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Walking Holidays in Andalucia
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Andalucia richness
in history goes back to the Neanderthal man who lived on the Rock
of Gibraltar, 50,000 years ago. Then, came the Iberians influx in
about 8,000 BC. The Phoenicians established a chain of trading
posts, founding the sea port of Cadiz in 1,100 BC — Europe's oldest
city — and strongly influenced the way of life of the native
Iberians. |
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The Celts, in 800 BC, moved south across
Europe and into Andalucia. By 700 BC the Tartessus Kingdom was
flourishing in Andalucia, and a century later Greek sailors
founded trading ports along its shores. By the year 500 BC, the
Carthaginians had colonised southern Spain.
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The Romans, in
their struggle against Carthage, invaded the peninsula in 206 BC, crushing
the resistance of the native Iberians and soon transforming Andalucia
into one of their richest and best organised colonies, which they called
Betis, crisscrossing the region with paved roads. |
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Under the Romans, in the 4th century,
Spain became a Christian country, and the Spanish language —
perhaps the closest modern tongue to Latin — began to take its
current shape. |
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After the collapse of the Roman Empire,
Andalucia was devastated by successive waves of barbarian tribes
coming from northern Europe, with the eventual predomination of
the Visigoths. This warlike people reigned chaotically over the
peninsula for almost two centuries, leaving Spain open to the
invasion of the Moors.
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The Moors were
Islamic warriors from Arabia and North Africa invaded Spain in
the year 711 AD. They called the region al-Andalus because they
associated it with the Vandals, one of the barbarian tribes who
had, several centuries earlier, swept across the Strait of
Gibraltar into North Africa. |
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The Moors made the
region their home for eight centuries and permanently marked it
with their cultural legacy, signs of which are still visible in
monuments such as the Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra Palace
in Granada. |
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It was not until the 13th century that the
Christian Reconquest reached Andalucia, seizing the cities of
Cordoba and Seville. |
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By the end of the
15th century, the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel of Castille and
Ferdinand of Aragon, had taken the last stronghold of the Moors,
Granada and the Alhambra Palace.
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The history of Andalucia is an intertwined
web of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish fascinating inputs. |
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A Spanish tour guide once said that if the
moors were sometimes brutal to the native Spaniards, then the
queens and kings of Spain were as brutal, if not more, to the Native Americans.
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It is only now, six centuries later, that
The Moors' influences on European life and culture are finally
beginning to be fully understood. Historian
Bettany Hughes
traces the story of the mysterious and
misunderstood Moors, the Islamic society that ruled in Spain for
700 years, but whose legacy was virtually erased from Western
history.
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Oliver Baptiste wrote in his essay about Western Civilization to 1648:
The Moors' academies were home to of much of the work done on the developing of the sciences. New work
in the mathematical sciences far exceeding the work of Euclid, Pythagoras, and others developed "algebra" and "algorithms"
(words of Arabic origin) and introduced this new arithmetic to Europe (Lumpkin 179-180). The perfection of "Arabic numerals,"
actually taken from the Hindu number system, came with the Muslim addition of the zero (Chejne 407). Muslim schools made
advances in optics, physics, astronomy, and agriculture. Thanks to the Muslims, potash, nitric acid, alcohol (yet another
word of Arab origin) and other discoveries were made in the field of chemistry (Britannica 17).
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