The Sacromonte and the Geography of the Sacred in Early Modern Granada

Abstract

In the last decades of the sixteenth century, a series of forged documents and supposed saints' relics were discovered in the Spanish city of Granada. This article examines how the Sacromonte, the site of the most prominent of the finds, became the symbolic landscape of Granadino spiritual identity. The relics and the miraculous events associated with them reconfigured the city's sacred geography, transforming a morisco holy site into a center of Christian holiness and a principal symbol of the religious aspects of early modem Granadino civic identity. This article also considers how this new sacred landscape found graphic expression in contemporary cartographic representations of Granada.