Day 7: Córdoba

see all photos »

On June 6th, we went to Córdoba, a city 80 miles northwest of Granada.

We left Granada at 8 and arrived at the Madinat al-Zahra around 11. According to the legend, this ancient castle is a private “city” that Abd al-Rahman III built for his favorite wife Zahra in the eighth century. The castle is located on top of a mountain in the outskirt of Córdoba, which fits the Islamic tradition: The King lives on the highest point and his people live in places lower than him.

Next we went to the Cathedral of Córdoba. This grand place used to be the Visigoth church of San Vincente (I didn’t know what “Visigoth” was so I looked it up. This word refers to a “a member of the branch of the Goths who invaded the Roman Empire between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD and ruled much of Spain until overthrown by the Moors in 711.”). It was later destroyed, turned into a Muslim mosque by Abd-ar-Rahman I, and undergone several expansions before its transformation to a cathedral in the 16th century. So in here one can see the many Christian saints inside a building of overwhelming Muslim architecture.

see all photos »

We then took an optional tour to places that were close to the Cathedral, one of which was La Sinagoga. It is the only synagogue left in Andalusia and one of the three left in Spain.

On the way back I took so many photos of the landscape. The scenes were mesmerizing. There were fields of sunflowers and olive trees everywhere. Yellows would follow green, green after yellow, yellow after green, on and on.