Tuna
Monday 19 May 2014
It was a short driving day today, only about 1.5 hours, Seville to Cordoba. We decided to stop off at a small town, Carmona. It has a good Roman Necropolis. Unfortunately, as it is Monday, it was closed; many things are closed on Mondays, so you just have to work around it. We took photos of part of the ruins through the gate, but the good part was unseen.
Onward to Cordoba! Along the road we saw a few solar panel farms, Spain are doing their bit to produce renewable energy. Yesterday on our 2.5 hour drive from Malaga to Seville, we must have seen about 500 wind turbines. The cows, wheat, olive trees and people didn’t seem to mind them being there. Anyways …. on our drive today we could see this really bright light tower, glowing and shimmering. So having now googled it, it is a thermosolar power station that started in May 2011. Check it out here. Kinda cool. http://phys.org/news/2012-03-thermosolar-power-station-spain-night.html
Into Cordoba and the hotel. We decide to do the Mezquita this afternoon, as it was open and many of the other things we want to do weren’t. The Mezquita is really amazing, it is an old Mosque that was built around 784 by the Moorish people on top of an old Visigoth church. It is stunning bit of architecture and covers a space of about 14,000m2, has about 850 columns and 30 huge doors that could open on all sides and let light and air in.
Then around 1236 the Catholic Church decided to add a church to the Mosque, thus became the Mezquita (Mosque-Cathedral). They didn’t knock down the mosque and build the church on the same site. Nooooo, they decided to build the cathedral in the middle of the mosque, knocking out a few of the columns and arches and plonking the church in the middle. All the lovely big doors were then sealed up and they installed about 40 different chapels, so it is now a dark and sombre place. It is an astonishing place, but it is difficult to form a final opinion, do I like it or do I think it is vulgar that the church built a cathedral inside a mosque. Normally they just invade, conquer, destroy and build their religious place or worship on top of that they just destroyed. Would the mosque part, which is absolutely gorgeous, still be here if the church hadn’t decided to build in Cordoba? I’m guessing not, it would have either been torn down or would have fallen down. So by this (weird) logic, then the church did a good thing by building their cathedral in the middle of the mosque? Confused!! I loved the mosque part, the columns, and arches and I can try to imagine what a stunning sight it would have been. The church part, it was, well, the same as the all the Catholic churches we’ve seen in Spain and in South America. (I think I have cathedral-fatigue.)
At the end of the day, I am happy that I saw the Mezquita.
We wandered back through the streets to try to find our hotel, which took a while as the town is a bit of a labyrinth.
Dinner was at the Italian place across the road from the hotel. It is the best Italian I have ever had!!!!