The surrender of Granada on 2 January 1492 to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed the eight-century Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, ending the last Muslim kingdom in Western Europe. The Nasrid sultan Boabdil surrendered the keys of the Alhambra palace-fortress without significant resistance and went into exile, reportedly weeping as he looked back at the castle. The same year, Columbus sailed west under Spanish patronage, making 1492 the most consequential year in Iberian — and arguably world — history.

The fall of Granada and the image of Boabdil's last sigh became an enduring theme in Spanish and European Romantic poetry, symbolising the pathos of civilisational defeat. Chateaubriand and Washington Irving popularised the legend; the 'Last Sigh of the Moor' became a trope of Orientalist verse. In Arabic, a tradition of lament poetry (rithā' al-mudun) mourned the loss of Andalusian cities and their citadels, a tradition that continued into the twentieth century in the work of Mahmoud Darwish.