Buried Secrets of Cordoba (2020) Movie Script
Cordoba,
a universal city distinguished
with four UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
More than one million visitors
come each year
to contemplate the marvels
in the Cordoba of the Caliphate.
But beneath these extraordinary monuments
lies another, more ancient and unknown,
Cordoba that conceals its history.
Islamic Cordoba never
would have become as important as it was
without the Roman city.
Now, a National Geographic
contributor will use the latest technology
to discover what's below
its buildings and streets,
seeking to reveal its
most deeply hidden mysteries.
When we visualize something,
we aren't just creating a space,
but also recreating
how it was used over time.
Fabio Amador joins the greatest
experts in the city's history
to uncover and recreate
the lost past of Cordoba,
a key place in the history
of Western civilization.
Fabio Amador isn't just an archaeologist.
He's a time traveler.
Working for National Geographic,
he's explored some of the most important
archaeological digs in Mesoamerica.
The pyramids of Teotihuacn,
the Mayan ruins of the Yucatn Peninsula,
and many more major archaeological sites.
Now, Fabio Amador is in Cordoba
on a high-tech adventure
utilizing ground-penetrating radar,
LIDAR, and 3-D scanning.
He will join the historians
and archaeologists working on site
to visually revive a hidden city
that is more than 2,000 years old.
I've come to Cordoba
in search of a hidden past.
And to uncover it, I want to meet one
of the greatest experts in Roman history
and in the later cultures
that inhabited the city.
- Hi, how are you?
- Good morning. Good to see you.
Desiderio Vaquerizo
is a professor of archaeology
at the University of Cordoba.
To my surprise, he decides to show me
an ancient sewage system.
But not just any sewage system.
I feel like we are exploring
the skeleton of the Roman world.
We are right in the underworld.
Yes, indeed. It's important
to realize that all this was underground.
Keep in mind that we're on the first level
of the parking garage
of a modern, privately owned building.
And several meters below us,
there's a line that marks, shall we say,
the underworld of the Roman city itself,
which is the sewage system,
which was just as good as ours,
and which shows the enormous scale and
the magnitude of this sort of urban plan,
as well as the image that
the new Roman Cordoba wanted to project
at the service of the Imperial idea.
To obtain a volumetric image
of these sewers,
I'm going to use a laser scanner.
By means of a laser beam,
the scanner calculates the distances
to the objects in front of me.
A revolving mirror makes this beam
of light hit every point on its surface,
creating a cloud of points, which,
once processed,
will allow me to understand what it's like
and what all this infrastructure
was like in the past.
So,
we're talking about a triple sewer system.
The one in the center, which,
as you can see,
is at a slightly lower level,
drained the amphitheatre.
Look at the size of the inspection tower.
It's huge.
Of course, amphitheatres were where
the Romans held the spectacles
where blood was spilled.
Cleaning up afterwards
must have been essential,
and must have required
large amounts of water.
This concept of public health services,
of water supply, of waste water removal,
the idea that it was essential for the
city to get rid of its waste water--
To find something like this, we
would have to jump ahead a lot in history,
probably to the 19th century
in many cities. It's totally modern.
After showing me the sewer,
Desiderio takes me to the spot
that fed this drainage system,
a dig where he's working now,
and where one of this city's
great monuments used to stand.
We're outside the Roman
city walls in the western outskirts,
at the excavations of the ruins
of the colony's amphitheatre.
How big is this?
Well, what we have here is a tiny part
of a truly colossal building
whose exact dimensions we don't know,
but which was probably
among the largest in its time,
and which must have measured much more
than 150 meters along its main axis.
What were the events
that were held in this amphitheatre?
How do we know what they were?
The amphitheatre in Rome
had a very clear function.
It was the building
dedicated to blood sports,
fundamentally,
fights that pitted man against man,
man against beast,
and beast against beast,
as well as the damnatio ad bestias--
that is, execution by wild animals,
and many other sorts of fights,
all somehow turned into a show.
This big building was integrated
in a reurbanization of the area
that also included the construction
of a large avenue 16 meters wide,
with a double portico
and triple sewer system,
which made it possible
to handle the huge number of people
that a building of this sort holds,
and to bring them
and take them back to the city.
Cordoba was largely a reflection of Rome.
Its rulers imitated the Imperial capital
and sometimes surpassed its splendor.
