Historical configuration of the province of Granada
Configuration of the Granada province / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The current configuration of the province of Granada is the result of a long process of territorial organization that reached its culmination in 1833, by means of the decree of provincialization promulgated by Javier de Burgos, Ministry of Development of the government of the regent Maria Christina of Bourbon. Until that date, what now constitutes the province of Granada was integrated within the limits of the so-called Kingdom of Granada.
It is necessary to go back to the Kūra of Elvira and the Zirid Taifa of Granada as the most significant precedents of what later became the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, assimilated by the Crown of Castile after the end of the Reconquest (1492). However, it was in the transition from the authoritarian monarchy of the Habsburgs to the absolutist monarchy of the Bourbons that the territorial organization of the State became a recurring theme of great political importance. The absolutist conception of the state encouraged the development of a series of projects, either of a liberalism or conservative nature, which would replace the old historical kingdoms of the Reconquest with the modern Spanish provinces.
The former Kingdom of Granada will be an important part of this process, given the imbalance of its superficial extension with respect to other provinces and its internal heterogeneity, which made its supervision and administration by the central state very difficult. Thus, already in 1799 the Maritime Province of Malaga was created, which grouped the districts of the western part of the kingdom around the clear capital of Malaga, with a population of some 50,000 inhabitants in those years. In the other provincializing projects, the capital of Malaga was a constant tonic.
The size of the Kingdom of Granada was still quite disproportionate and in the constitutional project of Bauzá (1813) a dialogue began on the need to constitute a province in the easternmost part of the kingdom. On this occasion neither the capital nor the demarcation of both provinces could be as obvious a question as it had been in the case of Malaga. The options of Guadix and Baza as capitals of the new province were considered, but finally, in the provincialization of Cortes of 1822, the option of Almería was chosen and the border shifted to the east, thus including the high plateaus of Guadix and Baza-Huéscar in the province of Granada. Thus, the provincial division of 1822 was repealed by the restoration of absolutism in 1823, the territory of the former kingdom of Granada was divided into three provinces, leaving the province of Granada with its boundaries practically defined in its current state, only nuanced with the subsequent and final provincialization of Javier de Burgos from Motril (1833).