Córdoba and the Alhambra

Muslim armies crossed from North Africa into Spain in 711, and for nearly eight centuries Muslim rulers governed much of the Iberian Peninsula, which they called al-Andalus. Two of its buildings are among the most beautiful in the world: a mosque in Córdoba and a palace in Granada.

Looking closely: The Great Mosque of Córdoba. The emir Abd al-Rahman I, a prince of the Umayyad family from Syria, began the mosque about 785. Later rulers enlarged it again and again, until it had hundreds of columns, many reused from Roman and Visigothic buildings. The columns were short, so the builders stacked a second tier of arches on top of the first to raise the roof: lower horseshoe arches and upper round ones. The arch stones alternate red brick and pale stone, so stripes march off in every direction like the trees of a forest. In the 960s the caliph al-Hakam II added a glittering mihrab decorated with mosaics. After Christian armies took Córdoba in 1236, the mosque became a cathedral, and in 1523 a Renaissance church was built in its middle.

Looking closely: The Court of the Lions. The Alhambra ("the red one," for the color of its walls) is a hilltop fortress and palace of the Nasrid sultans, the last Muslim rulers in Spain, mostly built in the 1300s. In the Court of the Lions, a garden courtyard is ringed by 124 slender marble columns, single and paired, carrying arches of carved plaster as fine as lace. At the center, water spouts from a basin carried by twelve stone lions and runs in channels toward the halls on each side. In the rooms beside it, ceilings are built of muqarnas: thousands of small niches stacked in tiers, like honeycomb or stalactites. Poems by the court poet Ibn Zamrak are carved into the walls.