Cordoba, one of Andalucia’s loveliest cities, has just added one more reason to spend the night.

A new initiative has been introduced in Cordoba promoting night-time visits to their Mosque-turned-Cathedral. Its called the Soul of Cordoba “El Alma de Cordoba” and allows a limited number of visitors each evening to experience an extra special illuminated autoguided visit to one of the most singular religious buildings in the world. The “Mezquita-Catedral” is a UNESCO ‘World Heritage Monument and in our opinion one of the must see sites in Europe. 

Cordoba’s period of greatest glory began in the 8th century after the Moorish conquest, and by the 11^th century the city had had become the centre of a great realm renowned for its artistic and intellectual predominance and its liberal tolerance of other religions. After the Christian conquest, In the 13th century, under Ferdinand III, Cordoba’s Great Mosque was turned into a cathedral. The structure was maintained and several chapels were built. Later the heavy, incongruous Baroque choir was sanctioned in the very heart of the mosque by Charles V in the 1520s. Artists and architects continued to add to the existing structure until the late 18th century, making the Mezquita an intriguing architectural oddity with styles spanning 8 centuries.

The Alma de Cordoba night-time visit costs 18 Euros and begins from 8pm to 10:30 depending on the time of year. The visits  last approximately one hour. Ask us to include this in your next customized trip plan for Southern Spain.

www.elalmadecordoba.com

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 Morocco has a number of historic medersas, once used as schools for teaching the Koran. One of the most celebrated is the Attarine Medersa in Fez,  built around 1325 and marking a high point in the decorative arts of the Merinid dynasty, based on delicate mosaics created from fragments of glazed tiles, carved cedar wood and chiseled plaster work. Under the direction of the UNESCO and Morocco’s Religious Affairs Ministry, the medersa has undergone a 3-year restoration employing the same materials and techniques used to create the original nearly 7 centuries ago. Visitors can now enjoy this building’s beauty as it was intended to look by its creators.

Toledo is one of Spain’s most historic cities and is less than a one-hour journey from Madrid. For those already familiar with its main sites, Valesa Cultural Services can now offer more visits to previously unexplored sites. Among the newly opened sites are the fascinating archaeological remains of Roman baths, the so-called ‘Caves of Hercules’ that figure in legends associated with Toledo’s foundation and early history, the Jewish House (with an area possibly used long ago for ritual purification baths), the Church of El Salvador with remains from an earlier mosque, and preserved architectural and archaeological remains of Islamic baths.  Another possibility is to climb a recently-restored Mudéjar church towers in order to appreciate their construction techniques, as well as the view when you reach the top!

Spain’s newest museum,  The Museum of Human Evolution is due to open in the northern city of Burgos on July 13, 2010. The location of this museum is important as it is located just 10 miles/15,km from the world famous archaeological site of Atapuerca. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Atapuerca’s excavations have revealed remains of one of the most significant settlements of the first Europeans. The human fossils recovered from Atapuerca so far constitute 85% of all the world’s fossils from the period known as the Middle Pleistocene.( 781—126 thousand years ago)

Undoubtedly the Museum will be a global reference point for prehistory, both on a scientific level and in terms of education and dissemination. Atapuerca Palaeontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga stated to El Pais Seminal “This is a unique museum in the world. There is nothing like it. During its conception, our team had decided that we did not want a museum of prehistory, of fossils and bones. We wanted a museum of the living, not of the dead. For this reason the building is very bright, the architecture is very open, like a huge glass box..”  The museum will also have exhibits which will interpret what the findings at Atapuerca can help us understand about ourselves. It will also be a center for research.

Another important factor in differentiating this museum from others is that the museum will show authentic fossils, contrary to many museums which exhibit copies while the original pieces are kept in safes. Among several, one of the treasures of the museum is Skull 5 known as ‘Miguelon’. It is one of the most complete human fossil skulls in the world, found in 1992 at Atapuerca and dated at 400,000 years old. 

Burgos is a plesasant city to visit, along with its charming old quarter with its many churches and convents, it is home to an extraordinary Cathedral, considered one of the finest examples of Spanish Gothic art.  A visit to Burgos would fit nicely into a route including Madrid, the Rioja wine region and the northern cities of Bilbao and San Sebastian or even west to Galicia. For those interested in pre-history, we also recommend visiting the Altamira cave museum (near Santillana del Mar and Santander).

