Cafés. Café-Restaur. Suizo, Calle Ambrosio de Morales (Pl. D, 3); La Perla, Calle del Conde de Gondomar No. 1, Cervecería Alemana No. 8.
Post & Telegraph Office (Pl. D, 3), Plazuela de Seneca.
British Vice-Consul, Richard Eshott Carr.
Half-a-Day, when time presses: Cathedral (open all day, except 12–2; closes 2 hrs. before sunset); visit to the Mihrâb, Renaissance choir, Mudejar chapel, etc., for which a permiso (2 p.) is obtained at the Oficina de la Obrería, adjoining the Puerta del Perdón; then the Guadalquivir Bridge, with the Calahorra; the Paseo del Gran Capitán and Jardines de la Victoria.
Cordŏva, Span. Córdoba (391 ft.), a provincial capital and the seat of a bishop, with 60,000 inhab., lies at the foot of the Sierra de Córdoba, a spur of the Sierra Morena, in a plain sloping gently down to the Guadalquivir. The town, whose ancient glory has long departed, now contains little or nothing to interest the expectant traveller except the mosque, now the Cathedral, which in spite of many later additions and disfigurements, is still the grandest monument in Spain of the Moorish period. Other memorials of this Mecca of the Occident, once famous as a patroness of science also, now survive only in several portals and inscriptions.
Corduba, the most important of the ancient Iberian towns on the upper course of the Bætis, became a Roman colony in 152 B.C., and was noted for its commerce and its wealth. The Visigothic king Leovigild wrested it in 571 from the Byzantines and made it an episcopal see. After the decisive battle of 711 (p. [51]) Cordova was captured by the Moors, aided by the Jews who were alienated by the arrogance of the Visigoths. With the Moorish sway begins the world-wide fame of the city, especially from the time when the emir Abderrahmân I., of the house of the Omaiyades (p. [485]), on his escape from the massacre of his family at Damascus, settled at Cordova in 756 and declared his independence of the Oriental caliphate. As the capital of the Spanish or western caliphate, Cordova soon became the wealthiest city in Spain, and even for a short time the richest in Europe, notably under Abderrahmân II. (822–52) and Abderrahmân III. (912–61), the greatest of the Omaiyades, and also under the governor (hâjib) Al-Mansûr (d. 1002). It even rivalled Bagdad and Fez as a brilliant centre of Mohammedan culture, to which students flocked from every part of the Occident. At length, after the Almoravides and Almohades (p. [95]), who had been summoned to aid the citizens against the Christians, had vainly attempted to arrest the decay of the city, Cordova fell, in 1236, into the hands of Ferdinand III. of Castile, who expelled the Moorish inhabitants and in 1248 made Seville his residence. The city afterwards fell into decay and poverty, and the once highly extolled Campiña became a desolate wilderness.
See ‘Cordova’, by A. F. Calvert and W. M. Gallichan (London, 1907).
From the Carrera de la Estación, or ‘station street’, bearing a little to the left, we enter the Paseo del Gran Capitán (Pl. C, 1, 2), the favourite promenade of the townsfolk on summer evenings.