We kicked off today with a 2-hour guided bike tour, which we figured would give us a good lay of the land overall. We were right…and expect to use this technique in future stops. Four of the big takeaways from that tour (aside from getting an overview of the geography and various old city boundaries):
There were many mosques in the city that were all built by the Moors (although older Roman features of the city are still visible here and there); when the Moors were driven out by the Christians, these mosques were either destroyed outright or converted into Catholic churches, In many cases of the latter, the mosque was, essentially, retrofitted to be a Catholic church (the Mezquito Catedral is a massive variation of this), Any round windows or “keyhole” arches/windows on a Catholic church is a remnant of the original mosque. We were spotting instances of this ourselves even after the tour.
There are many (16?) statues of San Rafael around the city. These are recognizable because he is represented as an angel, and, thus, has wings. The city lore is that, when the Black Plague was moving through Europe in the Middle Ages, Rafael descended and protected Córdoba. These, too, are easy and fun statues to spot.
One of the building techniques Córdoba has used to keep cool is to build “patios” in residences. These are, essentially, interior courtyards that feature rock floors (to keep water on and about—for cooling), fountains (more cooling), and many plants (on the ground and up the wall; watered using a can lashed to the end of a very long stick). These can be quite beautiful, and there is a 100-year-old tradition of having a Fiesta of the Patios every spring where 50 patios are opened up to the public for viewing, and prizes are awarded for the best one. The Fiesta of Patios of Córdoba has actually been added as a UNESCO Cultural Heritage Site, which has, apparently, increased their draw as a tourist destination.
Siestas are still very much a thing throughout Andalusia. It’s from 2:00 to 8:00 every day because it’s HOT! We were already aware this was something of a thing, and we’d seen how many places were closed the previous day when we took a walk at 5:00 (the hottest point of the day!). But, our guide indicated that locals did very much close up at 2:00 and eat lunch and then take a snooze for an hour or so before getting up and doing something relaxing before continuing with the rest of the day.
After the bike tour, we returned to the flat for a bit and then headed to “the” sight to be seen: Mezquita-Catedral. We had walked past and around this mosque multiple times already, so we knew we would wind up visiting it. It is…impressive. It’s a huge mosque that was built by the Moors and then partially destroyed by the Christians, who went on to build an entire Catholic cathedral inside the mosque. The cathedral is large and impressive (it was the second largest mosque in the world—second only to the one at Mecca), but it is literally inside the bounds of the mosque—there are walls of the cathedral that just butt right up to the middle of a mosque column. Here, it is easy to see the mosque structures—rounded arches and keyhole-style openings—as opposed to the cathedral. Of course, many of the coves along the border of the mosque had been converted into Christian chapels, so there is this simultaneous occupancy of two completely different religions, which is pretty unique.
Muslims? Christians? What about….the Jews? There was apparently never much of a Jewish population in the city, but there was a small presence and, as such, several synagogues in town. We went to the one that is near the mosque, and it is both very old, very small (perhaps a 30’x30’ space?), and not currently used for worship, we don’t think.
We also checked out “Flower Street” (Calleja de las Flores), which was a wall of flowers in blue pots, with the bell tower at Mezquito Catedral visible in the distance.
After that, we’d decided we’d give this whole siesta thing a go, and it was a winner. We ate a light lunch at the apartment, both wound up snoozing for a bit, and then hung out doing some digital puttering until a bit after 8:00, when we headed out for dinner, a walk, and some nighttime photography.
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: the audacity of the building of a cathedral inside an existing mosque
Tim: our discussion about how we were recording the trip through various automated and pseudo-automated means (pictures, Fitbit, Apple Watch, Swarm, this Google Doc), and how those were all structured such that, in theory, they could feed into a unified website that would be a record of the trip. Benton spent part of his siesta time working on some Python script to pull and parse the text from the Google Doc where it’s being written. If you’re reading this and it’s not by reading a Google Doc, you’re seeing the fruits of those efforts.
