Short answers, pulled from the story.
Al-Andalus began with the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, when Tariq ibn-Ziyad landed at Gibraltar on the 30th of April of that year. It ended on the 2nd of January, 1492, when the last Nasrid ruler Muhammad XI formally surrendered the Emirate of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs.
The Caliphate of Córdoba was established in 929 when Abd al-Rahman III declared himself caliph. During this period, Córdoba grew to a population of more than half a million and surpassed Constantinople as the largest and most prosperous city in the world. It became a centre for medicine, science, philosophy, literature, and the arts, and between 70,000 and 80,000 manuscripts were copied there each year in the 10th century alone.
Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, who died in 1013, is widely regarded as the greatest physician in the history of Western Islam; his comprehensive medical encyclopaedia was translated into Hebrew, Latin, and Castilian and used for centuries. The astronomer Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Zarqali, who died in 1087, was acknowledged by Copernicus in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. The ibn Zuhr family produced five generations of medical scholars, with Abu Marwan ibn Zuhr providing one of the earliest clinical descriptions of the scabies mite.
Al-Andalus was multilingual, with Arabic, Andalusi Romance, Hebrew, Latin, and Berber all present. Arabic arrived with the 711 conquest and spread through conversion and administration, becoming the language of literature and governance. By the end of the 9th century, Andalusi Christians and Jews were writing Arabic in Hebrew letters, and multilingual households were an attested phenomenon.
After the surrender of Granada on the 2nd of January, 1492, the Capitulations of 1492 initially permitted Muslims to continue practising their religion, but mass forced conversions in 1499 led to a revolt and the revocation of those terms. In 1502, the Catholic Monarchs decreed forced conversion of all Muslims under the Crown of Castile. Descendants of these converts, called Moriscos, were expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614, and the last mass prosecution of Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727.
Al-Andalus transmitted crops including sugarcane, rice, oranges, lemons, apricots, saffron, and cotton to Europe, and introduced the Hindu-Arabic numeral system via Spanish Muslims in the 11th century. The Toledo School of Translators rendered Arabic texts into Latin, and scholars like Averroes and al-Zahrawi significantly influenced the European Renaissance. Irrigation systems called acequias and architectural forms in the Mudéjar style continued to shape the Iberian Peninsula for centuries after 1492.