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Few cities in Europe carry the weight of three civilisations quite as visibly as Cordoba. The Umayyad caliphate made it the largest city in western Europe during the tenth century, a place of libraries, bathhouses, and philosophical exchange at a time when much of the continent was in comparative darkness. That inheritance is not merely commemorated here; it is embedded in the stone, the street plan, and the daily life of a city that has never quite stopped negotiating with its own past.

The old city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, draws most visitors immediately and for good reason. The Mosque-Cathedral, known in Spanish as the Mezquita-Catedral, is the defining monument: a forest of striped arches built under Abd al-Rahman I in the eighth century and expanded across three centuries of Moorish rule before a Renaissance cathedral was inserted into its centre after the Reconquista. The collision of the two structures is not graceful, but it is extraordinary, and no photograph prepares you for the scale of the hypostyle hall. Guided tours of the Mosque-Cathedral, several of which include the adjacent Jewish Quarter, give the layering of the site a coherence that independent visits can miss. The Jewish Quarter itself, the Juderia, is one of the best-preserved medieval Jewish neighbourhoods in Spain, its whitewashed lanes converging on a small fourteenth-century synagogue that is among the few surviving in the country.