Dynastic History | Madinat al-Zahra Museum — What Came Back From the Quarry

Madinat al-Zahra worked as a seat of government for roughly seventy years. The civil war that broke the caliphate reached it between 1009 and 1013, when Berber factions besieging Córdoba pillaged and burned the palace-city. Nobody rebuilt it. What it became instead was a quarry: cut stone, columns and marble panels were carried down the hill and reused in buildings in Córdoba for centuries afterwards, which is the ordinary fate of an abandoned government complex and the reason so little was left upright to find.

Systematic excavation began in 1911 under Ricardo Velázquez Bosco, stopped during the Spanish Civil War, and resumed in 1944 under Félix Hernández. The site has had a named director more or less continuously since. The museum below the ruins opened in October 2009 — a low building set into the slope by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, which took the Aga Khan Award for Architecture the following year — and it holds what the excavations recovered: carved marble capitals, stucco panels, basins, and the fragments from which the arcades upslope were pieced back together.

UNESCO inscribed the site in 2018 as the Caliphate City of Medina Azahara. The Junta de Andalucía runs it as the Conjunto Arqueológico Madinat al-Zahra, and the museum is the visitor entrance: tickets are issued there, and the ruins are reached from it.

📸 Cover: Marble capitals from Madinat al-Zahra displayed in the site museum, Edmundo Sáez, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons