Al-Andalus

For nearly eight centuries, from 711 to 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula was part of the Islamic world. Al-Andalus produced a civilisation with its own character — Arab, Amazigh, Iberian, Jewish and Christian elements combined into something that belonged entirely to the place.

Córdoba under the Umayyads of the west became the largest city in Europe, with paved and lit streets, running water, public baths and a library said to hold hundreds of thousands of volumes. Its Great Mosque, with the forest of double horseshoe arches, remains one of the most influential buildings ever raised.

Seville, Granada, Toledo and Zaragoza each had their own courts and scholars. The Alhambra, built by the Nasrids as the last Muslim dynasty in Iberia, brought muqarnas vaulting, water gardens and carved stucco to a level that has never been surpassed.

Al-Andalus also served as the main channel through which Greek philosophy and Arabic science reached medieval Europe, translated in Toledo from Arabic into Latin. Its legacy remains visible in Spanish and Portuguese architecture, in thousands of loanwords, in irrigation systems still in use, and in the Andalusian music preserved to this day in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.