Stand in the plaza of San Nicolás in the Albaicín at sunset and you see the whole story of Granada at once: the red walls of the Alhambra across the valley, the snow of the Sierra Nevada behind them, white houses tumbling down the hill, church towers and, a few streets away, the minaret of a mosque.
The Nasrid kingdom
In 711 armies from North Africa crossed into the Iberian peninsula. For almost eight centuries large parts of what is now Spain and Portugal were al-Andalus, part of the Muslim world, a place of great learning, architecture and trade.
As the Christian kingdoms of the north advanced, al-Andalus shrank. From 1238 the Nasrid dynasty ruled a small kingdom from Granada, and over the next two centuries they built the Alhambra: palaces of carved plaster, fountains and courtyards, and walls covered in tiles of endless geometry. The eight-pointed star in the logo of YWAM Granada comes from those tiles.
2 January 1492
On 2 January 1492 the last Nasrid king, Muhammad XII, known in Spain as Boabdil, handed the keys of the city to Ferdinand and Isabella. Nearly eight hundred years of Muslim rule in the peninsula came to an end. The same year the Jews of Spain were expelled, and Columbus sailed west.
The treaty of surrender promised that Granada's Muslims could keep their faith. Within a decade that promise was broken: they were pressed to be baptised or leave, and their descendants, the Moriscos, were finally expelled from Spain in the early seventeenth century.
Why this history matters to us
We tell this story honestly because it is part of the ground we walk on. In Granada the name of Christ was once tied to conquest and force. Jesus never asked for that. He came with open hands, and He calls His followers to love their neighbours, including those of another faith.
Today Granada is a meeting point again. It has a visible Muslim community, a great university full of students from across the world, and Morocco only a few hours away. For us that makes it one of the best places in Europe to learn cross-cultural ministry: with humility, friendship and the freedom to share our faith.
Water from the spring in Alfacar, where our base stands, once flowed down the Aynadamar channel to the Albaicín. Our prayer is the same: that living water would flow from the hill into the city.