Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba

The story

In 750 the ruling family of the Islamic world, the Umayyads of Damascus, were massacred at a banquet by their rivals. One prince of nineteen escaped. He swam the Euphrates, crossed Africa in disguise, and six years later made himself ruler of Muslim Spain, with Córdoba as his capital. In 785, an old man, he began this mosque.

His successors enlarged it three times as the city grew, until by the year 1000 it could hold some forty thousand people. In China these two centuries run from the middle of the Tang dynasty (618–907) to the early Northern Song (960–1127).

Close by, with a page of its own: Seville Cathedral, Alcázar of Seville, Sagrada Família.

What is here

One ticket covers the whole interior. The bell tower is a small separate ticket for a set time. The courtyard is free.

If you have one minute

Just inside the door, in the oldest part

Let your eyes get used to the dark. Columns run away from you in every direction, like a plantation of palms.

Look at the columns themselves. No two match. Some are pink, some grey, some black; some stand on bases and some are sunk in the floor. The builders took them from Roman and Visigothic ruins, and they were all different heights.

They were also too short for so big a hall. So the builders did something nobody had done in a building before. On each column they set a pier, and they sprang two arches from it, one above the other: a horseshoe arch below to tie the columns together, and a round arch above to carry the roof. They had seen the same idea in a Roman aqueduct.

The stripes are not paint. They are red brick and pale stone laid in turn.

Things people often get wrong

"It is a mosque." It is a Catholic cathedral, with Mass every day, and has been since 1236. Muslims are not allowed to pray in it. Visitors who kneel to pray in the Muslim way are stopped by the guards.

"The Christians wrecked it." They kept it for nearly three hundred years almost as it was. The cathedral in the middle was built against the wishes of the city council, which threatened the workmen with death.

"The prayer niche points to Mecca." It points almost due south. Mecca is to the south-east. Nobody is sure why.

"The arches are all the same." Walk east. In the last eight aisles the stripes are painted on. That part was built in a hurry, about 990, by a man in a hurry.

People who stood here

• Abd al-Rahman I (founder of the Umayyad state in Spain, 731–788)He began the mosque in 785 and is said to have worked on it an hour a day with his own hands. He planted the first palm in Spain in his garden and wrote a poem to it: a stranger in the west, like himself.
• al-Hakam II (caliph of Córdoba, reigned 961–976)A scholar whose library was said to hold four hundred thousand books. He added the richest part: the domes and the prayer niche. He wrote to the emperor in Constantinople for a mosaic maker, and the emperor sent one, with 1,600 kilograms of gold glass cubes as a gift.
• Almanzor (chief minister and real ruler, about 938–1002)He nearly doubled the hall to hold his Berber soldiers. In 997 he raided the Christian shrine of Santiago in the far north and, the chronicles say, made Christian prisoners carry its bells here on their backs to be hung as lamps.
• Averroes (Ibn Rushd, philosopher and judge, 1126–1198)He was born a few streets away, and was chief judge of Córdoba. A judge sat in this mosque. His commentaries on Aristotle were read in Paris and Oxford for four hundred years.
• Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, Jewish philosopher and physician, 1138–1204)He was born in the Jewish quarter just north-west of these walls and left at about ten, when a stricter Muslim dynasty took the city. He became the sultan's doctor in Cairo.
• Ferdinand III of Castile (king, 1199–1252)He took Córdoba on 29 June 1236. The mosque was blessed as a church the same day. He then had the bells of Santiago carried home, the chronicles say, on the backs of Muslim prisoners.
• Luis de Góngora (Spanish poet, 1561–1627)The most difficult and admired poet of Spain's golden age was born in Córdoba and was a paid official of this cathedral for most of his life. The chapter once reprimanded him for talking during services and going to bullfights. He is buried in one of the chapels.
• Muhammad Iqbal (poet and philosopher of India, 1877–1938; honoured as the spiritual father of Pakistan)He came in 1933 and was allowed, as a special favour, to say his prayers here. The long poem in Urdu that he wrote about it, The Mosque of Córdoba, is known by heart in Pakistan.

Go deeper: eight stops through twelve centuries

The building grew from north-west to south-east. Walk it in the order it was built.

1. The courtyard

You enter through a court of orange trees. Before the oranges there were palms and olives, and channels between them brought water for washing. The rows of trees line up with the rows of columns inside: the hall once opened on the court through nineteen arches, and the grove walked straight into the building. The arches were walled up to make chapels.

The bell tower is a shell. Inside it stands the minaret of 951, which cracked in a storm in 1589 and was wrapped in new stone. You can climb it.

2. The first mosque, 785

The first eleven aisles are the founder's. Look at the tops of the columns: Roman leaves on one, a Visigothic cross chiselled off the next. Look at the floor: some shafts go down into it because they were too long.

3. The first extension, 833

Walk south. Where the floor changes you are in the second emir's hall. He ran out of old columns and had new capitals carved, the first made in Islamic Spain. They copy the Roman ones, a little stiffly.

4. The caliph's hall, 961

Further south the light changes. Daylight falls from a dome whose stone ribs cross to make an eight-pointed star without meeting in the middle. It was built more than a century before ribbed vaults appeared in northern Europe.

Under it the arches stop being simple. They cross and loop through each other in lobes, like a pattern knitted in stone.

5. The niche

At the south wall is the mihrab, the niche that shows the direction of prayer. Here it is not a niche but a small eight-sided room, roofed with a shell carved from one block of marble. You look in through a horseshoe arch.

The arch and the dome above are covered in mosaic: gold, deep blue, green, red. The bands of writing are verses of the Quran and the name of the caliph who paid. The man who set the cubes was a Christian from Constantinople.

Look at the marble at the foot of the arch. It is worn into a hollow. Pilgrims went round the little room seven times on their knees.

6. The minister's hall, 990

Now walk east. Eight more aisles run the whole length of the building. This is Almanzor's addition. He could not build south, because of the river, so he built sideways, which left the mihrab off centre for ever. Look closely at the arches: the red is paint.

7. The cathedral in the middle

Go back to the centre. The roof suddenly rises to three times its height, white and gold, with a dome, a high altar of red marble and choir stalls of mahogany from Cuba. It was begun in 1523 and its choir stalls were finished in the 1750s, so it is Gothic at the bottom, Renaissance in the middle and Baroque at the top.

To make room, the builders took out the columns of the central aisles. Stand at the edge and look both ways: striped arches on one side of you, saints on the other. Nowhere else can you do this.

¡Oh excelso muro, oh torres coronadas de honor, de majestad, de gallardía! ¡Oh gran río, gran rey de Andalucía, de arenas nobles, ya que no doradas!

O lofty wall, O towers crowned with honour, with majesty, with grace! O great river, great king of Andalusia, whose sands are noble, though they are not gold!

Luis de Góngora, the opening of his sonnet "A Córdoba", 1585. He served this cathedral and is buried in it; our translation

8. Outside

Walk round the outside. On the west wall is the oldest door, from 786, its carving worn almost flat.

Then cross the Roman bridge. From the far bank you see what the building is: a long, low, flat box of a mosque, with a tall church pushing up through its roof.

The same shot: the classic view is from the middle of the bridge at sunset, when the stone turns orange, or from the tower at the far end after dark.