The endgame

Granada, of course, scooped up top prize in the architectural stakes thanks to the glorious forms of the Alhambra (“red fort” in Arabic) silhouetted against the snow-capped Sierra Nevada This, the last bastion of Al-Andalus, was an emirate ruled by the Nazrid dynasty that stretched from Gibraltar to Almería However, nearly eight centuries after the Moors’ arrival, it was being chipped away inexorably: Málaga fell (bloodily) in 1487, then Almería, and finally the besieged capital itself in 1492 Ferdinand and lsabella, the Catholic monarchs of a reunited Spain, imposed the new architectural forms of the Renaissance, the Spanish language, the beliefs and rituals of the Catholic church and, not least, a pork-based diet.