Why go
This period explains why a city with an Islamic street plan also has a major cathedral and later commercial route to the sea. The changes were social as well as architectural: protections for Muslim communities narrowed, forced conversion followed, and expulsions reshaped the region.
The full story
After the Christian conquest, Muslim communities in the Málaga area initially lived under agreements that protected people, property and religious practice. Those protections eroded. By the sixteenth century, Muslims were compelled to convert and were known as Moriscos; expulsions followed in the early seventeenth century. The city itself was being remade. Calle Nueva opened a broad commercial link from the main square, now Plaza de la Constitución, toward the sea gate. The cathedral rose on the site of the former main mosque, and churches and convents drew settlement beyond the older walls into neighbourhoods such as La Trinidad and El Perchel. The harbour remained important enough to prompt new works and later expansion. A walk from the square along Calle Nueva toward the port shows the commercial part of this transformation; the cathedral marks the religious and architectural break with the medieval city. Those visible changes should be read alongside the much harder history of the people displaced by them.
Useful to know
- Walk from Plaza de la Constitución toward the sea along Calle Nueva to trace the later commercial route.
- Pair that street with the cathedral to see how the old urban plan was recast.