Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett

Author:Giles Tremlett [Giles Tremlett]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571247905
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2013-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

9

11-M: Moros y Cristianos

The road south from Granada towards the Mediterranean rises gently uphill as it rounds the western fringes of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. As you crest the rise, the sierra swells upwards on the left, a first, dramatic rampart towards the Mulhacén, mainland Spain’s highest peak. This is where the rivers start running south, rushing for the nearby sea. It is, however, the name of this pass – rather than the countryside around it – that impresses. For this, a modest sign indicates, is the ‘Puerto del Suspiro del Moro’, ‘The Pass of the Moor’s Sigh’.

It was here, according to legend, that Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of Granada, looked back for the final time towards the city. Boabdil, whose Mediterranean kingdom had stretched west to Málaga and east to Almería, was a sentimental man. Standing here on a January day in 1492, the story goes, he wept. It was not just the end of his personal reign, but of 781 years of Muslim kingdoms in Spain. The Granadinos still celebrate the Fiesta de la Reconquista, of the Reconquest, every 2 January. They are not always keen to recognise it, but a century and a half must still pass before their city can claim to have been Christian for longer than it was a place where, principally, Mohammed was revered.

Boabdil was on his way to La Alpujarra, the steep, south-facing foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragón had left him a small fiefdom in return for his capitulation. As he stood looking back towards Granada and his recently abandoned Alhambra fortress-palace, his formidable mother, Ayxa, is reputed to have scolded him. Washington Irving, the American writer who was so entranced by the Alhambra when he arrived here in the 1820s, put her words this way: ‘‘‘You do well,” said she, “to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man’.’’ Irving did not invent the story himself. Well before he arrived here on his horse, this had been known as ‘The Moor’s Sigh’. ‘La Cuesta de Las Lágrimas’, ‘The Slope of Tears’.

The year Granada was taken, bringing almost eight centuries of Christian Reconquista of Iberia to a formal end, was extraordinary. It is hard to overestimate the importance, not just to Spain but to the world, of the events that unfurled under the joint flags of Castile and Aragón. This year still conjures up a one-line childhood rhyme which I used to memorise dates. ‘In 1492,’ I learnt,‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ On the far side of the Atlantic, indeed, Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, creating a colony on the island of Hispaniola – now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Spain’s Jews, meanwhile, were expelled on the orders of Isabella and Ferdinand. This couple, known as the Catholic Kings, had, by uniting their realms, effectively founded modern Spain (though it would take until 1512 to fit in the last piece of the puzzle, Navarre). Today’s

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