Just Me and the Aristocrats

Cordoba has some of the big historical and touristy draw items. I have detailed some of them in the past couple days, but I thought you might like to take a walk in the general neighborhood where we are staying. This city has about a half million in its environs and our hotel is on one edge of the “old city’ with its centuries old streets and I don’t know how old houses.

But, if you look at the picture of our hotel you can see that it is jammed in just off the street. This is the largest and busiest single street around. The local buses use it and it can be relatively busy. So, for this morning we are taking about a 10 minute walk to Palacio Viana to see this old house/museum.

The streets get narrower as we go and I am not even certain what we are looking for. On the map there is a plaza nearby with its local church. So many plazas are hundreds of years old with a church as its namesake. We reach a church plaza and though it is quaint and old…it is not what we are looking for. All of the houses and small businesses are jammed in on one another and we don’t see how there could possibly be a museum anywhere.

We consult the map. Retrace our steps a couple “blocks” (can you have “blocks” with twisting and turning city streets?), make a turn or two and suddenly the houses open up and we are confronted by this house, our destination.

It seems this was the property of an old aristocratic Cordoban family which owned the house for centuries. It was passed down from generation to generation and finally in 1980 it was sold to the city and made a museum and tourist draw. They could have located on a busier, easier to find thoroughfare, but I guess when the family took ownership back in the 14th century, that was not on their minds.

We toured the twelve (12!) gardens of the estate. Each was small and unique and it occurred to me that it would take a couple people alone just to maintain gardens. I’m sure they did and since they were aristocrats, it was a case of keeping up appearances. The garden tour was a case of just walking through each garden and reading your brochure. The tour of the home was with a guide and about two dozen people. All of whom spoke Spanish. There was a French family. And there was Makaila and Me. The guide said that the tour would be in Spanish (a fact which she confirmed for the next hour). She handed our French friends a short guide to each room in French. We got the “Ingles” edition and we were off.

No matter. Splendor is splendor in any language. “Old and faded” knows no language boundaries either. All the Spaniards clustered around the guide, the French and “Ingles” tourists brought up the rear and got to see what everyone else did. And frankly, we got as much out of it as anyone. What was clear was….this house was big and drafty. The décor was an amalgam of several eras of which some was formerly the property of the family and some was there for museum-show.

The house wound around and around. The kitchen was in two parts, the preparation and the clean-up rooms. Pretty smart. And just when you thought you had seen the main “family room” we were shown another amazing room which had another theme. Either this family liked its sitting rooms or they could not make up their minds as to what era they wanted to settle in. It made for an interesting tour.

As with the old cathedrals, I kept looking at the ceilings and noting water leaks and structural damage. This would take a couple more men to just do building maintenance which I’m sure they had. (How many South American plantations paid for its upkeep….sorry, I grew up blue collar.) But, how fascinating the life of the upper classes. I imagine it was based on trade with the colonies and probably had its financial roots in South and Central America.

Many of the men of the generations were in the military and artwork and gun displays confirmed this.

Alas, in 1980 the last of the family had to sell, after over 700 years of existence. We bid the Marquises and Marchioness of Viana “buena suerte” and “gracias” and went of down the street to rejoin the masses who were trying to avoid repression and fomenting revolution while the Viana family lived in splendor amidst a dozen orange tree filled gardens.

What is the surprise of such winding streets is that there are so many tiny businesses thriving; plumbers, bars, pharmacies, grocers and the like. The houses are packed together, there are no yards (The Viana family took up all the available space for their gardens) and you have to walk carefully to avoid 21 century autos on 14^th century sized streets.

A few blocks away we come across this.

It is a church built in the 12^th and 13^th century. Granted, it looks like it has seen better days but it is still a neighborhood church. I regret that it was locked up tight. It was around prior to the Viana family down the street and I had to wonder if they ever worshipped here or stayed within their estate (the brochure says that at one time there was a chapel at their estate.) I suppose they may have made a few holiday celebrations at the ancient church.

Across the street was this plaza.

We continued or walk, constantly checking to see if we were going somewhere or just going in circles. Finally we reached a destination. The Torre de la Malmuerte. Tower of the bad death. I did not note any sense of irony in that name on the part of the Spanish and figured maybe it was to commemorate the plague (of which we have seen memorials in various cities recently). This too, dates from the 13^th Century or so. And the name? It is tied to a legend. Some woman got into a scuffle with her husband and he done her wrong and tossed her off the tower. Hence the name.

Interesting neighborhood, one that goes back only about 800 years.

Let’s see, Dublin Community Church dates it’s Gladden Chapel back about 135 years. In 1877, this neighborhood, the Viana family and its aristocratic forbearers, were sitting down to a lovely breakfast which they had been doing for about 600 years.

 

Gives one perspective.

Peace, Bob