Granada

Camino Mozárabe

GranadaAndalucía

Toponym of double filiation, Hispano-Roman and Arabic. The most sustained hypothesis —⁠Federico Corriente, Joan Coromines⁠— derives the medieval form Gharnāṭa (غَرْنَاطَة) from the old Ibero-Roman toponym Iliberris ('new city' in Iberian, cited by Strabo) through an intermediate stage Garnatha documented in 9th-century Mozarabic cartularies. An alternative popular hypothesis links it to Castilian granada (fruit of the pomegranate), popular etymological explanation without philological support.

Granada was capital of the last Muslim kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula: the Nasrid kingdom of Granada (1238–1492), established after the collapse of the Almohad caliphate by the Banu al-Aḥmar family. Under the Nasrids, Granada reached the greatest cultural splendour of late al-Andalus: the Alhambra, built between 1238 and 1492, is the best preserved Islamic palatial ensemble in the world. The two etymological hypotheses coexist in medieval documentation: Granatum in Christian charters (which sustains the reading of the pomegranate), Gharnāṭa in Arabic (which seems to reflect the sedimentation of the Iberian toponym). The surrender of Granada on the 2nd of January 1492 to the Catholic Monarchs closed seven centuries of Muslim presence in the Peninsula. Boabdil, last Nasrid sultan, handed the keys of the Alhambra to Ferdinand the Catholic at the Hill of the Martyrs.

Evolution of the name

  1. Iliberris Iberian before the 1st century BC
  2. Iliberis / Florentia Latin 1st centuries BC–5th
  3. Garnatha / Gharnāṭa Mozarabic / Andalusi Arabic 9th–15th centuries
  4. Granada Castilian from 1492

Reflections, to the letter

Look down, not up at the Alhambra: the fruit shows up on the bollards by Plaza Nueva, on the manhole covers, crowning every ceramic street sign. The city sowed itself with pomegranates because someone took its name from the pomegranate tree, even though philologists trace it back to ancient Iliberris through Arabic Gharnāṭa. So you walk on the fruit of a mistaken etymology the city chose to make true.

Languages of origin

Themes

Origin status

confirmed

Glossary

Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1238–1492)
Last Muslim kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula, founded by Muhammad I ibn Nasr (Yusuf I) in 1238 after the fall of the Almohad Empire and the Christian advance of the Reconquista. It comprised the current provinces of Granada, Almería and Málaga, with approximate extension of 25,000 km². Its cultural and artistic splendour —⁠Nasrid architecture of the Alhambra, bilingual Arabic-Hebrew poetry, medical and astronomical science⁠— made it one of the great intellectual foci of the late medieval Mediterranean. The 1492 capitulation by Boabdil to the Catholic Monarchs ended the eight hundred years of Muslim presence in the Peninsula.

Sources

  • Corriente, F. — Diccionario de arabismos
  • Ladero Quesada, M.Á. — Granada nazarí

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Camino Mozárabe

  1. ··· toward Santiago
  2. Luque
  3. Alcaudete
  4. Frailes
  5. Alcalá la Real
  6. Atarfe
  7. Pinos Puente
  8. Granada
  9. Quéntar
  10. La Peza
  11. Guadix
  12. Fiñana
  13. Alboloduy
  14. Alhama de Almería
  15. ··· toward the start