The city on the Guadalquivir in southern Spain that rose from a Roman provincial capital to become, as Qurtuba, the capital of Muslim al-Andalus and one of the largest and most learned cities of the tenth-century world — whose Great Mosque, later turned into a cathedral, still stands as the central monument and the central argument about who the city belongs to.
Walk into the old mosque of Cordoba today and the floor leads you under hundreds of striped arches, red and white, marching off in every direction like a forest of stone. Then the forest opens. Rising out of its center is a Christian cathedral, built straight through the Muslim hall after Castile took the city in 1236. One building holds both. For centuries, and especially in recent decades, people have argued over what to call it, who may pray in it, and which past it honors. The quarrel is really about the whole city, which was once the jewel of Islamic Europe and is now a mid-sized Spanish city that the world will not let rest.