---
title: "Muslim converts rebuild an Andalusian farm as Spain’s politics turn right"
description: "A couple’s 14-hectare retreat near Alora tracks a demographic shift Vox is campaigning against"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-24T08:28:25Z
modified: 2026-10-24T12:03:49Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/muslim-converts-rebuild-an-andalusian-farm-as-spain-s-politi-6982b5
language: en
tags: ["immigration", "religion", "spain", "history", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Muslim converts rebuild an Andalusian farm as Spain’s politics turn right

*A couple’s 14-hectare retreat near Alora tracks a demographic shift Vox is campaigning against*

By Luis Goa · October 24, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/muslim-converts-rebuild-an-andalusian-farm-as-spain-s-politi-6982b5

## In brief

- A British-Hungarian Muslim couple is building a retreat called the House of Andalus on 14 hectares above Alora, Spain
- Spain’s Muslim population is 2.4-2.5 million, about 5% of the total, per a March 2026 CEU CEFAS report
- 11% of babies born in Spain in 2024 had at least one Muslim parent nationally, rising to 27% in Girona province
- Far-right Vox polls 18-20% ahead of Spain’s 29 November election; the PP-Vox bloc polls 50.2%, up from 45.5% in 2023
- Vox’s 2023 Congress motion to suspend residency and citizenship for people from Islamic-majority countries was rejected

Al-Andalus held the Iberian peninsula for 781 years, from Tariq ibn Ziyad’s crossing at the Battle of Guadalete in 711 to Muhammad XI’s surrender of Granada on 2 January 1492, per the standard chronology of the period. Fourteen hectares of olive, pomegranate and avocado land above the town of Alora, in Spain’s Málaga province, is a much smaller unit, but it is being worked on the strength of the same history. Henrietta Szovati, a British-Hungarian Muslim, and her husband Ajmal Masroor, a therapist and imam, have spent the past two years turning an old farmhouse there into what they call the House of Andalus: a retreat meant to connect visitors to the region’s Islamic past and its land, as [Al Jazeera reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2026/10/24/the-muslims-finding-belonging-in-southern-spain).

The farm already carries close to 400 olive trees across its 14 hectares (35 acres); Szovati wants to get to 1,000. She and Masroor are funding the project from savings, and the plan includes a Quranic garden planted with species named in the text. None of that is unusual for a rural retreat anywhere in southern Europe. What is unusual is the reason given for choosing this particular hillside: not the climate, but the 700-odd years an Islamic civilisation ruled from Córdoba, Seville and Granada before 1492.

Szovati has lived in Britain since 2001 and married Masroor there a year later. She still does not feel she belongs. “I feel like an outsider there. I’m still not ‘one of us’ after more than 20 years,” she told Al Jazeera. Hungary, her other country, was never a candidate — she describes its government as “racist and right-wing.” Spain, she says, is the first place where neighbours meet her as Henrietta first and as a Muslim second, a distinction that matters in a country where a national election is five weeks away and immigration has become its central issue.

## Eight centuries, repackaged

Muslim rule over Iberia ran in three phases: a dependent emirate under the Damascus caliphate from 711 to 756; an independent emirate and then caliphate based in Córdoba, which became, by most historical accounts, the wealthiest and most technically advanced urban centre in Latin Christendom; and a long fragmentation into smaller taifa kingdoms after Córdoba’s collapse, ending with the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, which Christian forces took in 1492. The architecture that survives — horseshoe arches, carved plaster yeseria, zellij tilework — and the irrigation channels still called acequias, from the Arabic al-saqiya, are the physical residue of that span. For British Muslim writer Tharik Hussain, author of *Minarets in the Mountains* and its follow-up *Muslim Europe*, the loss has given al-Andalus an “Atlantis-like aura” in Muslim literature running from the 17th-century historian al-Maqqari to the 20th-century poet Allama Iqbal — a myth potent enough that people are now buying farmland on the strength of it.

## The numbers behind ‘Islamisation’

Spain’s Muslim population stood at between 2.4 million and 2.5 million people at the start of 2025, or roughly 5% of the national total, according to a March 2026 report from the [Observatorio Demográfico at CEU CEFAS](https://cefas.ceu.es/demografia-islam-espana/), a think tank attached to a Catholic university. Of that, the report estimates 1.79 million are first-generation immigrants and about 680,000 were born in Spain to at least one Muslim parent. The figure lines up, within a few thousand, with the 2,542,498 counted at the end of 2024 by the Unión de Comunidades Islámicas de España and the Observatorio Andalusí, as [El Confidencial Digital reported](https://www.elconfidencialdigital.com/articulo/vivir/poblacion-musulmana-espana-alcanza-25-millones-consolida-crecimiento/202603231822351011286.html) — two bodies with little else in common agreeing on the headcount, even as some outlets have run the same CEU data under the heading “Islamisation.”

