Explore Córdoba's Mosque-Cathedral (Mezquita). Discover its 850 iconic red-and-white arches, historic mihrab, and centuries of Moorish history.

Cordoba´s Mezquita, once the largest mosque in the world, is the most well-known and outstanding monument in Cordoba. In order to truly experience the mezquita and its surroundings, we think that the best thing to do is to stay in a hotel nearby, possibly with spectacular views of this terrific building.

The most striking thing about the Mezquita is that, incongruously, the "mosque" contains a Christian church (Cordoba's cathedral). What one sees from outside is confusing indeed: a huge, flat-roofed low-lying square building with a gigantic baroque church jutting up in the middle like a rather unsightly stone wedding-cake.

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.