A surrender that came with written guarantees
On 25 November 1491, in the siege camp of Santa Fe outside the city walls, Boabdil signed the terms that would end eight centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia.[4] The document, now known as the Treaty of Granada, promised Granada's Muslims specific, written protections:
- No one would be forced to convert to Catholicism
- Existing customs and daily life would not be interfered with
- No Muslim would be conscripted into the Crown's armies against their will[5]
These were not vague assurances, and they were not generous by accident. Granada had bargained from a starving city under siege since spring 1491, but the Crown needed the Alhambra handed over intact rather than burned, and a written promise was the price of a bloodless surrender.
The Crown moved on a separate front almost immediately. On 31 March 1492, barely three months after the surrender, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree inside the palace the ceremony now commemorates, ordering every unconverted Jew in Castile and Aragon to leave within four months.[1] Granada's Muslims did not have to wait long to see what a Crown promise was worth once the military threat was gone.
For Granada's negotiators, this level of protection was worth extracting even from a losing position. Cities that resisted the Reconquista longest generally fared worse once they fell, and the Nasrid court understood the value of a negotiated handover over a stormed one. That document is also, indirectly, where the modern ceremony's name comes from: Día de la Toma, the Day of the Taking, commemorates the moment the handover described in these clauses actually happened, not the negotiation that produced it. The two events, promise and possession, would drift apart within a decade, and the modern ceremony has inherited only the second one.
How the promises collapsed, 1499 to 1609
The written guarantees to Granada's Muslims lasted less than eight years. The Crown kept its side of the bargain only until 1499, when it handed the task of Christianising the city to Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, a harder man than his predecessor.[6] Cisneros moved fast: within two years, a royal decree ordered the forced conversion of Granada's remaining Muslim population.[7]
Explore nearby · Monument
Alcaicería
Granada's historic silk market, rebuilt after 1843 in Neo-Moorish style. Small shops sell ceramics, taracea woodwork, spices, and leather goods. Free to enter.
The practical effects followed quickly. Mosques were converted into churches, the city's hammams were closed, and Islamic festivals were banned outright — the religious life the Capitulations had promised to protect was dismantled piece by piece, not by a single decree but by an accumulating pattern of them.[8] The city's Muslims, now legally Christian in name, kept speaking Arabic in private and kept their customs alive in ways the Inquisition would spend the next century trying to root out.
By 1609, the process the Capitulations were supposed to prevent reached its endpoint. King Philip III decreed the expulsion of Spain's last Moriscos, closing more than a century of forced assimilation that began with a treaty nobody honoured past its first decade.[2] The full arc of that century, the 1568 Alpujarras revolt and the deportations that followed, is told in the Moriscos of Granada.
This is the history the modern ceremony compresses into a single festive date. What Granada's town hall commemorates every 2 January is the surrender of 1491, not what came after it, and that gap between the promise and its enforcement is where the modern argument actually begins.
A ceremony reborn: from civic ritual to nationalist stage
The modern Día de la Toma is not a direct five-hundred-year-old survival. Its current municipal form dates specifically to 1752, when the city's ceremonial protocol book first required the standard-bearer to carry the royal standard from the Town Hall to the Cathedral, close to the route the official ceremony still follows today.[9]
What happened to that ceremony under Francisco Franco's dictatorship is genuinely disputed among the sources that cover it, and this article attributes each claim rather than choosing between them.
One academic account of the ritual describes it as having "languished" under Francoism, reviving only in the 1980s.[10] A separate journalistic account, citing the Ideal newspaper's own archive, instead documents Franco personally celebrating the Toma from 1937 onward, in the middle of the Civil War.[11] Neither source reconciles the gap between a ceremony described as neglected and a dictator described as celebrating it publicly for nearly four decades.
