Cordoba Audio Tours

In the 10th century, Cordoba was the largest city in western Europe, the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and a centre of learning where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars worked in proximity that was unusual for the medieval world. The Mezquita-Catedral is the architectural record of what followed: a forest of 856 columns topped with alternating red and white striped arches, built over generations by successive caliphs, into the centre of which a Catholic cathedral was inserted in the 16th century. The result is the most contested building in Spain, a place where you can stand in the nave of the cathedral and look left into the mosque, and the two architectures simply coexist.

The Jewish Quarter to the west of the Mezquita is one of the most intact medieval urban fabrics in Spain, a maze of whitewashed lanes with geranium-filled window boxes that contains the Synagogue of Cordoba, one of only three medieval synagogues remaining in Spain and the only one in Andalusia.

The city is also home to the ruins of Medina Azahara, a 10th-century palace complex built by the Caliph Abd al-Rahman III eight kilometres outside the city, which at its height housed 12,000 people and was the most ambitious construction project in the western world.