Parks and Gardens in Córdoba city: Patio of the Mosque, Alcázar, Patio de Viana, Botanical Garden and more.

Cordoba is best known as being home to one of Andalucia's three great monuments: the Mezquita, the other two being Seville's Alcazar and Granada's Alhambra. Like the other two, the city embodies the region's rich cultural and religious history: the Mezquita - which dates from Cordoba's zenith, as capital of Al-Andalus and the largest and most important city in Western Europe, with 500,000 inhabitants.

The Patio contests is sponsored by the Córdoba City Hall and began in 1918. But to really understand why a contest of this type was created in Córdoba you must know something about the local architecture.

This recently created museum is located at the 15th century Episcopal Palace, and is a beautiful building with a cloister of several storeys, a chapel and dining-room, as well as a hall dedicated to artists from Cordoba and a gallery dedicated to mediaeval art, as well as tapestries and collections of psalm books from the Cathedral.

Before the 18th century's "enlightened" philosophers existed, with their humanistic ideas, there was no ideological precedent which made a virtue of tolerance and respect for other beliefs than one's own - something which is all too often forgotten in our guilt-ridden, altruistically-minded times. Medieval people, of all religions, were alternately fanatical and pragmatic, as the situation demanded, but never broad-minded in the liberal, relativist sense of the word. Such a thing was impossible in the Middle Ages, simply because the idea that there could be more than one "truth" did not exist. Equality, as conceived at the time of the French Revolution, is above all a political convention, not a biological fact.

See more about Córdoba city.

There is a modern bus station opposite the RENFE railway station. The bus station itself has become one of the emblematic buildings of Córdoba. The building wone the National Prize for Architecture in 1999 when it was built was built by César Portela. In the car park travellers can observe remains of a Mozarabic house, the junction of two aqueducts and a mosque with Roman ashlars.

There are summer scheduled in 2025 from Cordoba to La Palmas de Gran Canaria. In the summer of 2024 Air Nostrum made seasonal scheduled flights to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Palma De Mallorca on behalf of Iberia. There are also some charter flights. Cordoba it is popular for general aviation services and for pilot training. Cordoba airport is open to national and international (Schengen only) flights.

Cordoban painter Julio Romero de Torres is much loved in his home town, and around Spain - his works, which you`ll see on posters everywhere, have adorned postage stamps and bank notes, and inspired songs and films.

Capital of the Roman province Baetica (roughly the same area as Andalucia today), Cordoba was the birthplace of two Roman poets, Lucan and Seneca (the Younger; the less celebrated rhetorician Seneca the Older was also born here). Later, in the 12th century, Averroes, the renowned Muslim philosopher and polymath, was born here. He rose to become a judge in Seville, Cordoba and Morocco.

Sometimes historic cities have places filled with local lore, steeped in tradition and history. Plaza de Potro is one such place - the "potro" is a colt on a fountain in the square, which hosted animal markets in medieval times. It has a former inn, the 15th-century Posada del Potro, which is mentioned in Don Quixote as a "den of thieves", and where Cervantes most probably stayed when he visited the city (he lived here as a child).