Send Gift Baskets to Malaga, Spain

In 770 BC, Phoenicians settled in Tire, where they built a colony called Malaka (Greek: ) or Malake. The town served as a waypoint on trade routes between Phoenicia and the Strait of Gibraltar and controlled access to Guadalmedina. Like other Phoenician colonies, the Phoenician colony fell under Carthaginian rule in the 6th or 5th century B.C. The Phoenician and later Roman urban core were between Gibralfaro Hill and the mouth of the Malaca flumen (Guadalmedina).

It was the Roman Republic that controlled Malaca after the Punic Wars. As early as the 1st century BC, Strabo noted that it had a Phoenician profile, unlike the Hellenized Mainake settlement nearby.

It was governed by the Lex Flavia Malacitana, a special law that changed it into a Confederate city. During this period, a Roman theatre was constructed. The Visigoths ruled it after the Western Roman Empire fell. The Byzantine Empire took the town circa 552; Malaca or Carthago Nova may have become Spania’s capital. As a result of the Byzantines’ restoration and expansion of the docks, the city’s fishing and trading tradition was further strengthened. A Visigoth king named Sisebuto retook the city in 615. The Visigoths ruled it until 711 when the Umayyad Caliphate conquered it.

The city became an important center of regional trade in the 8th century. A town known to them as Mlaqah was ruled by the Umayyad Emirate of Cordoba (later Caliphate) after secession from the Abbasid caliphate. The early 10th-century chronicle of Aḥmad al-Rāzī praises Málaga’s vineyards for producing raisins of unparalleled quality. Malaga became the capital of a distinct Taifa kingdom after the Caliphate of Córdoba ended.