Granada is the Moorish kingdom whose conquest completes one stage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon’s expansion and whose loss becomes part of Catalina’s private inheritance. In the novel, the city is more than a territory claimed for Spain: it is a remembered homeland, the setting for a story of defeat, and a measure against which Catalina considers power and coexistence.

Kingdom and ambition

Catalina describes Spain as being made from al-Andalus, the lands once ruled by Moorish princes. Granada has joined Castile and Aragon, but in her account the expansion is unfinished: her father intends to take Navarre, seeks Naples, and will not be satisfied until Spain controls further regions to the south and west of France. These are ambitions she predicts, not a record that every territory was acquired. Granada’s place in her account is therefore both a conquest already achieved and one stage in a continuing project of territorial expansion.

The Alhambra and its surrender

Catalina recalls the fall of the Alhambra through the fate of Boabdil. According to the story she tells, he left the palace with the keys on a silk cushion, bowed to her parents, and rode away. At a mountain pass, he looked back toward his kingdom and wept; his mother rebuked him for grieving over what he had failed to hold. Catalina presents the episode as tragic, while the contrast between the surrender’s ceremony and the loss it represents gives the story its force. Granada’s transfer is not merely a change of rulers: it is the end of a kingdom as Boabdil knew it.

A remembered homeland

In a dream set in March 1502, Catalina imagines flying south from Toledo over New Castile toward Granada and the Alhambra. Within the palace complex, she searches for her mother, Isabella of Castile, who is walking there and thinking of her daughter far away in England. The dream makes Granada an intimate place of separation and attachment: Catalina is distant from her mother, yet returns to her through a remembered Spanish landscape. The city thus connects her present life abroad to the family and kingdom from which she has been separated.

Conquest and coexistence

The novel also sets Granada’s conquest against the culture it associates with al-Andalus. In the author’s account of the research behind the novel, the conquered society is described as rich and tolerant, and its ideal of convivencia is presented as a history in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived alongside one another as People of the Book. This framing gives Granada a significance beyond the military victory celebrated by Catalina’s parents: it preserves the possibility of another model of religious life even as the novel recounts its overthrow. Granada consequently carries a double meaning throughout the story—proof of the reach of Spanish power, and a reminder of the society and homeland that power displaced.