Cordoba

Leaving Madrid we headed south a few hours to Cordoba, which marked the real start of our Andalusian adventures. For a small town, Cordoba has a lot of amazing things to see and do so I’ll get straight into it.

Fresh off the train, we started at the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos (Castle of the Christian Monarchs), a medieval fortress. Like almost everything in this region, it was once visigothic, then housed a number of Caliphates before being taken over by Christian rulers.

The building in the background of the last photo gives a sneak preview of our destination the following morning – the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba (Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba). Originally a Christian Visigoth temple, it became a half-mosque/half-Christian church until the late-700s when it became a full on mosque… only to be taken again by Christians in the early-1200s and returned back into a weird half-mosque/half-church…

The Mezquita is truly spectacular so here are a million photos:

I hope you’re now convinced that you should go to Cordoba – it’s mad. Crazy thing is, that’s not even the end of it. There is also a Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir River that is pretty damn impressive, especially when you consider it was built in the early 1st Century BC.

Pretty ugly, eh? Cordoba also happened to be where we spent New Years Eve, so we celebrated in a typically Spanish way – by heading to the town square at midnight to try and eat 12 grapes as the bells ring in the new year. Being non-Spanish, we didn’t know any grape tricks, so we ended up with kind of big grapes full of seeds – trying to gulp them all down in 12 seconds or so was a pretty gross ordeal that I can’t see us adopting as one of our own new years rituals… but anyway, it was fun attempting to blend in with the locals – Feliz Navidad!

Finally, the obligatory food pics. I’ve buried them at the end because even though they tasted good, these dishes look kind of terrible haha… actually I take that back – one of them also tasted pretty bad too.

Salmorejo is a cold soup made of whizzed up bread, tomato and olive oil… unsurprisingly tastes exactly like bruschetta, if bruschetta was a soup/paste.

The chilis were an oily, tasty mess, while the tortillas were a pregnant lady’s saviour amidst all the forbidden ham-based foods.

Finally we have the Pastelas Cordobas, which we kept accidentally eating despite its underwhelming taste. The disappointing taste is probably due to this ‘delicious local cake’ being made of so called ‘sweet pumpkin’ with a weird texture. Can you tell it was not my favourite?

This cake at least made me very happy we live in Denmark, land of the kanelsnegle…