Seville & Córdoba

I love field trips. That said, they are only fun when you have time to do all your other work. Needless to say, instead of getting out and enjoying Seville during the two evenings we were there, I spent lots of time reading about Eva Perón's crazy propagandistic life. Which was cool, since I kind of love analyzing propaganda. But it still means I didn't get out much.

But that doesn't mean I didn't see some amazing sights. Because I totally did! And I have pictures to prove it!

We hit up some of the usual sights: The Mosque of Córdoba (did you know that it is actually a cathedral, but pretty much everyone refers to it as a mosque?), and the Cathedral/Giralda and Alcázares Reales (Royal Castle-Fortress-thing) in Seville.

My pictures of the mosque really don't do it justice. I wanted to be able to show how the inside was built to resemble a forest, but there's just no way to capture its beauty and grandeur. 

It's got some lovely intricate arches, and I would love to be to tell you what they are in English, but I only know their name in Spanish: Arcos polilobulados. If someone can tell me what that is in English, they will totes get a postcard!

But of course, the strangest, craziest part about the mosque is the part that the tourist/art history images seem to forget. Like I said, it is technically no longer a mosque, but rather a cathedral. When Fernando III (el Santo) invaded Córdoba in 1330, one of the first things he did was have the mosque sanctified as a Christian church. It's kind of the way that they did things back then. Conquest a city, convert the enemies' sacred places into your own, and then rule with an iron fist. (I kind of added that last part...but the first parts are totally true!).

Of course, as unique and wonderful as the mosque is, its architecture wasn't really in keeping with the Christian architecture of the time. So someone (I think it was an archbishop), got the idea to build a cathedral within the mosque. He hired a baroque architect and got the approval of the Pope to make the new Cathedral of Córdoba. 

And they built this:

Believe it or not, that Baroque monstrosity is actually plopped in the middle of all those beautiful striped Islamic arches. There's even proof on the arches themselves.

Apparently, King Carlos V (the king at the time of the creation of this hybridization) remarked something like this: "It's a shame that they ruined something so unique with something so mundane."

Apparently he was not a fan. 

It sure lets in a lot of light, though.