granada

Picture Granada beneath the Sierra Nevada: an Andalusian city whose name may conjure a pomegranate before it conjures palaces or mountains. The leading explanation connects it with Latin granatum, “pomegranate,” perhaps because the fruit grew there or because the city’s shape reminded someone of one; Spanish granada still means “pomegranate.” But the name has an intriguing rival: some scholars link it to a Moorish karnattah, supposedly “hill of strangers,” while the older Roman name Illiberis may preserve Iberian elements meaning something like “new town.” After the Christian conquest in 1492, Granada became the name Europeans knew for the city and province—and its fruit association traveled onward into French grenade, which later named the explosive because a seed-packed pomegranate looked uncannily like a fragmenting bomb. Remember Granada as a place-name with a fruit inside it, and a grenade as that fruit’s surprisingly violent cousin.