Whatever the truth of the Franco years, both accounts agree on what happened after. Since its 1980s revival, the ceremony in Plaza del Carmen has grown steadily more politicized, with far-right demonstrators invoking what one account calls a "new crusade of reconquest" and clashing annually with counter-protesters in the same square where the standard is raised.[12] As early as 1989, Arab ambassadors formally petitioned the Spanish government to suppress what they called an "intolerant anniversary".[13] Since 2017, the Spanish Foreign Legion has guarded the royal standard in the procession, adding a further, more literal layer of militarisation to a ceremony that started as a municipal paperwork obligation.[14]
Why Día de la Toma is controversial today
The numbers behind the objection are not abstract. Nearly four in five Muslims in Spain report facing continuous discrimination, according to a survey by the Observatorio Español del Racismo y la Xenofobia[3] — and a ceremony that stages the defeat of Muslim Granada lands differently against that backdrop than the town hall's official framing suggests. In 2002, the Moroccan historian Azzuz Hakim petitioned King Juan Carlos I directly, asking the Spanish state to apologise for the Toma.[15]
Opponents and officials genuinely disagree about what the ceremony means, and both sides have said so on the record. José Chamizo, the former Andalusian Ombudsman, has warned that the official ceremony has become "a staging of far-right messages".[16] The city's own former culture councillor, Juan García Montero, took the opposite position: the event is "a family celebration" that only reads as intolerant to people who don't know Granada.[17] A former PP mayor, José Torres Hurtado, argued the far-right presence is a reaction to opposing demonstrations rather than something the ceremony itself causes, telling reporters that before counter-protests existed, this problem didn't.[18]
The clash is not just rhetorical. At demonstrations around the ceremony, opponents have chanted "genocides are not celebrated" against far-right marchers answering with "Arriba España".[19]
Both positions cannot be fully true at once, and Granada has never settled which one governs how the ceremony is actually run.
The far right's embrace: Vox and the 'new Reconquista'
Vox has treated Día de la Toma as a recruiting stage since before the party held national seats. In January 2019, the party's then secretary-general Javier Ortega Smith attended the ceremony and used it to praise the historical expulsion of Granada's Muslims, explicitly endorsing the concept of the Reconquista from the same square where the standard was raised.[20] The party has gone further institutionally, formally proposing that Andalusia replace its regional holiday, Día de Andalucía on 28 February, with 2 January as the region's official day.[21]
Vox's local figures frame this as heritage rather than provocation. In 2020, the party's Granada spokesman Onofre Miralles defended the ceremony as marking the unity of Spain, arguing the Reconquista itself concluded with the fall of Granada.[22]
“Día de la Toma is a day of historic celebration that directly represents the unity of Spain. With the Taking of Granada, the Reconquista came to an end.”
The pattern has repeated with the party's most visible national figures. Vox leaders including Macarena Olona and Ortega Smith have returned to the ceremony in later years, using the same public stage each time to reinforce the party's association with the date.[23] The ceremony that began as a treaty-signing anniversary has become, in the hands of Vox's leadership, an argument for the treaty itself: proof, as they see it, that the Reconquista concluded correctly and deserves annual celebration rather than complicated memory.
The strategy fits a broader pattern in Vox's local politics: the party has repeatedly used civic and religious commemorations, not just in Granada, as low-cost opportunities to attach itself to a narrative of national unity without having to legislate anything. Día de la Toma suits that strategy unusually well because the ceremony already exists, already holds an official calendar slot, and already draws television cameras every January. Mainstream conservatives in Granada's own town hall have handled the same date far more cautiously, treating it as inherited civic protocol rather than a political statement, which is precisely the gap Vox has spent years exploiting. Whether that gap closes, or widens further, has become as much a story about the ceremony's future as anything written into the 1491 treaty itself.
Can Día de la Toma change? The fight over BIC status and a coexistence festival
Granada's city council has tried to formalise the ceremony's protected status, and failed. It petitioned the Andalusian Parliament to declare Día de la Toma a Bien de Interés Cultural, a heritage designation that would have given it extra legal weight — the request was rejected.[24] Even inside the parties that run the ceremony, support has wavered. PSOE's current municipal spokesman, Francisco Cuenca, once argued for scrapping the celebration altogether and replacing it with a 26 May commemoration of Mariana Pineda, the Granada-born liberal martyr; he dropped the proposal once he became mayor.[25] Years earlier, when PSOE held the mayoralty, the party actually voted against holding the ceremony as such.[26]
The most sustained pressure comes from outside the town hall. Granada Abierta, a citizen platform, has spent more than thirty years campaigning to transform 2 January into a "Festival of Coexistence" rather than a celebration of conquest.[27] Its coordinator, Paco Vigueras, calls the Toma "a historical manipulation", a capitulation, he points out, that the Catholic Monarchs themselves broke.[28]
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Nothing has changed the date, the route, or the ceremony's official standing. What has changed is how loudly Granada now argues about it, a debate that circles back every January to the same unresolved question the 1491 treaty raised and never settled: whether the convivencia Granada markets to tourists is compatible with a ceremony that commemorates the moment it began to end.