Lost Paradise: The Story of Granada

By Elizabeth Drayson

The essential history of an iconic European city, by Cambridge academic Elizabeth Drayson.

'An admirable achievement... [Drayson has] expertise as a scholar and command as a storyteller' BBC History Magazine

'A glittering homage to one of the world's most beautiful and storied cities' Dan Jones

'Beauty built on blood and brutality... A fascinating new tome' Daily Mail

From the early Middle Ages to the present, foreign travellers have been bewitched by Granada's peerless beauty. The Andalusian city is also the stuff of story and legend, with an unforgettable history to match. Romans, then Visigoths, settled here, as did a community of Jews; in the eleventh century a Berber chief made Granada his capital, and from 1230 until 1492 the Nasrids – Spain's last Islamic dynasty – ruled the emirate of Granada from their fortress-palace of the Alhambra. After capturing the city to complete the Christian Reconquista, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella made the Alhambra the site of their royal court.

In Lost Paradise, Elizabeth Drayson takes the reader on a voyage of discovery that uncovers the many-layered past of Spain's most complex and fascinating city, celebrating and exploring its evolving identity. Her account brings to the fore the image of Granada as a lost paradise, revealing it as a place of perpetual contradiction and linking it to the great dilemma over Spain's true identity as a nation. This is the story of a vanished Eden, of a place that questions and probes Spain's deep obsession with forgetting, and with erasing historical and cultural memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apollo
• Release date: Jul 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788547444

Elizabeth Drayson

Elizabeth Drayson teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge. She is Lorna Close Fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College and lecturer in Spanish at Peterhouse. Her books include The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava (2007) and The Lead Books of Granada (2013).