At festival times the city is all animation. The anniversary of the taking of Granada is celebrated on January 2, when a procession is formed and proceeds to the Cathedral. Corpus Christi is another feast day, and there are two fairs during the year, one in June and the other in September.
But it is Granada of the past rather than of the present that holds us during a sojourn in the city of hills and vistas. It is the scene of dreams, a city of meditation. You court serenity rather than hilarity amid these haunted streets and silent ruins. The Arabs had a saying, referring to one who was sad, "He is thinking of Granada." It is this spirit, perhaps, which prevails in the patios of the Alhambra and amid the orange trees of the Generalife Gardens. And yet it is not true depression. It is a sense of the glory that has been, a meditativeness which is induced by the somnolence of the scene, and fostered by the languorous atmosphere of the South.
An ancient legend, often rehearsed by chroniclers, ascribed the founding of the city to certain descendants of Noah. It stated that Tubal settled in Spain and populated the country. There is some evidence that the province of Granada was the first district in Spain peopled by aliens. The founder of a town on the site of modern Granada is alleged to have been the mythical Iberus, who built Illiberis, which has been referred to as the original city. At any rate Illiberis existed in the Roman days, for it was a municipium under the rule of Augustus. The town was also the scene of an ecclesiastical council in the fourth century.
Plundered by the Vandals, and won by the Visigoths, Illiberis was in decay at the time of the coming of the Moors to the Iberian Peninsula. With the conquest of Andalusia, the town of Granada first came into existence.
At this period the Berbers overran the territory, though the Moorish authors relate that settlers from Damascus were the first Eastern colonizers of Granada.
The greatest obscurity shrouds the history of the city. It is strange that the writers of medieval times so rarely allude to Granada. About the year 860, a war raged over Andalusia between the native Moslems and their foreign rulers, the chief leader of the former being Omar Ben Hafsûn. Under his lieutenant, Nabil, an attack was made on Granada, and we read that some exultant verses written by the belligerents were attached to an arrow and propelled over the city wall. In these verses the words Kalat-al-hamra ("the Red Castle") appear. This first reference to Al-Hamra suggests that an edifice for defence stood on the hill now occupied by the Alhambra.
In 886 Omar Ben Hafsûn appears to have wrested Granada from the Khalifa of Cordova. A few years later Omar was conquered, and retiring to the Castle of Bobastro, he embraced the Christian faith, in which he died.
Zawi Ben Ziri, a Berber, first established Granada as a kingdom in 1013. Gayangos, the Spanish historian, states that Illiberis—or Elvira, as it was called at this time—was a dwindling city and that Habus Ibn Makesen, nephew to Zawi Ben Ziri, founded a new town and capital.