Its religion, customs, and way of life
were similar
to those of other large Roman cities.
My mission
is to solve mysteries of the past,
but to do that, I need to know
how the city was planned,
and how the inhabitants
of Roman Cordoba lived and died.
To achieve it, I'm meeting Ana Ruiz,
an archaeologist who has specialized
in the burial rites of that time.
Since the proclamation of the first known
law in Rome in the 5th century BC,
known as the Law of the Twelve Tables,
there was a requirement to always bury
human remains outside the city,
whether an interment or a cremation.
It was completely forbidden
to bury people within the city walls.
The diseases transmitted
by corpses and the smell of decomposition
were the reasons
that led the Roman authorities
to prohibit burials within city limits.
So, in this case, the city walls
became the border
between the city of the living,
who remained inside,
and the city of the dead,
who were left outside.
Only important people,
such as the emperors,
could enjoy the privilege
of being buried within the city.
Fabio Amador has arrived
in Cordoba,
at a key moment
in the archaeological research.
Although historians have been working
for many years in this city,
the last 30 have borne the most fruit.
On the one hand,
the number of research projects has grown,
and on the other, the boom in construction
has enabled some unexpected discoveries.
All this has completely changed
the consensus
on what Cordoba's urban structure
was like.
The amphitheatre,
the sewer system,
how residents spent their free time,
and the relationship of Cordobans
to death in Roman times
makes me rethink the city's history.
Today the prevailing image of Cordoba
features Islamic culture
as its main reference point,
but I'm discovering something unexpected.
The Roman city of Corduba
had a very carefully planned
and meaningful urban structure.
The checkerboard design, the city walls,
and the large public buildings
where the people met
to take political decisions,
have fun, or pray,
established the main axes of the streets.
Two tombs stand
on the main Corduba-Hispalis road,
outside the city walls but still
quite close to them and to the city gates.
They were discovered in 1993,
and are a clear example
of extramural burials.
It was also the custom to locate
burial sites beside the roads.
A large number of epitaphs
and burial inscriptions
have been found along these boundaries.
It's increasingly obvious to me
with each step.
Under the well-known Arab Cordoba
lie many centuries
of undiscovered history.
Rome was here first
and shaped this city in a profound way.
This should be my line of research
if I want to understand the past
and whatever is hiding underground
in Cordoba.
But why did Rome choose this spot
for the provincial capital?
Who were the first people to arrive here,
and what made this city
one of the most important in the Empire?
Cordoba's special geographic
location was the reason for its founding.
The city stands on fertile flatlands
along the Guadalquivir River,
and at the foot of a mountain range
that was once full of valuable metals,
such as copper, gold, and silver.
The river connected the city with the sea,
the metals from the mountains
fueled industry and trade,
and the abundant water supply
allowed extensive farming.
Nevertheless,
although the first human settlement
was created here about 5,000 years ago,
it wasn't until the 1st century AD,
when Corduba had already been declared
a Roman colony,
that the city reached
the level of importance and splendor
that would mark its history forevermore.
After several days investigating
what is hidden in the city,
now I want to look
into whether it is possible
to understand modern Cordoba without Rome.
Desiderio and I have agreed
to meet at the School of Humanities.
He wants to show me
one of his most important discoveries.
In the image, you can see
an overall diagram of the city of Cordoba.
To the east lies the circus,
with that great dramatic setting
presided by the Roman temple.
In the city center
stood the colonial forum,
the forum adiectum, which was modeled
on the forum of Augustus,
and to the west we have the amphitheatre.
All this was connected by a ceremonial
road, the Decumanus Maximus.
The city was structured
around the Cardo Maximus,
which was the main north-south road,
and the Decumanus Maximus,
which was the east-west axis.
Roman Corduba was founded
in the mid-2nd century BC,
at the same settlement where the Iberian
people called the Turdetani lived,
today Cruz Conde Park.
Later, the city moved to a natural terrace
that was easy to defend,
located a scant 750 meters
from the earlier site.
This place then became the center
of Cordoba.
After a bloody war
between Caesar and the sons of Pompey
that partially destroyed the city,
Cordoba reemerged to become
the capital of the province of Baetica,
with the title Colonia Patricia.
It was the start of an era of splendor
in which the city's great monuments
were built,
of which we can still find vestiges today.
The circus, the temple, the theater,
and the amphitheatre
comprised the city's offering
of entertainment.
