Our first full day in the beautiful Andalusian city of Córdoba dawned bright because we got, you guessed it, pastries. The entire time in Spain I was eating pastries and desserts heretofore unknown to me and they made it worth the trip. But we can’t spend the whole day eating pastries so we spent the time while we were digesting checking out the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba!

It didn’t take us long to get to the Mezquita from where we were staying, like I said last time we could see it from the porch of the place we were staying. We had timed tickets and audioguides which made us fret because when we showed up it was confusing where we were supposed to go. I eventually left my super amazing wife in the extremely long line (we figured so many people couldn’t be wrong) while I picked up our audioguides. The timing worked out perfectly because I returned with the audioguides at just the right moment for us to head into the building.

I am still a little unclear if I should feel bad about checking out the place, it being of course at one point a mosque. I mean, probably not, but at one point I overheard a tourist asking I think a tour guide about how Muslims felt about the mosque being converted into a cathedral and the tour guide didn’t quite seem to understand the question. He explained that the site was part of Spanish heritage because the Spanish had taken over Andalusia. There is a whole lot more to interrogate there than I really have the background for.

Anyway! The Mezquita! What a place! As I was wondering around I tried to keep myself from blaspheming and using particularly dirty language because, you know, it felt more respectful, but here in the quiet solitude of this blog I will say: holy fucking shit! I was not prepared for the experience! When we were wandering around Córdoba the previous day we passed by and around the Mezquita a lot. It is right downtown so you have to walk around it to get anywhere, and from the outside it is impressively decorated and the size of a city block, but man was I not grasping what the place was.

The thing is so gigantic and just jam-packed with beautiful, intricate, gorgeous details. I ran around the whole place taking pictures of every little decoration and architectural feature. I also tried to listen to the audioguide but a) I was very distracted every single time I saw a new motif and b) it has a very layered history that is hard to grasp in the moment (for me anyway) so I was losing the thread. But the various cultures and additions mean you just keep gilding the lily with more gilding and more lilies and it is non-stop man. Centuries of desiring to add to the profound contemplating of religion and spirituality and stuff really does numbers for the look of the place. As we continued to wander farther south some of this became de rigueur, just slightly, that it lost only a hint of shine, but as a first experience it could hardly have been more intense. You could get a permanent crick in your neck looking at all the ceilings, phenomenal and varied and stunning.

It is also hard to get a solid feeling for the place. Since it has been expanded so many times and is so big but still requires so many different supports for the roof, it almost feels like you are in a maze of warrens. You can’t see the whole thing from any given spot, or even a big part of it, so every time you turn the corner there is something new. For example, the Cathedral. It is called the “Mosque-Cathedral,” and so I knew they used it as a Cathedral, and I knew the Cathedral-y bit was somewhere in the middle. But I thought that meant like, there was a bit in the middle they just used as a Cathedral. But no! You turn the corner and there is a whole-ass Cathedral!

I was already so blown away by the Mezquita bits I could barely take in the Cathedral bits. I didn’t even take many pictures, but it is also so intricate and detailed! If something takes like 10 years to build these days that is a lifetime, but man, you spend a few centuries putting something together you have time to add a whole lot of fiddly bits! So many carvings and figures in stone and wood, not to mention the paintings, and just wowee. I am running out of words, clearly. Eventually we decided there was not much more we could take and head back out into the courtyard.

I have just gone on and on about the interior but I also loved the courtyard. Like the rest of the city it was filled with orange trees, but I really particularly liked what they did with the place. All over the city there was these pavings done with stones and so designs were inserted in, but more importantly for my tastes the trees were placed in basins with channels between them, for easy watering and a really beautiful effect. The courtyard was so beautiful that I lost track of time and we almost missed our tour of the tower. We had tickets and I thought we could go up pretty much whenever we wanted, but my super amazing wife had realized that we were supposed to go up in a single group with the other tourists. We missed that group but the guard let us scramble up after them anyway and so we got to check out Córdoba from above.

It was really gorgeous, to no one’s surprise. Not only do you get a more holistic view of the Mezquita, with the different roof bits making it more clear the shape of the place, but the city itself sprawls from the hills on one side, down to the river and then across to the rolling plains on the other. You could peer down into people’s courtyards and admire the Mezquita’s own orange grove and yeah man it was great. But the day was far from over, and so when it was time we head on down and off to the next adventure.