In this project called “The double heritage of Granada”, in which we sought to show the great heritage of our city. We wanted to do together with something more curious and ingenious, agreeing with the study of the fossils in our geology classes. The four students who carried out this project thought it would be very interesting and a great opportunity to find out more about whether there were any hidden fossils in Granada's heritage and monuments. And all this, learning not only geology but heritage, orientation and above all companionship helping each other. With this video, we wanted to make learning about Granada's heritage more interesting, as well as learning about fossils. Since we have the luck of living in an amazing city that mix four cultures that are extended in the whole european union hebrew, arab, christian and gypsy. Also, multiple artistic styles are reflected in our monuments and buildings, such as Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, or much modern and current styles. 

To make that project possible, we previously conducted extensive research on the classification of living beings and geological history in order to fully comprehend it. And that way, gain a much better understanding of fossils and where they came from. We used images and diagrams to help us understand the subject more easily. In the days leading up to the trip, we reviewed everything we had learned and highlighted the objectives we had set for the project, which were to find as many fossils as possible in the city centre and show them to the rest of the world. Besides having an extremely good time and learning a great deal about our heritage and the fossils and history hidden in its rocks, we fully achieved our goal: to create a route that would take us through the most emblematic areas of Granada and discover hundreds of fossils and stories in its fossil-rich limestone rocks. 

The route began on the famous Calle Recogidas, on one of its sidewalks we found belemnites, fossils belonging to cephalopods that existed during the Mesozoic era, they are shaped like a dart, bullet or mace, conical and elongated. A fascinating curiosity is that belemnite fossils were once believed to be darts or arrows that had fallen from the sky during thunderstorms. In the same shop, we also found ammonites, some of them that were spectacular in size. Ammonites were extinct cephalopod molluscs with spiral shells that dominated the seas for millions of years. 

After that we went to Calle Ganivet, where we could see some Ammonites and Crinoids fossils at the post office's facade. There were a lot of them in only one tile!!!. We learnt in class that Crinoids, often called sea lilies or feather stars, because of their shape, were echinoderms that weren't completely extinct. That means that nowadays we can still see them in our oceans .

Then we went to the city hall square, where we saw a lot of rudists fossiles, and that was a really exciting moment because you could see that they were all over the floor tiles, we literally lost count of how many there were. Rudists were marine bivalve mollusks that formed reefs during the Mesozoic Era, unfortunately they finally disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous period.

Afterwards, we walked through Reyes Católicos, a really emblematic street, and we found a turrietella. Turritellas were spiral-shaped shell marine snails, gastropods, and they have existed since the Mesozoic Era. You can find some of them in the depths of the Atlantic ocean. We also found giant ammonites.

In one of Granada's historical monuments, Isabel La Católica square in the soil, we found extinct nummulites foraminiferas (single-celled protozoa), known for their large coin-shaped calcareous shells (hence their name, from the Latin nummulus, “small coin”). An interesting fact is that rocks were used to build the pyramids of Egypt.

With breathtaking views of the Alhambra opposite the Church of Santa Ana, we find bivalves. Bivalves belong to the phylum Mollusca, a group that includes animals as diverse as chitons, gastropods, sea tusk and cephalopods (squid and octopus), as well as clams.  

Finally we went to the cathedral, one of the most important monuments of Granada, where we saw an impressive anémona. An interesting fact is that this kind of fossils are difficult to find because anemones have soft bodies which makes the fossilization difficult.

As you can see in this project, Granada has more than monuments, it has live history for all over the streets. We hope that you have enjoyed and learned with this project as much as we did. And remember to look carefully at your city, who knows what you can find?