Spain and Portugal for Visitors

The most magnificent of the over 1,000 mosques in mediaeval Córdoba, the Great Mosque or La Mezquita was originally the Aljama Mosque, named after the wife of Abd ar-Rahman I, sole survivor of the bloodily deposed Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, who became Emir of Córdoba and reigned from 756 to 788. Abd ar-Rahman purchased the site of the Visigothic Cathedral of Saint Vincent from the Christians, and ordered the construction of a mosque there, the original Mezquita, begun in 784 and completed in the reign of Abd ar-Rahman's son, Hisham I. The mosque (as such) was successively enlarged and reformed over the following two hundred years, the last if least satisfactory addition being the aisles to the east built by the great warrior Caliph Al-Mansur.

When you enter the Great Mosque from the cool of the Patio de los Naranjos, Orange-Tree Courtyard, the thing that strikes most people is the pillars and arches, a great forest of them which seems endless. There are, in fact, over 1,000 columns of jasper, onyx, marble, and granite, mostly Roman or Byzantine in style, having been taken from the former church of Saint Vincent and other buildings.

Though shadowy, the mosque has a feeling of lightness, which would have been more notable when it was a wholly Islamic building, as many of the doors which would have been left open were sealed up by the Christians who reconquered Córdoba in 1236. And the characteristic Caliphal arch, double rows of "poly-lobed" horseshoe arches on the same pillars, emphasises this effect of lightness, like tree cover letting sunlight through in a tall forest. It originated in the Córdoba Mezquita and was later exported to the rest of the Islamic world.

Slap bang in the middle of the Mezquita is the great surprise rewarding those who do not believe in researching what they are going to find before they visit a place, and boy is it a whopper: a full-scale Renaissance cathedral. Looking at Córdoba Cathedral is unnerving, like you feel peering into the Tardis would be, for it is a structure seemingly far too big to fit into its container. It's an illusion, of course: as Spanish cathedrals go, Córdoba's is on the small side (possibly, as the BBC maintains, the smallest in the country), whereas the Great Mosque is said to be the third largest mosque in the world.

The conquering Christians originally had the whole mosque consecrated, but were content to build a couple of chapels inside it (and the cultured Alfonso X regretted having allowed even this). The inhabitants of Córdoba had grown attached to their Mezquita and were loathe to see it mucked around with for what were essentially political and propagandistic reasons, and when Charles V gave the cathedral chapter permission to build their Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin, the town council was opposed to the idea. So instead of the mosque being razed, as happened practically everywhere else in Spain, it was preserved and the cathedral built in its interior.

At the far, south end of the Great Mosque is the mihrab, the prayer niche, oriented not towards Mecca but to the south-east, for unclear reasons, perhaps because of Abd ar-Rahman's nostalgia for Damascus. It is considered especially magnificent.

Click here for Great Mosque opening hours, entrance prices, and how to get there.