Food Review: El Churrasco Restaurante

For lunch we dined at El Churrasco Restaurante, purportedly Tony B.’s favorite Andalusian restaurant in Cordoba.  The restaurant has a number of different rooms and outdoor courtyard spaces.  We had the tortilla de patatas, which resembled a cake made of creamy potatoes, and the calamari.  The beef cooked in a spicy pepper sauce was outstanding, but the mushrooms cooked in olive oil and heavily seasoned in fresh, dried garlic and pesto served as the highlight of the meal. 

Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos

From outside, the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos looks like a small fort with a single tower shielded by the leaves of palm trees.  Inside, however, the fortress unfolds to reveal beautiful grounds with vast gardens and a series of fountains that empty into pools filled with large goldfish.  I found the palace grounds the highlight of my visit to the Alcazar; the palace interior was a bit sterile except the climb to the fortress’s roof was worthwhile for a better view of the Mezquita’s bell tower.   

Mezquita

Cordoba’s main tourist attraction is the Mezquita, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We visited it early in the morning, just in time for morning mass.  The walls of the Mezquita are misleadingly bland.  Upon walking through the gate, one finds oneself in the Patio de los Naranjos, a sweeping courtyard of orange trees.  Upon immediately entering the Mezquita, I found myself in what looked and felt exclusively like a mosque—a furniture-bare, dark-lit hall with terracotta & white-striped columns.  Both my visit to Istanbul’s Blue Mosque and Codoba’s Mezquita destroy any preconceived notions that mosques are built solely for functionality, without design or aesthetics in mind.  The Mezquita’s peppermint-striped columns and arches along with its intricately-patterned ceilings combine to make one of the most beautiful sites I have ever visited.  Visiting Cordoba’s Mezquita was the highlight of my trip to Andalucia. 

Along the periphery of the Mezquita are numerous, tiny Christian chapels that commemorate the religion’s various saints in their depictions on ornately framed paintings and life-size statues.  Stained glass windows are embedded in the arches near the mosque’s ceilings, and Renaissance-style paintings of Christianity’s religious figures are interspersed throughout the walls of the Mezquita.  Remains of an ancient Visigoth cathedral are on display in corners of the Mezquita, and modest ceiling fixtures cast a red glow, the only light inside the dark mosque. 

Smack in the center of the Mezquita is a sixteenth-century Renaissance cathedral which is attached to the terracotta pillars along its periphery, making the cathedral seem a little more organically-attached to the surrounding mosque.  Apart from the few pillars, however, the design of the cathedral is a stark contrast to the mosque surrounding it.  The cathedral has a round dome and glass-stained windows, choir stalls, carpeting and decorative furniture, as well as an organ whose sound reverberated throughout the Mezquita.  The terracotta-striped coloring of the Mezquita combined with the chapels and cathedral make the Mezquita a wonder to explore and was unlike anything I’d ever seen.    

Food Review: Casa Pepe de la Juderia

Cordoba is known as the culinary capital of Andalucia, and our first meal in the city did not disappoint.  At Casa Pepe de la Juderia, we dined on oxtail with gravy, sirloin cooked in jerez sauce, and mushrooms Cordoba style.  For desert we had the selection which included tiramisu cake, coffee-flavored ice cream, chocolate-dipped fried bread, chocolate cake, and coconut ice cream.  We were satisfied, to say the least. 

Puerta de Almovodar

On the trip from Sevilla to Cordoba we passed through the Carmona and miles and miles of farmland. Upon arriving in the city, Cordoba immediately struck me as a much smaller and compact city than Sevilla. Immediately after checking in, we explored Juderia, the old Jewish quarter where Cordoba’s historical sites are located. The walls of Mezquita loomed above us as we walked around the building, noting the occasional peppermint red & white designs on the otherwise banal yellow walls, designs that foreshadowed what we would see inside the Mezquita the following day. Along the Rio Guadalquivir are monuments such as Triunfo de San Rafael from which we could see the river and a bridge the Romans had built, but the Puerta de Almovodar was the highlight of our walk through Juderia. The nineteenth-century gate is notable, but the walk along the old city’s walls, especially by the pools romantically lit by lanterns was the perfect ending to a night-time stroll through Cordoba.