Migraciones, interculturalidad, exilio y arquitectura. Cerámica española del siglo XVII en Túnez y América, un encuentro transatlántico

At the beginning of the sixteenth century,
shortly after the Christian conquest of Granada, Spanish Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity. Less than a century after that, in 1609, these new Christians, called Moriscos, were finally expelled from Spain. Many of them went to different Islamic territories around
the Mediterranean, but a large number settled in Tunisia. Tens of thousands arrived there, generating a huge impact in many fields of Tunisian culture whose consequences are visible even nowadays.
Before his expulsion, the Moors had a remarkable role in construction and design in 16th-century Spain, where they continued the techniques and likings of their Islamic tradition and gradually included European Renaissance influences, creating the hybrid models that characterized the arts of this period as the tiles that we will develop in this text.
When finally Moors were expelled, they
brought this art to their exile, a kind of confluence between Renaissance and Islamic Art. Contemporaneously, the conquest and colonization of America was being developed. So, Spanish conquerors brought to America, among other things, identical tiles. Therefore, we can find this type of tiles in contemporary structures located in Africa and Latin America, building an unsuspected transatlantic encounter.