Málaga

By the 15th century Málaga was the chief port of the Nasrid kingdom, a city of some 15,000 people, and that made it the hardest-fought prize of the Granada War. The Catholic Monarchs besieged it for more than three months, through assaults and artillery fire, until hunger forced its surrender on 18 August 1487. Nearly the whole remaining population, around 11,000 people, was sold into slavery in Andalusia, Valencia and Barcelona, and only about fifty were allowed to stay. Settlers from across the peninsula filled the emptied city, which kept its trade as the sea outlet for Antequera and Córdoba, and after a 17th century of floods, epidemics and earthquakes it entered a long prosperity in the 18th. Its merchant families also made it a liberal stronghold, and in 1831 the general José María Torrijos, who had come to restore the Constitution of 1812, was captured nearby, betrayed by the city's governor and shot with his men on the beach of San Andrés.