More than any other spot on earth, Granada seems haunted by memories of bygone glory. The wide plains, now inhabited by less than seventy-five thousand, once swarmed with over half a million souls. The artist feels poignantly the charm of those long centuries of Arabian Days and Nights that were forever blotted out by the zeal of the Christian sword. The ruined temples still attest the thrift and industry, the refinement and learning of the vanished race; the squalid poverty that has replaced it is deaf and blind to the records of ancient grandeur, but the traveler and the historian may still be thrilled by the struggle that destroyed "the most voluptuous of all retirements" and feel there as nowhere else the relentless power of the most Catholic Kings, the pathos of the Moor. Granada is a very old city, and like Cordova and Seville, it was one of the principal Moorish centres; in fact after their fall, the industries and culture which had been theirs went to swell the inheritance of Granada. Its name has always been associated with the scarlet-blossoming tree which covers its slopes, whose fruit the Catholic sovereigns proudly placed in the point of their shield, with stalks and leaves and shell open-grained. During the Roman occupation, a settlement had been made on the wooded slopes at the foot of the Sierra Nevada and called Granatum (pomegranate). The Goths in their turn swept over the peninsula until, in 711, they were driven out of the valley by the advancing Arab hordes. These transformed the name given it by the Romans to Karnattah. Seven hundred and eighty-two years passed before the Crescent set forever on the Iberian peninsula. Dynasties had succeeded one another in the various kingdoms formed of larger and smaller portions of southern and central Spain, but in the north, hardy monarchs had founded more stable thrones on the ruins of the Gothic Empire, and they were eagerly watching the advancing decay, the domestic discord of the Mohammedan power and grasping every opportunity for the aggrandizement of their own states. [Illustration: KEY OF PLAN OF GRANADA CATHEDRAL A. Sagrario. B. Royal Chapel. C. Capilla Mayor. D. Choir. E. Door of the Perdon. F. Door of St. Jeronimo. G. Main Entrance.] In the tenth century, the Moorish power was at its zenith. During the eleventh, Granada had become strong enough to break away from the caliphate of Cordova. There the Almorvides and Almohades dynasties had alternated while the Nasrides ruled in the kingdom and city of Granada until the luckless Boabdil surrendered its keys.