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Cordoba, More Than the Cathedral/Mosque?

February 9, 2002

Dear Friends and Family,

Plans. Ours get rearranged from time to time. While relaxing in Arcos de la Fronteira, work threatened to intrude. Opportunity was knocking for a week or two's work back in Kiev. We need work in order to travel so this is a good thing. Unfortunately, we might have to leave southern Spain quickly and we didn't even know how to do that.

We searched Arcos and found an English-speaking travel agent who told us, that to get to Kiev, we would have to get to Madrid first. We had not planned to go to Madrid but, if we could avoid driving, maybe it would be a good addition to our itinerary. A few questions and we concluded that a bit of a back-track to Cordoba would allow us to park the car and grab one of the 16 daily high-speed trains from there up to the Spanish capital. This could be the best of both worlds: a manageable road trip stop at Cordoba and a big city visit just before we head back to the cold. Great, a plan that sounds good all around. But, as soon as the plan was created, the work was delayed for two more weeks. Within a few hours, w e needed a new plan.

By now, a stop in Cordoba to visit the large cathedral-in-a-mosque called the Mezquita sounded pretty interesting, so we kept that part. After Cordoba, we could just drive to the southeast corner of Europe and hang out in Portugal until work threatens again. Another good plan.

We chose to drive from Arcos to Cordoba over a mix of roads. After a bit of highway, Marianne turned off onto a shortcut. Almost immediately, the painted centerline disappeared. We now know that's the sign for a road too narrow for two full lanes. Then the painted lines on the outer edges disappeared. We know that's the sign for a very small road. Then a bus came around the corner and we knew that's the sign for reconsidering our shortcut.

So, we reconsidered something like this: the main road will be dull; the shortcut really is shorter; this territory is too isolated to have two buses; hence, we continued. After that, we really had no problems. A few more cars passed us and a truck or two, but gradually the road regained width and lines. We even managed to find a good-sized farm town where we stopped next to the tractor-repair shop for a breakfast coffee and ham "tortilla" - that's a ham omelet in English, but we used Spanish because we were well off the tourist route.

Another hour or so and we were driving down the four-lane highway into Cordoba. We approach every city, even a not-so-big one like Cordoba, with a considerable anxiety. We had a hotel-faxed map but it was pretty fuzzy. We turned off the highway, onto city streets and made five or six turns until we actually felt that we were near our hotel. Then the streets became an unrecognizable maze of passages that were one-way, wrong-way, no-turn, too-narrow. Just like in Olvera last week, we found ourselves driving through the center of an open market square except this one was twenty times bigger, but now we have experience. Marianne dodged the shoppers, turned out of the square, and I asked for help. I showed a helpful pedestrian the hotel name and he assured me that we were indeed close, just around a block, down a street and left at the first traffic light. Of course he did this assuring in Spanish and used a lot more words than I understood. Nevertheless, we did what I thought I understood him to say and did, indeed, arrive at our one-star hotel, with parking. At this point, parking was important, not stars.

Our normally reliable guidebook contends there is nothing in Cordoba but the Mezquita - and he's not too positive about that. With these limited expectations, we used our first afternoon to scout out stops for the next day. We started with a good lunch, big beef and pork steaks in a crowded courtyard restaurant. After stuffing ourselves, we wandered down to the Mezquita and admired the grand Moorish-style Mezquita door and thought it must promise a worthwhile interior.

Around the Mezquita, there are many souvenir shops. We need these for post cards at every destination, but Cordoba seemed to have many more than we could possible visit. However, mixed in with souvenir shops were plenty of old houses, each giving a glance into the courtyards that are the core of the old Moorish house. At sunset, we strolled across a 16th Century stone bridge. The bridge is still in service and reportedly rests on foundations built by the Romans almost two thousand years ago. Good engineers. Good stone.

On the next day, at 8:45, we opened up the hotel breakfast room early because we had planned to see as much as could be seen in Cordoba. By 9:30 we were walking up to the Plaza de Cordera to check out the market. We discovered that this was our road the day before, but arriving early meant than neither the market nor the road were busy. The normal patrons of the plaza were just getting breakfast coffee. For us, that was just fine. We could check off Tourist Attraction #1.

Attraction #2 was another plaza, called Plaza del Potro. Reportedly this plaza plays a role in several stories by the famous Spanish writer Cervantes. Off to one side of the square is the Pousda de Potro, a well-preserved building that appeared as a traveler hotel in Cervantes works. Chalk up Attractions #2 and #3.

Just across the street is a pair of museums, the Fine Arts Museum and Julio Romero de Torres Museum. We started with fine arts. In other places, it has taken us hours to make it through an art museum. Here in Cordoba, it was quick. The building was a great old Moorish-era palace with wonderful wooden ceilings and trim. The art was a mediocre collection of 16th through 19th Century paintings of the religious themes of the period. You know, depictions of pain, suffering, blood, and martyrdom. When the Romero museum across the way threatened more of the same, we passed so we only got tourist credit for Attraction #4.

