Dynastic History | Madinat al-Zahra, the Salón Rico — The Hall Built to Be Received In

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III had ruled Córdoba as amir for three decades before he took the title amīr al-muʾminīn in January 929, and the palace-city he began west of the city in 936 was, among other things, an argument for the claim. A caliph needed somewhere to receive people.

The hall now called the Salón Rico — the Hall of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III — went up between 953 and 957 (342–345 AH), a basilical plan of aisles divided by marble columns, carved stucco over the walls, and a garden with a pavilion in front of it, so that anyone admitted walked the full length of the approach in view of those already seated. The chronicles name the vizier who supervised the building, ʿAbdallāh ibn Badr, and the eunuch Shunayf who oversaw the decoration. They do not name the quarrymen. The limestone was local, the marble was brought from elsewhere in al-Andalus, and someone carried it.

A figure repeated by later Arabic historians has the caliph spending a third of state revenue on building. That is a chronicler's arithmetic rather than an account book, and it should be read as the kind of number a court liked to have circulating. Getting anyone to live in the new city was a separate problem: the treasury offered 400 dirhams to those who settled there.

The hall stands roofless now, its arcade consolidated and partly rebuilt from fragments recovered in excavation. Conservation has been near-continuous, and visitors often meet it behind fencing.

📸 Cover: The restored arcade of the Salón Rico, photographed during conservation work, losmininos, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons