Granada had a ruling class, so went the saying, richer in doblones (doubloons) than in blasones (heraldic quarterings). ‘A new city, a body composed of members of different origins’, commented the humanist Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–75) as he tried to explain the intrigues of 1569 in the city hall which were undermining the authority of his nephew, the Captain General, who was then grappling with the Moorish rebellion. People had come to Granada because they were ‘poor and ill at ease in their homelands, or driven by an appetite for gain’. I do not say that there are no gentlemen, he hastened to add, but new cities are turbulent places ‘until virtue and wealth take root and a nobility comes into being’. Granada was peopled by immigrants of diverse origins, wrote the chronicler Bermúdez de Pedraza (1576–1655?). Few enough were the Conquistadors, more frequent the common folk, ‘new men who had no opportunities back home: artisans, journeymen and those in service, everything that one could call the lower classes (plebe)’.

The city was one of the largest in Spain, with 11,624 households in which lived 46,496 persons of an age to take communion, according to the great census of 1561. It is generally thought appropriate to increase the latter figure to 52,844 in order to include children under ten years of age (approximately) who would not yet be allowed access to the Eucharist.