the time that took some suspicious turbans to appear on the horizon.
In 711 Tarik arrived with some friends to conquer, in the name of Allah, an enormous territory that was going to be known as al-Ándalus and in which, in any case, Granada would take a long time to become significant. It had to wait until after the year 1000 when it gathered a certain amount of population and raised a couple of walls that gave it a little bit of shape.
But the best was yet to come, and during the following centuries, the city was gaining volume with palaces, kings and wonders, to become the magical and splendid Granada of the Alhambra and the Generalife. Later it was taken by the Catholic Monarchs and thus the extended Muslim period that had given it its looks and breathtaking beauty was closed.
Luckily, the place keeps enough for any visitor to be as stunned as the romantic Washington Irving was in the nineteenth century. The man could not believe what he saw while walking through the capital of Granada. He decided to tell it in writing and, after reading it, many people began to ask themselves this question: what’s in this city that this writer talks so much about it? And as he did so much for the town, they dedicated him a statue located in the forest that surrounds the Alhambra.