The more loaded figure is births. CEU CEFAS, working from Spain’s National Statistics Institute birth microdata, estimates that 11% of babies born in Spain in 2024 had at least one Muslim parent — about one birth in nine, nationally. The regional spread is wider: Murcia and Catalonia have the largest Muslim shares of population, at roughly 10% and 9%, with Catalonia’s absolute total, near 700,000, the largest of any region, ahead of Andalusia’s 400,000 and Valencia’s 300,000. Within Catalonia the birth share climbs well above the national rate, as [El Debate reported](https://www.eldebate.com/espana/cataluna/20260323/cataluna-region-espanola-musulmanes-casi-cada-diez-habitantes_399247.html) from the same CEU CEFAS data.

**Where births with a Muslim parent run highest** Share of 2024 births with at least one Muslim parent, by province or nationally, %

|  | Share of 2024 births (%) |
| --- | --- |
| Girona | 27 |
| Lleida | 25 |
| Tarragona | 23 |
| Barcelona | 16 |
| Spain (national) | 11 |

Source: [CEU CEFAS Observatorio Demográfico, via El Debate](https://www.eldebate.com/espana/cataluna/20260323/cataluna-region-espanola-musulmanes-casi-cada-diez-habitantes_399247.html)

The gradient in that chart is the gap between a national average built on 46-odd provinces and the handful where immigration has concentrated for three decades. It is also the exact statistic Vox has built a campaign on.

## Votes follow the number

Spain votes on 29 November. Private pollsters put Vox at 18–20% going into the final weeks — Sigma Dos had it at 19.5% on 19 October, the PolitPro poll average 18.9% on 23 October — while the state-run CIS survey shows the ruling Socialists still well ahead. What is not in dispute is the combined right-wing bloc: the PP and Vox together polled 50.2%, against 45.5% at the 2023 election, as [The Local reported](https://www.thelocal.es/20260907/spains-right-wing-bloc-polls-absolute-majority-amid-migrant-crisis). The trigger was Ceuta: roughly 72,000 people attempted to storm the Morocco-Spain border fence there on 30-31 July, and immigration jumped to become the top concern for 45.9% of voters, up 16 percentage points in two months and ahead of housing, according to the pollster More in Common, as [the Spanish Eye reported](https://www.thespanisheye.com/2026/09/05/poll-hard-right-vox-party-sees-surge-in-support-after-ceuta-migrant-crisis/). Among Vox’s own voters the figure is 75.7%.

Vox’s position on Muslim immigration predates this cycle and has not moved. In October 2023 the party filed a motion in Congress to suspend processing of Spanish nationality and residence permits for nationals of Islamic-majority countries and to bar entry to immigrants from those countries “if their correct and peaceful integration cannot be guaranteed,” arguing that recent attacks in Brussels and France were the direct result of Europe’s “open-door policies” and that “Islamism constitutes a first-order threat to the security and stability of the whole West,” as [Euronews reported](https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/19/spains-far-right-vox-wants-to-freeze-residence-permits-for-people-from-islamic-culture) at the time. The motion got almost no support and failed. Three years later, with the PP-Vox bloc polling above the threshold for a governing majority for the first time since Franco, the same argument is no longer a fringe motion that fails; it is closer to the median voter’s stated priority.

Szovati’s response to that is to change the subject. “Circumstances change, but community, connections and faith don’t,” she said, after acknowledging that being Muslim “can be difficult anywhere in the world today.” Her evidence is local rather than electoral: a visit to her neighbour’s 79-year-old mother, Maria, a Catholic, who asked about the scarf covering Szovati’s hair and was told it was a way to feel closer to God, the same reason the Virgin Mary covered hers. Maria’s own view, relayed by Al Jazeera, is that none of the outward signs of a faith matter much if you are not a good person underneath. No one in that exchange needed to defend anything.

Most of the British citizens around Szovati did not move to Andalusia for its Islamic history. Spain’s immigration observatory counted just over 419,000 UK nationals with residency documents in 2025; the census, which uses municipal registration rather than paperwork, counted 266,462 on 1 January 2025, down from a peak of 316,362 in 2013, as [The Local’s residency-stats roundup](https://www.thelocal.es/20251211/seven-key-residency-stats-about-brits-living-in-spain-in-2025) shows. Málaga province alone — the Costa del Sol — holds somewhere between 49,298 (census) and roughly 74,000 (broader residency count) of them, the largest single foreign nationality in the province even as the number falls for a second straight year. Szovati’s truck, dusty from hauling farm supplies rather than beach towels, is parked in the same province as that declining sun-seeker population, pursuing a different kind of return.

The open question is what the farm’s second anniversary looks like if the PP-Vox bloc converts its 50.2% polling average into a governing majority on 29 November. Spain’s roughly 2.5 million Muslims are already there; converging estimates from a Catholic-university think tank and an Islamic federation agree on that much. Whether a government built partly on reversing that number treats a 14-hectare retreat above Alora as heritage tourism or as the thing it was elected to stop is not yet measured by any poll.

## See also

- [House of Andalus](https://houseofandalus.com/about) — houseofandalus.com · The retreat project's own site
- [Review: Muslim Europe by Tharik Hussain](https://geographical.co.uk/book-reviews/review-muslim-europe-by-tharik-hussain) — geographical.co.uk · On the book cited for al-Andalus's hold on Muslim literature