Atapuerca Links:

Museo de la Evolución Humana – http://www.museoevolucionhumana.com

Palaeontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga’s website:  http://www.atapuerca.tv/

Atapuerca Foundation: http://www.atapuerca.org/

http://www.fundacionsiglo.com/atapuerca/datos_en.html

http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/atapuerca.html

Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia church, one of Spain’s most famous landmarks despite its unfinished state, will start hosting religious events in 2010, chief architect Jordi Bonet said confirming that the interior of the Catholic basilica will be finished by September 2010.

Viewed from a distance, the four main towers of the Sagrada Familia stretch above Barcelona like a giant drip sandcastle on a beach. But the closer you get, the more intricate the conical monoliths become, until you find yourself overwhelmed by this mind-bending masterwork of the late Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926). A monument to Gaudi’s outsider genius, this church, still incomplete after some 125 backbreaking years, also measures the patience and tenacity of generations of his countrymen. Some Barcelonans love the church, others not so much, but even its detractors have (mostly) learned to accept its role in the city’s history and skyline: Paris has the Eiffel Tower, London has Big Ben, and Barcelona has the Sagrada Familia.

Completion of the interior means that the church will finally be more than a breathtaking stop on an architectural sightseeing tour. For the first time in its history, Sagrada Familia will host a Catholic Mass in its main nave. (Gaudí, who was a devout Catholic, would surely approve.) After the interior is finished, the final spire — the lordly 550-foot-high “Tower of Jesus” — will soon follow. Of course, “soon” is a relative concept.

The stumbling blocks to Sagrada’s progress are myriad. They began to crop up the moment Gaudí first set pencil to drafting paper. “Gaudí worked on Sagrada Familia for 43 years, and during his last 12 years, he worked on nothing else,” the 83-year-old Bonet says. The architect oversaw every aspect of the construction — from the drawing to the masonry — until he was killed in a 1926 streetcar accident that happened as he was walking to the job site. Gaudí designed the church with 18 towers — 12 for the apostles, four for the evangelists, and one each for the Virgin Mary and Christ. Each completed tower, and practically every crevice of the church, is adorned with intricate geometrical designs and sculptures. The interior spaces are buttressed by forms that Gaudí culled from nature, thus resemble towering animal bones or the articulated trunks of massive trees. His renderings were so dynamically puzzling, the builders couldn’t figure out how to realize them. The challenges didn’t end with geometry. Disease epidemics, labor strife and chronic gaps in funding (the church has been constructed solely through private contributions) persistently slowed construction. And then, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out; building ground to a halt. General Francisco Franco’s army attacked Barcelona three years later, and during the ensuing street battles, parts of the church were destroyed, along with the studio housing much of Gaudi’s planning work. In a display of typical Catalan fortitude, building recommenced when the war ended, with designers painstakingly redrafting the damaged plans.

Then came inevitable political complications. The most recent battle erupted last year, when a group of prominent architects, artists and critics — including the heads of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, the Miró Foundation and the Tàpies Foundation — penned an aggrieved manifesto demanding that construction cease. “Work should have ended when Gaudí was killed in 1926,” it declared. The central complaint is that the church bears little resemblance to Gaudi’s original vision. The group’s quest is distinctly quixotic since the Sagrada Familia has vanquished stauncher rivals by far over the years. “These are extreme preservationists,” says Edward Keegan, a Chicago architect who teaches at the University of Notre Dame. “They are all about hero worship and the 20th century’s ‘cult of the genius,’ which says that you can’t touch the master’s work.” But Keegan points out that cathedrals regularly took decades to build and thus required several designers. “Only in the last 100 years have we become interested in the sole architect as a genius creating a quickly built masterpiece,” Keegan says. “Let’s face it, now we build entire cities in 10 years.” Ironically, Gaudí himself would have objected to extreme preservationist ideas. “I know that the personal taste of the architects who follow me will influence the work, but this does not grieve me,” he wrote. “I believe it will even benefit the church. It will mark changing times within the unity of the overall plan.”

The project also faces a potentially devastating new structural problem: The city is excavating a tunnel for a new high speed train that will pass below the main façade. Although Spain’s Ministry of Public Works assures the church that the digging is too deep to disturb the foundation, engineers are concerned.