Historian Bettany Hughes traces the eight centuries during which Muslim rulers governed large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, from the Umayyad conquest in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. She walks the streets of Cordoba, once one of the largest and most sophisticated cities in the world, and the Alhambra palace complex, reading the architecture as evidence of a civilization that funded libraries, hospitals, and observatories while much of the rest of Europe had none. Interviews with scholars lay out how Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities coexisted and clashed under this rule, and how Arabic translations of Greek philosophy and science eventually fed back into European universities. Hughes pushes against the standard telling of the Middle Ages as a purely European story, arguing that the Reconquista's endpoint erased a period whose intellectual legacy is still underacknowledged. The film uses surviving manuscripts, tiles, and courtyard architecture as its main evidence, letting the physical remains of Al-Andalus carry the argument about what was lost.