Medina Azahara

About 6 km outside Cordoba is the ruins of the ancient palace-city of Medina Azahara, built by Abd-ar-Rahman III, who was caliph of Cordoba at the time, and basically God's most important person on Earth, if you believe that sort of thing. It was an extensive undertaking, 10 years to build and involving the usual thousands of slave labourers.

We'd driven out of Cordoba in search of this palace and got into a bit of an argument with Sattie, our satnav in the car, as she kept insisting we turn left unnecessarily. We found the place eventually (it wasn't that hard) and parked, to find that the place didn't open until 10am. There were various other early birds milling around, but fortunately they opened on time, and ushered us all into an auditorium to watch a short film about the palace. We then took a tour around the museum, which culminated in an account of the destruction of the place. It only lasted 70 years. Most of it was then carted off for buildings elsewhere in the region. Early in the 20th century, an archaeological dig was begun to see what was left, and more recently it has been the subject of more methodical archaeology, which has resulted in the museum and tour available today. A lot of the ruins have been reconstructed.

Finally, we went to the site itself, this is located about 2km from the museum - there is a bus every 20 minutes. There were a lot of people waiting for the bus - mainly - mainly Spanish, listening to the voices - so when it came to boarding time, any semblance of a queue descended into a typical Mediterranean scrum, involving a lot of shouting and waving, to get on. As we weren't on a tour, we had to pay the driver.

When we arrived at the top, we found plenty of car parking. There had been no indication that we could drive up there. Ah well.

The ruins were pretty well what we expected to see, having seen the film. We wandered around a bit, reading the informative placards, and had our photo taken by an Italian couple.