Together, they created a common idea, the
idea of belonging to a single structure.
It was the ideal place
to display the power of Rome,
but also to create
shared signs of identity.
These large constructions
are going to guide my research.
Thanks to Desiderio, I've learned
how the city's main roads were laid out
and the different spaces
for the living and the dead.
But will I be able to find more remains
of the great buildings of Roman Cordoba?
To that end, I'm going to meet
with Mara Dolores Baena,
the director
of the Archaeological Museum of Cordoba.
Part of what I'm looking for
lies beneath the museum.
What's so attractive
about the museum
is that it's the very image of the city,
where that whole mix of cultures
become visible,
where we can see all the elements
that form part of the city.
Through the museum we can explain
its history, its life, its custom,
why we are the way we are today.
In addition to having
a magnificent collection
from all the historical periods,
many museums from around the world ask us
to loan them pieces for their exhibitions.
The museum itself has some elements that
make up that image, that soul of the city.
We're on top of Cordoba's Roman Theater,
which is open to visitors.
That's why this museum is both a blend
and the image of what the city is.
What we've got in the basement
is the remains of the infrastructure
at the foundation level, because it
was a quarry within the city limits.
When the theater fell into disuse,
it was gradually dismantled
to construct other buildings.
What they did was to take
these architectural elements,
that ashlar, that stone,
to raise another building.
And bit by bit, they left behind
what was of no use to them,
which was the decorative elements.
That decoration allows us
to reconstruct, for example,
the whole faade of the theater as it was.
It wasn't wars, nor earthquakes,
that destroyed these buildings,
but rather neglect and time.
The stonework and what little is left
of the seating give me a starting point
to visually recreate the ancient theater.
What can't we see in those
theaters? How a Roman theater was built.
And that's what we have here.
Because we can see the way it was built,
we can see the opus caementicium,
which is the first known concrete
in history,
and which set there 2,000 years ago.
I've managed to reproduce what's
left of the theater in three dimensions
and to reveal the designed foundation,
and a part of the area
destined for the spectators.
Once again,
by scanning what's left of the theater,
we can capture at least some
of the elements of the seating
and, well, that begins to give us an idea
of how big that monument was.
What's more, I think this tool
is a tool for the future,
that can make it possible
to easily reconstruct the whole building.
Because one of the criteria which makes
things easier in Roman architecture
is that it is extraordinarily modular.
That means that if we know a part,
just a small part
of this kind of building,
we can recreate practically all the rest.
But to give you an idea of its size,
look at this.
It's a photo superimposed
on a map of modern Cordoba,
and the theater takes up a bunch
of buildings,
including the convent garden,
historical services, et cetera, et cetera.
That's why it may be impossible
to excavate it all,
and why it's brilliant
that precisely the Archaeological Museum
is a 16th-century palace that was declared
a National Heritage of Cultural Interest,
so it's impossible to demolish it
in order to dig beneath it.
We have to play precisely with new
technologies to be able to see the past.
The big buildings tell me about
the city, but I'm also looking for clues
that can show me
how those Roman Cordobans lived.
I want to know what their homes were like,
how they were decorated,
and how they reflected
their culture within their walls.
I'm still looking for answers,
and this time, I'll find them someplace
that I never would have imagined.
Following Mara Dolores Baena's directions
I've reached the Palacio del Bailo,
a palace in the heart of the city
that's been turned into a hotel.
I'm meeting here with Carlos Castejn,
the former owner of the building,
to find out how a 16th-century palace,
like so many other buildings in Cordoba,
can hide underground surprises.
Carlos had lived in this house
since he was a child,
and remembers a crucial moment
in its history.
Well, when firewood and coal were carried
from the front door
to the back of the house,
that made the house quite dirty.
One day, my grandmother was
complaining to my grandfather
about how filthy that made the house.
So, to solve the problem,
he said to her in a rather manly outburst,
"Mara Isabel, don't worry.
I'm going to make a tunnel
that will go from the back of the house
to the entrance for the workers to use.
And they won't track dirt
into your salon anymore."
And so, they started tunneling.
And when they had dug halfway,
they found the Roman ruins.
And that was how
they discovered
one of the best-preserved Roman domus
found anywhere in the world today.
This typical upper-class Roman house
lay hidden underground.
A Roman domus had multiple rooms,
such as bedrooms, a dining room,
an atrium to receive visitors, bathrooms,
and many other amenities.