For Attraction #5, we headed for the centerpiece, the Mezquita Cathedral. The cathedral was built in the 13th through 18th Centuries, in amongst a grand Mosque. The mosque itself had been built in the 8th Century, with the materials and in the space of a Visigothic Christian church in honor of St. Vincent. Church-over-mosque-over-church had apparently been a common pattern in the Iberian peninsula, but for the last conversion to a cathedral, the populace convinced the reigning monarch to spare much of the old mosque. We are fortunate today that he listened.

Just inside the front walls is an orchard of orange trees. This orchard had always been a feature of the mosque/cathedral and it makes a wonderful interval between the souvenir shops outside the wall and the dark and cool insides of the Mezquita. Once inside, the first view is of the famous double arched pillars. This part is strictly from the old mosque, although at the outer edges of the space are some four-dozen Christian shrines, each more gaudy or gruesome than the next. It reminded me of my parochial grammar school days.

The Christians left the Muslim prayer niche in the center of the back wall. It showed the direction toward Mecca for prayers, although modern geographers, with the benefit of satellite navigation, criticize that it's aim is a bit off to the South. Personally, I am amazed that such directional aids could be close at all since even the magnetic poles have moved considerably in the last 1,300 years. It was undoubtedly that Moorish navigational heritage that gave Spain and Portugal an advantage in the colonial period.

Walking back to the cathedral in the center of the Mezquita, we saw one of the light beams that came from the upper windows that were features of old Moorish architecture. We had seen similar windows in the Alhambra palaces and in both places we admired the wisdom of the original architects and their solutions for buildings that fit with the hot and sun-baked surroundings.

Finally, we reached the main Christian contribution, the cathedral fitted within the mosque. Like other European churches we've seen from this period, it was wonderfully ornate. The floor-level "choir stalls" were carved out of mahogany from Spanish Cuba. (Picture #8) Among these, the most ornate was the chair of the cardinal and was called the "cathedra", the origin for the work "cathedral". The ceiling here was also a work of art and would have competed with the older mosque areas.

All in all, a good visit, worth the trip. But we still had the morning left, so we left Attraction #5 and moved to # 6, the Archaeological Museum. One of the points of our European journey has been to get a better sense of the history from which our own American history began. Consequently, we look for museums and the Cordoba Archeological Museum was in another of the wonderful courtyard buildings of this region. But, after I caught Marianne yawning at yet another display of broken Roman headstones and pottery shards, we swore off history for awhile.

I don't know if shopping can legitimately gain us credit as Tourist Attraction #7, but I'll try. Marianne was set on getting a lacy fan to display at home as a souvenir of our visit to Spain. Because of space limitations, we seldom if ever buy souvenirs, but fans fold up small so we were going to take exception to our rule. We did discover a problem, however, when a helpful shop clerk pointed out that it was winter, a time for stores to sell warm wool shawls not cooling fans. Marianne is persistent, however, and after visits to a half-dozen shops, she found the right fan with all the required lace and hand-painted flowers - and at a price she liked. When we're back home, wherever home might be at the time, come by and we'll show it to you.

Our ninth Attraction was my favorite: lunch. In this case, we tracked down a hotel recommendation and entered yet another wonderful courtyard. The Salinas Restaurant didn't serve meals exactly but rather a wide selection of small dishes, more like Chinese dim sum than the tapa fare we'd had in Barcelona. We picked four dishes almost at random and each was delicious. We also ordered a half-bottle of house wine and celebrated a tourism accomplishment: nine Attractions in four hours.

We then chose to add yet another Spanish tradition to our list of accomplishments: the siesta. I could get used to this.

Our post-siesta goal was modest: one more Attraction. We could choose from the Alcazar of the Christian Kings, a riverside fortress guarding the entrance to the old city or the Synagogue, the single remnant of a large Jewish quarter that prospered under the Moorish rule, or the Museum of Bull Fighting. All of these sounded properly historic but, as we walked from one to the other, we managed to reach each just as it was closing for the day. We obviously had gotten into that siesta stuff too well.

We did run across an old home in the Jewish Quarter that was open for tourists and it turned out to be a real gem. From the outside, the house was just another blank wall but inside there was a central courtyard overflowing with flowers and plants. The rooms of the house were all connected to the courtyard and could draw on the coolness of the garden and the fountains. Under one wing was a deep basement that revealed an ancient Roman mosaic, a sign of how long this neighborhood had been settled.

So, was our guidebook right? Was the Mezquita the only attraction worth the visit? Not in our view. Cordoba doesn't have the grand palaces of Granada's Alhambra and it's art museums are not close to those of Barcelona, but it's a good stop because, despite the dozens of souvenir shops, it is possible to get a sense of the places where people have lived and worshipped for a millennium or more.

Next stop: Portugal and the end of the European world.

Take care. Use guidebooks carefully.

John and Marianne