1487, The Muslim inhabitants resisted assaults and artillery bombardments before hunger forced them to surrender, virtually the entire population was sold into slavery or given as "gifts" to other Christian rulers. Five years before the fall of Granada.
On 24 August 1704 the indecisive Battle of Malaga, the largest naval battle in the War of the Spanish Succession, took place in the sea south of Málaga.
Málaga had a period of rapid development in the 19th century, becoming with Barcelona one of the two most industrialized cities of Spain. But that early industry was gradually dismantled, because the successive national governments were supporting the industrial centers in the north of the country.
After the coup of July 1936 the government of the Second Spanish Republic retained control of Málaga. Its harbor was a base of theSpanish Republican Navy at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. It suffered heavy bombing by Italian warships which took part in breaking the Republican navy's blockade of Nationalist-held Spanish Morocco and took part in naval bombardment of Republican-held Malaga. After the Battle of Málaga and the Francoist takeover in February 1937, over seven thousand people were killed. The city also suffered shelling later by Spanish Republican naval units. The well-known British journalist and writer Arthur Koestler was captured by the Nationalist forces on their entry into Málaga, which formed the material for his book Spanish Testament. The first chapter’s ofSpanish Testament include an eye-witness account of the 1937 fall of Málaga to Francisco Franco's armies during the Spanish Civil War.
After the war, Málaga and Koestler's old haunts of Torremolinos and the rest of the Costa del Sol enjoyed the highest growth of the tourism sector in Spain