But not all Romans could afford
this level of comfort.
The humbler classes lived in insulae,
very simple buildings
filled with apartments
that often had only one room.
The poor quality of the materials
used to build the insulae
made them vulnerable
to frequent collapses and fires.
Fortunately, the domus were built
with better-quality materials,
allowing houses like this one
to survive down to our times
as a valuable source
of information for archaeologists.
Inside contemporary
modern buildings
we have the ruins of Roman houses,
what we call domus,
which are single-family homes.
These domus feature mosaics,
and these mosaics are also preserved.
In some areas of Cordoba they are
preserved just as in this museum.
These mosaics can help me
to better understand
how the people of the city lived.
To learn more about them,
I'm meeting Luz Neira,
an archaeologist who is an expert
in Roman mosaics
at the Alczar de los Reyes Cristianos,
which houses a collection of mosaics
recovered from beneath the square
called the Plaza de la Corredera.
Mosaics are an essential source
of information to reconstruct
the history of the Roman Empire,
and especially the history of the elite,
because mosaics are preserved in the place
for which they were originally designed.
This is essential because
other ancient art forms are moveable,
they've been transported.
But within the misfortune of falling
into ruin, the collapsed roofs and walls
protect the mosaics so that we find them
in their original location.
And that location, as is logical when
talking about a mosaic such as this one,
an opus tessellatum mosaic, is linked
to domestic life in the large domus
in a city like Corduba Colonia Patricia
or in a big Roman country house.
The Romans were very superstitious,
especially regarding those issues
related to death.
Magic symbols, tablets bearing oaths,
or curses on the epitaphs that accompanied
the dead were quite common.
And that superstitious protection
was also employed in their homes.
Their mosaic floors feature numerous
elements that reflect those Roman beliefs.
The Romans were terrified of evil spirits,
of hexes,
and that's why they protected themselves
with these kinds of symbols.
Anyone who thinks that these
are merely decorative motifs
is tremendously mistaken, because in
reality what the head of Medusa represents
is a form of protection for these rooms,
above all to ward off evil spirits.
The scenes depicted
in the mosaics allow me to understand
part of the history of Roman Cordoba,
a heritage which, gauging by what
I'm seeing in this marvelous city,
is still quite alive.
From the tower of the Alczar,
the Royal Stables are going to put me
on the trail of another of the elements
that left the deepest mark
on the lives of the Romans and that
the city's inhabitants valued most.
The Romans held Spanish horses
in very high esteem.
Horses were their method of transport,
essential work tools,
and a symbol of social class.
At the eastern end
of the Decumanus Maximus
lies Cordoba's spectacular circus.
That's where the Romans
held their horse races,
which they were
extremely passionate about,
just as they were about the games
featuring gladiators.
Jockeys were revered in the same way
that many star athletes are today,
and the winning horses,
along with their trainers,
were glorified,
and their feats immortalized in mosaics.
The circus, where
the famous horses in the mosaics raced,
has since disappeared.
The few ruins that remain
lie beneath the Orive Palace.
But a temple overlooked the circus.
Some remains of it can still be found,
and a tiny part has been rebuilt.
It's the perfect opportunity
for me to reconstruct it digitally
using the laser scanner.
What happened to such
magnificent constructions as this one?
Why did they disappear?
During the 4th century AD,
the decadence of the Western Roman Empire
reached the city of Cordoba.
Most of the public buildings
fell into disrepair
and their materials were reused
to build new constructions.
It was a slow transformation
of the city that took several centuries
and erased
most of Cordoba's Roman heritage.
After the Romans came a period
that we call Late Antiquity,
which is when the Visigoths ruled.
That period is being studied now and had
a lot of influence on what would become
the Cordoba of al-Andalus,
Islamic Cordoba.
Archaeological research
has shown that the city's urban design
underwent substantial changes
during the 6th and 7th centuries,
from roads to hydraulic infrastructures,
and even in homes and public spaces.
The Christian community's contributions
were especially important,
in the form of churches and basilicas,
which even today are little known.
The Moors took over from the Visigoths,
and expanding on what
the Romans had created,
they once again placed Cordoba
among the world's most important cities.
The Mosque-Cathedral
is Cordoba's most distinctive emblem.
The splendor of the Umayyad caliphate,
which began with the arrival
of Abd al-Rahman the First,
eclipsed the city's past.
