The Albatross
Tuesday 20 May 2014
We slept in late today after a big day yesterday and a big meal last night. Breaky was a coffee and a croissant just down the road before a walk down the hill through town to the old city. The old city is lovely, but absolutely chockers with tour groups and really expensive restaurants (they sell the same thing as all the other places, but 4 times the price). The first stop was an old synagogue, which went out of business when the Spanish Inquisition hit town.
Cordoba was one of the main centres of the Inquisition, and ran the show here for nearly 400 years. Amazingly, of all the places we’ve been to here, there has only been one short sentence on a board that even mentioned it. Come on guys, it’s shameful, but you can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Anyway, a few hundred years after the inquisition, after the tiny building had been used for various things, some plaster fell off revealing Hebrew text, fortunately they saved it. Small but pretty, and more interesting for what it is than how it looks.
Further travels through the streets lead us down to the old roman bridge, which is specky, and has a nice tower at one end and a look across a bunch of old Moorish mills. This is also where the buses drop off the tour groups to start their day, so wave after wave of people wandered across.
Back across to one of the local Alcazar. I wanted to see this as it’s meant to have been the seat of the Spanish Inquisition when it really kicked off. It’s right next to the Jewish Quarter so that saved some transport issues. This is where we found the one mention of the Inquisition (low down on a sign board 10 meters away from the entrance tucked behind a hedge). Inside is a nice building, with old Roman ruins underneath including a bath house, on top of which is a Moorish building including towers (with some cool graffiti, (either from when it was part of the inquisition or when it was later used as prison at one point, but there was one clear inscription of 1662 (I don’t know if that’s the Jewish or Gregorian calendar)) and ramparts, overlooking some lovely gardens. They do have one hall where great roman mosaics recovered from nearby have been placed on the wall. A stroll around the gardens and we were getting hungry.
We wandered out of the tourist zone and into a lovely plaza. We split the local delicacy of slow braised ox tail stew and a pisto (eggplant stew) and a bottle of wine. A lovely late lunch!
A slow stroll back to our hotel, past an old roman temple that they have restored (well a few columns), with a stop off to explore some shops and then chill and plot the next 4 days (yes, that’s right a grand total of 4 days ahead)