So what do you do on your last night in Cordoba? You wander the streets, of course, stopping off here for a drink, there for something to nibble on, all the while soaking in the light, the atmosphere, the sense of place.
As the night winds down, you end up on the Puente Romano over the Guadalquivir River, if you are lucky with the moon rising in the sky above you.
So here is an image of people entering and leaving, under a gateway, on our final evening – a fitting symbol I think, of the end of our journey. My next post will take you across the Puente Romano, under the moonlight.
What better way to say good night – and goodbye – to Cordoba’sLa Mezquita, than to pause, in the street, as her moonlit steeple reaches up into the night sky from above a jumble of houses, on a quiet back-street, and see this image.
La Mezquita in Cordoba, I wrote in a recent post, is a Christian cathedral emerging from the ribs of a Moorish mosque – and it is precisely this amalgam and emergence, this blending and superceding, that I find so infinitely absorbing and rewarding, such fertile soil for the kind of historical imagining and understanding that we need so badly in an age that seems, at least in its politics, so partisan and diminished, so limited and narrow.
In these images, Moorish arches frame and reveal Christian figures and motifs; different ages and tastes are overlaid; a place of worship becomes a human record.
And they interest me, these photographs, not merely as records, but as meditations of a sort. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
La Mezquita simply takes possession of old Cordoba: vast, sprawling, the Christian cathedral emerging from the ribs of the Moorish Mosque, its bulk and presence are unignorable.
It’s a good idea to circumnavigate before you enter: wander the surrounding streets, catch glimpses of the spire from narrow alleyways or see it from up high, from the old stone towers of the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos, to get a physical sense of its mass and antiquity – and then go in, to a fantasy world of pink and white columns, horseshoe arches, chapels and pulpits, tiles and paintings, silver and gold, light and shade, a timeless and yet particular blending of cultures, faiths, visions and religions.
To give you a sense (I hope) of place, of time and locality, here are some exteriors.
The gardens of the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos, in Cordoba, Spain – set within the medieval walls and towers of a palace that the Catholic monarch Alfonso XI built in the 15th century upon the site of Visigoth and Moorish forts – have that ‘Cordoba quality’ I mentioned in an earlier post: a sense of peace, of warmth, of open skies, an easy and comfortable humanity. The gardens may not be as grand as those of the Alhambra, in Granada, but they welcome you in.
Mind you, you are met at the entrance to the palace by a rather formidable gentleman, with his bible and sword (the sword being more prominent) before you descend into the garden itself.
From the entrance you walk down wide stone steps to blue-green pools dappled with fish; there are more pools below, and formal gardens, a lushness and ornamentation that is always absorbing, but never overpowers.
Speaking of formidable gentlemen, though, one of those you will find in the gardens, standing before the king and his queen, is the stony figure (yes, this is a play on words, but it is also a comment on what is a pretty humourless and po-faced trio) of Christopher Columbus.
When you are done, there is one more thing you should do, and that is climb to the top of the towers, and look out over the gardens, and the town, with its silvery green palm trees and look to your right: there you will see the steeple of La Mezquita – the topic of my next blog.
This portfolio of black and white images of Cordoba includes one image in colour – a quiet corner, two buildings intersecting, and a tree and its shadow intermingled. And then there is that splash of red, like blood…. I could have done it in monochrome, but suffused as it is with the afternoon light it just wouldn’t let me. And that dramatic splatter of red, of course, would have been lost.
The other images, when seen in colour, are essentially representation – ‘this is what it looks like’ – whereas the monochrome, to my eye at least, allows for interpretation and expression.
I hope you enjoy them – both the black and white and the colour. See what you think.
Steps, Cordoba
Street, Cordoba, with the steeple of La Mezquita in the distance
I think our first evening in Cordoba pretty much did it for us.
We had driven up from Granada, in our hired baby Mercedes, taking a road less travelled through miles upon miles of hills and olive groves, and dropped off the car, and found our hotel – a still oasis in the soporific heat – and wandered down towards dusk to the Puente Romano, the old stone bridge from Roman times spanning the Guadalquivir River.
The light was soft and warm, the heat had melted away, the air was an easy embrace, and at the foot of the bridge – with medieval columns as backdrop – a bride and groom were posing for photographs.
Gone were the crowds and bustle of Granada and Sevilla, and in their place, down by the Guadalquivir, there was amplitude and calm, a quietude, a touch of romance that was effortless, unhurried, a folding of ourselves into the world and this place that was subtle and unforgettable.
Cordoba was the last of the towns that we visited, in Andalucia, but I’d venture to say it was the town we loved most, and the first we would go back to.
Here we are, Rob and I – at dusk, by the Guadalquivir, with the Puente Romano behind us.
Small-town Andalucia – those slightly run-down settlements you find on the road from Granada to Cordoba, for instance, places that are not on the tourist route, that are a little hard-scrabble, impoverished – still surprise, with their Moorish keeps, their sense of history. But it is a pre-democracy Spain you sense here – the Spain of Franco, perhaps – yet to be dragged into modernity.
We passed a number of these places along the road to Cordoba, stopping in one for a coffee, in another to use the bathroom. Here are some images: the first, which I took while Rob sipped her coffee at a little open-air cafe by the side of the road, are in colour.
The black-and-white images are from a little town quite close to Cordoba – our final destination for this trip, before we climbed on board the train back to Madrid, footsore and sunburned. But happy.
Set against the vast and empty Plains of Camdeboo, abutted by the Valley of Desolation and surrounding mountains, the small Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet seems dwarfed, vulnerable, a fragile human outpost, more so when storm clouds gather.
Yet there is a beauty in the landscape, something stark and wonderful.
