The historian Henríquez de Jorquera in his “Annals of Granada” attributes the foundation of the village to the Arabs of the 8th and 9th century, although before that there was a settlement from the Hispano-Visigothic period and it is believed that it already existed in Roman times under the name of Pinienllus.
Since the 16th century it has changed its name several times, in 1574 it appears as Pinillos de la Sierra, in 1642 as Pinillos del Genil, a name which it will keep until 1810, when it appears definitively under the name of Pinos Genil.
It has a very complicated orography as it is located in the narrow valley formed by the Cerro de la Cruz and the Cerro de Don Luis, with the river Genil dividing its urban centre, which gives it peculiar climatic conditions and a unique beauty.
Its municipal district borders Cenes de la Vega, Granada, Dúdar, Güéjar Sierra and Monachil. The River Genil and its tributary, the Aguas Blancas, flow through it. It has two distinct nuclei, the town centre proper and Los Pinillos, a neighbourhood separated from the village by about 3 kms.
The inhabitants are called “pinero” and “pinera”. And their affectionate nickname is “rano” and “rana”.
Pinos Genil has a privileged location between Granada and Sierra Nevada, being only 9 km from the capital of Granada and 23 km from the ski resort of Pradollano, with whose history it has always been closely linked.
Until well into the 20th century, Sierra Nevada had never been a centre of attraction for skiing, despite the fact that at the end of the 19th century, the Granada writer Ángel Ganivet, Spanish consul in Helsinki, recognised that it offered excellent opportunities for snow sports on the peaks of Granada.
It was in 1929 when the Sierra Nevada Society, the third oldest club in Spain and a pioneer in Andalusia, built the first lodge in the Hoya de la Mora, in the Granada mountain massif.
It was in the 1920s that it received a great boost from the Duke of San Pedro de Galatino with the construction of the Granada-Sierra Nevada road and the Sierra Nevada tramway.
The vicissitudes of history meant that the development of snow tourism in the Sierra Nevada changed its initial project, which envisaged the location of the ski areas in the plains of Otero and Hoya de la Mora, which would be accessed by tram from Granada to the Barranco de San Juan (Güéjar Sierra) and from there by cable car to the area of the hostels, for that of locating the ski resort in Pradollano and opting for access to it via the Sierra Nevada road.
Both the Sierra Nevada tramway, which had a station in Pinos Genil, and the road, which passed through the village itself, had an impact on the economic development of the municipality, so that the history of Pinos Genil cannot be understood without the Sierra Nevada and the projects of the Duke of San Pedro de Galatino.
