Arrival in Spain

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Duncan: Here we are in Spain in the city of Cordoba. We flew out from San Jose to Madrid Wednesday morning via Miami, and arrived around 9:00 on Thursday morning. The most striking thing about Spain at first was the landscape. I knew that much of the country was considered a plain, but it was surprising nevertheless. The ground looked reddish, either from sand or clay, and all of the trees and plants were short and scrubby and seemed as though there were plucked from a desert. After two and a half hours on a train we arrived in Cordoba.\r

We walked around the city in the evening, getting a sense of where things were as well as exploring the old streets of the city that are classically Spanish and cars can only fit through if they pull in their mirrors. We also learned that when people say that everything closes between two and four or five in the afternoon, they aren't kidding. We couldn't find any sort of food until 5:00, and even that was only a few oranges and grapes. We had to wait until 8:00 to have dinner.\r

Today was fascinating. We visited the mosque-cathedral in the morning when it was free and the tour groups weren't allowed to enter. The mosque was built by the Moors who came to Spain from Africa in the eighth century. It is an enormous building, supported entirely by columns and arches. When it was built, there were no walls anywhere and the building was filled with light and free-moving air. Three sides opened to the streets, and one side opened to a courtyard where trees continued the row of column that support the roof. In the 1300's, when Christians re-conquered Spain, they turned the mosque into a sort of cathedral. They walled off all four sides, and put a cathedral in the center, turning the freely open structure into something that feels almost like a giant basement. Most of the surrounding building was still the mosque, but along the closed in sides there are Christian shrines and smaller chapels. The cathedral is shaped in the traditional cross, and the top and bottom are closed off from the open mosque part, but the sides just sort of extend into it, and the only reason you can tell they are the wings is because carpet and pews have been laid out. The ceiling was also expanded, so from the air you can see a huge though low building with a much taller Christian cross-shaped cathedral roof rising from it.\r

To me, it's a very interesting contrast between Islam and Christianity. When the Moors ruled, they tolerated other religions to a surprising extent. The only difference was a slight taxation increase for citizens who were not Islamic. The Moors also encouraged the making of wine, even though they were not allowed to drink it, because it was good for the economy and because other people wanted it. They built open-air structures where not once could you see any seat of power or any sort of thing. By contrast, the Christians walled up the building, persecuted and evicted all other religions, and put a building inside of another to focus attention on a person and an image of Jesus. I'm not saying that Christians haven't done wonderful things and that Muslims haven't done terrible things. All I'm saying is that there is a unique perspective that comes from seeing where two major religions meet, in the same city and the same place of worship.\r

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