I'm aware of the important points, the Moors arriving and reaching to Tours, El Cid and the Fall of Granada (coming from a Spanish speaking country, history courses tended to focus on the Spanish side of the Reconquista while the Portuguese one was largely ignored), but I'd like to learn more about the rise of the Christian kingdoms and how Moorish Iberia was and how Al Andalus fractured into the smaller sultanates. I'm fluent in English and Spanish so any recommendations in either language will do.
Thanks
Alright! I saved this last night and now I finally have time to answer it. I've got plenty of recommendations for you.
The Reconquest of Spain by Derek Lomax is an old but solid general history of the reconquest.
La España medieval by Emilio Mitre Fernandez is a quick-and-dirty general history of medieval Spain, with decent coverage of the Reconquista, if you need/are interested in that.
Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain by Joseph O'Callaghan is about the rhetoric and culture of crusade involved in the Reconquista. A really good in-depth work that also covers the whole chronology of interreligious warfare in medieval Iberia.
Medieval Spain, edited by Olivia Constable, is a great collection of primary source excerpts from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authors throughout the Middle Ages. It includes all sorts of topics, but there are plenty of segments directly and indirectly related to the Reconquista.
A Society Organized for War is a great book by James F. Powers that explores the nature and significance of the Christian kingdoms' town militias in the efforts of the Reconquista.
[Crusade and Colonisation](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4279906-crusade-and-colonisation?from_search=true](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4279906-crusade-and-colonisation?from_search=true) is a collection of articles by Elena Lourie, a hispanist who studied many minute details of the Reconquista (non-Christian mercenaries in Christian service, special cases of temporary military religious service and their similarity to the Muslim concept of ribat), and it includes her article "A Society Organized for War," whose title Powers borrowed and whose thesis he expanded.
Two from Osprey's military history series by Davide Nicolle: El Cid and the Reconquista 1050-1492 is a brief and beautifully illustrated book on the armies of Christian Spain, and The Moors: the Islamic West 7th-15th Centuries AD is its counterpart covering the Andalusian military side. He also wrote a (somewhat longer, but still short) book on the end of the war with Granada called Granada 1492: Twilight of Moorish Spain. I feel like books of this sort are often dismissed, not necessarily because they're academically weak, but because they are brief and illustrated. They're certainly intended more for laymen, but that's not a fault. Besides, who doesn't like pictures?
A considerably older by more comprehensive look at the final war between Castile and Granada is William Prescott's The Art of War in Spain.
Several books that look at the Reconquista kind of diagonally, from a "homefront" sort of perspective, are worth looking at. David Nirenberg's Communities of Violence is about the more "mundane" sorts of violence that was used to keep the peace in the religiously diverse cities of Aragon--in other words, to maintain the Reconquista. In the Shadow of the Virgin and The Handless Maiden are about the cultural conquest of converts from Judaism and Islam, respectively. Like I said, these are only obliquely related to the Reconquista.
I think I'd better stop there, but please feel free to ask further questions. Happy reading!
Edit: I knew I'd forget some I meant to add: The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings by David Wasserstein is about the taifas (petty kingdoms) that the Cordoban Caliphate fractured into. Roger Collins' The Arab Conquest of Spain: 710-797 is a really good monograph on the initial invasion. I'm sure I'm still forgetting some important ones.