This beautiful poem perfectly reflects feeling of that step by step advances by that magical temple, surrounded by colorful columns and voussoirs, red and white, that seems to mark to a way nonsignalized within a strange labyrinth of lights and shades. Advancing by its interior, without lowering the Vista, always watching at its arcs and their ceilings, we heard in the middle of the sound of silence, how our passages on the marble are lost in an itinerary without final order nor. But we begin by that she is perhaps one of the most beautiful seats than we pruned ourselves to find in Cordoba, the califal city that welcomes this impressive work of art that is the Mosque: the Patio of the Naranjos. In its center, and we try to inhale its aroma of April and May to orange blossom, coolness, freedom. And surrounded in that warm scent, we will remember how in Arab time, there, in that same patio the ablutions were made; as justice to the doors of the temple were distributed; we will watch towards another one of its sides, and will see like, or astronomers, mathematicians and so many and so many wise people who populated Cordoba with that one time propagated their knowledge between the people of on foot, and or comedians and teatros entertained with their legend and its stories to the children, who, seated crowded around themselves around to his. The Patio of the Naranjos, nowadays, is considered like the older alive garden of Europe, because their beginnings date from year 784, under the mandate of Abd al-Rahman I. If nicialmente, these gardens were basically formed by cypresses and palms, nowadays are the naranjos those that invade it: ninety and naranjos that was planted during century XVIII. Of century XVI, on the contrary, they are the claustros that in one of the sides of the garden we can observe. The enclosure of one hundred thirty meters, and closed, is divided in three gardens in whose center there is a beautiful source. … and once admired and inhaled the pleasant atmosphere of this magnificent garden, the heart shrinks when putting the foot within the temple and observing for the first time the impressive Room of the Columns… more than 800 columns and arcs that are distributed geometrically and that hide at sight back in the bottom, in a landscape without end. The one was the own Abd al-Rahman I that began its construction, building its first oratorio in the middle of century VIII, being inspired by a mosque that existed at that time in Jerusalém. The result was the construction of eleven ships with 110 columns in marble and granite, with Roman and capitals. On them, arcs vaulted in red and white colors. Their descendant, Abd al-Rahman III, ordered to erect alminar half century later, whereas Al-Hakam II extended the mosque more other twelve sections. Of the later time of Al-Manzor it is the part in which the columns are of blue marble, time in which almost the surface of the Mosque bent in size, until reaching the 24,000 m2 that he has.

The two perhaps more beautiful parts of the temple belong to the time of Al-Hakam II: the marble Mihrab, scenery rich working, and the octogonal cupola of the Kibla, with interlaced arcs. Of this time they emphasize the corintios capitals and marbles in blue pale and pink. Perhaps the construction in its interior of the Christian cathedral has been one of the greater aberrations than they have been possible to make as far as reform in the architectonic set, because a part of works made during the time of Abd was destroyed al-Rahmán III and Almanzor. Its construction began under the supervision of Hernán Ruiz the Old one in 1523, by express mandate of Carlos V, but it was not finished until year 1766. In him the styles were conjugated gothic, Renaissance and baroque; the ship and the cruise are in Latin Cross, with gothic arcs. The zone of the Alminar, tower located in the patio, from which at Arab time it was called to the oration, was covered by baroque elements, covering therefore, all those Arab rest that composed it. It would be necessary to emphasize two curiosities in this building: in the first place, any mosque assumes that there is to be oriented towards Mecca…. this one in particular, in spite of being the third most important one of the world, is not it, because its direction is towards Damascus, city by which felt passion Secondly its Abd al-Rahmán I., the situation of the Mihrab. The Mihrab is the most sacred place of Arab nobody tmeplo, because it remembers the site that Mahoma prophet occupied in his Mosque of Medina. It is the arc or located place in center of the wall of the Kibla, that marks the direction of Mecca. In the case of the Cordovan Mosque, the Mihrab is not located in center of the temple, where it would have to be; and this must to later extension that made Almanzor, that when making it by the Eastern part, because no longer it had left more space by the other sides, left its location off-center. … and once admired this wonder, declared Patrimony of the Humanity, already only we have left to lose us by the narrow narrow streets of the district of the Judería… but that, that is another history….

• Malaga: a route by the capital of the Coast of the Sun