Advertisement
Published: April 8th 2018
Edit Blog Post
These early starts wear you down after a while. This time we're up at 6am to catch the 8.30 train to Cordoba, once the capital of Andalusia. The AVE trains are great, very similar to the TGV in France but the Spanish ones are actually running. Its almost 5 hours from Barcelona to Cordoba with numerous stops along the way. For the most part we appeared to be travelling through Olive groves for as far as the eye can see at around 300km/h. The trains are really comfortable and you can charge all your devices while you watch the world roll by.
We arrived in Cordoba at 1.15pm, caught a taxi to our hotel, a little over 1km from the old city centre, dumped our bags and headed straight into town via the old roman bridge to see the Mezquita. The Mezquita was originally an enormous mosque built originally in the late 800's and added to over the next several hundred years. The mosque is aparently 400ft by 600ft not counting the courtyard with its orange grove. The ceiling of the mosque is supported by over 800 columns making it look a bit like a forest inside. At its peak
it could hold around 40,000 people. Then in the late 1200's the Christians reconquered most of southern Spain. They needed a place of worship so the planted a cross on the mosque and sprinkled it with holy water thus making it a church. Sadly, a couple of hundred years later some visiting bishop almost had apoplexy when he saw good Christians worshipping in a mosque and ordered the whole thing raised to the ground and a cathedral built in its place. The good people of Cordoba however had more sense and rather than destroy such a beautiful building they removed 70 odd columns and built a cathedral inside the mosque and thus it remains. The local moslem population have recently asked the catholic church to be able to use a bit of the outer part for prayers but they've been turned down. So much for peace and love to all men!
Anyway, back to our travels, after visiting the mosque/cathedral we wandered around town for a bit before sucumbing to yet more tapas and rioja. On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a supermarket and bought a bottle of wine for evening drinks on the patio
but had to go to 3 other stores to find a corkscrew. Yes, they still use corks in Spain, bless them.
The next morning we had a lazy start with a walking tour of the old city at 10.30am that took us through the Moslem and Jewish parts of the city as well as the Al Cazar Los Reyes Christianos - the castle of the Christian kings. The old city is beautiful, with streets full of flower boxes and the smell of orange blossom everywhere from the Seville oranges planted in the streets.
Cordoba is the birthplace of Maimonides and Seneca, must be something in the water to produce two such clever people.
We finished the day with a visit to a medieval house that is described in literature from around 900AD. The house was derelict before being restored and is stunning with its typical moorish architecture consisting of a house surrounding two enclosed courtyards. Well worth a look.
Having walked about 10 or 12 km over cobbled roads we headed to a small local bar across the road from the hotel for, you guessed it, rioja and tapas, its a hard life on the
road.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.073s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 12; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0471s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb