Granada fell in 1492, but Spain's Moriscos stayed until 1614

Granada surrendered on 2 January 1492, when Boabdil (Muhammad XII), the last Nasrid sultan, handed the keys of the Alhambra to Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. The handover ended the last Muslim-ruled state in the Iberian Peninsula, about 780 years after the conquest of 711, and capped a ten-year war.

Some histories date the conquest to 1491, because the surrender terms, the Capitulations, were agreed by both sides’ delegates in November 1491. The January ceremony was the public end of a deal already struck. Boabdil rode down from the Alhambra and was recorded as telling Ferdinand, in Arabic:

“God loves you greatly. Sir, these are the keys of this paradise. I and those inside it are yours.”

For Christian Europe, which had watched Constantinople fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, it was a triumph. For Granada’s Muslims the fall of the kingdom was the start of a long unravelling, not an overnight end:

• 1491–1493: much of the noble and intellectual elite leaves for North Africa, and an estimated 10,000 others follow. Boabdil goes first to the Alpujarras, then to Morocco.
• 1499: Fray Hernando de Talavera, who had followed the Capitulations’ rule of conversion by “soft means”, is replaced by the far harsher Cardinal Cisneros.
• 1501: after a crushed revolt in the Albaicín and the Alpujarras, the authorities claim the Muslims have broken the covenant, and forced baptisms begin.
• 14 February 1502: a royal Pragmatic orders every Mudéjar in Castile to convert or leave. Exit was so restricted (no one under 14 could go) that conversion was the only real option.
• 1609–1614: the Moriscos, converted Muslims and their descendants, are expelled from all of Spain: between 275,000 and 300,000 people expelled or dead.

So Muslim rule in Iberia ended in 1492, but a Muslim-descended population lived on in Spain for more than a century afterwards.