Speak the Culture: Spain: Be Fluent in Spanish Life and Culture

Slowly does it: theReconquista

The Christians had been chipping away at Moorish

Spain ever since Asturian folk hero Pelayo repelled

Muslim advances at Covadonga some time around 720.

A mere 770 years later, Granada fell and they had their

peninsula back.The now familiar regions of Castile,

Aragón, Catalonia, León and Navarre all emerged in the

process, only really effective in varied alliance as they

slowly pushed south.They fought each other as often as

they fought the Moors. Portugal broke off as a separate

kingdom in 1143.The hard work, spearheaded by

emerging Iberian superpowers Castile and Aragón and

often carried out under the banner of Santiago

(St James), was pretty much complete by the mid

13 thcentury when al-Andalus was hemmed back to

Granada.Then came a 200-year pause, a period when

ineffectual Castilian monarchs spent much of their time

concentrating on trade or picking on Jews. Only the

God-fearing lovematch of Isabel of Castile and Fernando

of Aragón finally mustered the strategic wherewithal

to subdue Granada in 1492. On arrival in the city, the

monarchs’ soldiers burned all 80,000 books in the

Alhambra palace.

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1. Identity: the
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The first new mosque to
be opened in Granada
since theReconquista
was unveiled in 2003.

Shared knowledge
The process of
reconquest and the
inherent transition from
Islam to Christianity
didn’t always equate to
cultural regression for
Spain. It wasn’t always
a simple ‘them and us’
situation; marriage
between Christians
and Muslims wasn’t
uncommon, while
languages and ideas
were often shared.
As the possession of
land ebbed and flowed
between Islamists and
Christians, the incumbent
regimes were often
surprisingly tolerant of
their citizens’ different
faiths. Poet King Alfonso
X, who ruled over most
of Christian Spain in the
13 thcentury, was known
asEl Sabio(The Wise).
He chronicled the battle
with the Moors and
created a rarefied,
learned atmosphere in
Toledo, expounding the
benefits of both Arabic
and Ancient Greek
culture.

A lingering prejudice

After the Moorish

invasions of the Middle

Ages, Spain received

little in the way of

migrants for centuries

and duly cultivated a

rather caricatured

impression of the

Arabic race. It means

that today, as the country

experiences its first

wave of mass migration

in aeons (about four

million since 2000), some

rather naïve prejudices

occasionally come to

the surface, based on

those relations that

began 1,300 years ago.

The term ‘Moro’ is

sometimes thrown

pejoratively at new

Muslim settlers.