Following the proposal of "Legado andalusi", the cultural branch of the Society for the Development of the Sierra Nevada Winter Games, and after its detailed presentation at an assessment seminar of the cultural routes in Bourglinster in 1996, the Culture Committee elected this theme in April 1997.

It is necessary to insist on the birth of this proposal since among all the themes of cultural routes it profited from the outset both from national support and from considerable financial assistance, insofar as it constituted the guiding cultural project of a great sports gathering.

A Recommendation on the importance of this route was made during the Conference of Ministers responsible for cultural heritage, held in Helsinki in May 1996. It concerned a particularly representative project of a new form of cultural tourism, at the same time developing a topic unknown to the rest of Europe and enabling the discovery of a rural territory left behind in comparison to coastal tourism (Malaga or Almeria) and urban tourism (Seville, Cordoba or Grenade...). Moreover, the project received the support of the King of Spain, of the Governments of Spain and Andalusia, as well as that of the cultural ministry of the Kingdom of Morocco. As King Juan Carlos I declared in Madrid in 1995, "The Spanish Moslems interpreted with their own accents the most elevated topics in philosophy, literature, sciences and arts and enlightened through their creations Western Europe and the surrounding Moslem countries..."

Among the principal objectives of this project, which is now organised through a Foundation, one can enumerate:

• To make known the hispano-Moslem civilisation, its artistic events, its monuments, as well as the historical and social bonds between Europe and the Arab world;

• To spread the historical role that Spain and Andalusia played as cultural bridge between the Orient and the Occident, as well as their relations with the countries around the Mediterranean Sea and with those of Latin America;
• To reinforce connections with all these countries that have a common history;
• To promote cultural and rural tourism, traditional arts and trades (including silk), as well as to protect and restore the monumental and artistic heritage;
• To stimulate the sharing and valorising of this heritage by the countries that have it, to enable better mutual understanding;
• To contribute to the use of this common history and heritage to improve the perception of the "Other" and to establish a series of relations that can help us build a more humane and interdependent world.

During the eighth century, a series of groups and families of nobles, coming from the East, and Berber tribes coming from Maghreb, penetrated the peninsula through the North of Morocco and little by little settled on the territory of Al-Andalus. This did not represent a total rupture with the then dominant hispano-visigothic culture. Quite to the contrary, the two cultures were based on a singular and dazzling indigenous culture that enormously differentiated Western Islam from the Eastern one.