But the information that I have
suggests that inside here, too,
if you know where to look, are hidden
vestiges of Rome and the Visigoths.
Construction
of the Great Mosque began in the year 786,
and immediately, everyone
who visited it greatly admired it.
The mosque grew
as each new ruler rose to the throne,
ordering a series of expansions
that made it more important, bigger,
more beautiful, and more spectacular.
Finally, after reconquering the city, the
Christians built inside it the cathedral
that today
juts up from the building's silhouette.
To learn more
about the city's past
in the period
between the Romans and the Arabs,
I'm meeting
with the archaeologist Alberto Len
and the engineer Rafael Ortiz,
who are in charge of an ambitious project
to discover what's hidden
beneath the Mosque.
Their studies suggest
that under the floor lie a basilica
and a monumental Christian complex.
Their findings may become the basis
of a truly important discovery,
and may confirm the idea that Cordoba has
witnessed a continuous flow of cultures
through its gates.
What we are looking at here--
Is that a basilica or not?
What do you think?
What we're saying, so as not
to keep making the same mistakes,
is that we shouldn't be talking
about Saint Vincent's Basilica,
and that the fundamental question
is not to interpret this structure
as part of Saint Vincent's Basilica.
What we're proposing
is that we should work from the concept
of the episcopal complex, that is,
of a large neighborhood within the city
that is much bigger than the basilica,
and that corresponds to part of the chapel
in the mosque, and is oriented
in different ways in different phases.
The archaeologists
maintain the hypothesis
that when Abd al-Rahman the First
arrived in Cordoba in the year 756,
an episcopal complex that the Christians
had built in the 6th and 7th centuries
already stood inside the city walls.
The complex was very large,
covering more than two hectares,
and included several Christian buildings
in addition to Saint Vincent's Basilica.
It's believed that Abd al-Rahman the First
ordered the Great Mosque
to be built on top of the basilica.
The Romans had disappeared
centuries earlier,
and the Visigoths reused the materials
in their temples, houses,
buildings, and monuments.
The Muslims did the same thing.
The architecture
is very dynamic in this area.
That means that a lot of the monuments
were built in this part of the city,
and one of the things
Rafa has studied is proof of that.
The reuse of the architectural elements
that decorated that building
in the construction of the Mosque.
You've found that in this context too?
During the construction
of the first mosque,
they used a lot of scavenged material,
both Roman and Visigothic,
and we can see when we enter the building
pedestals, shafts, capitals.
They're all elements that have been
recovered from various buildings.
And the interesting thing is
that in this dynamic context,
many of those buildings, many of those
materials, were made with Roman elements
that had already been reused
in Visigothic constructions.
We may never be able
to excavate nor see
the Christian and Roman ruins
beneath the Mosque-Cathedral.
Current and future studies will be carried
out with the use of indirect techniques
that won't destroy the heritage
preserved today,
and are based on the three-dimensional
analysis of images
like the techniques Fabio Amador uses.
Many mysteries
will remain buried underground,
and that is the great challenge
archaeologists face--
how to study the past
without destroying the present.
I understand why such beauty
has eclipsed the city's Roman past.
But Rome is also present here,
in the heart of the Mosque.
Rome forms part of everything
I'm coming across in Cordoba,
its houses, its monuments,
its urban design.
Roman Cordoba grew
to a population of 50,000
in one of the warmest areas
in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.
Nevertheless, its inhabitants enjoyed
gardens, public baths,
and plots of fruits and vegetables.
The water supply
was not a problem for Cordoba.
My next step will let me discover
the Romans' precise and astonishing
hydraulic engineering.
On my walks through the streets
and patios of Cordoba,
I'm constantly surprised
by how green it is,
by the number of plants that cool off
this city in the scorching south of Spain.
So, I want to know
where all that water comes from
and how it reaches
every corner of the city.
Despite what many people think,
Cordoba is a region rich in water.
The Guadalquivir River
was always a transport route to the sea,
but water for farming and domestic uses
was also supplied to the city,
and is still supplied today
from the area's generous water table.
Real pioneers, the Romans were specialists
in bringing underground water up
to where it could be used on the surface,
and their technology
was very advanced for the times.
The Arabs were great masters
at channeling and handling water,
and they appreciated
the Romans' work and engineering.
Wells, cisterns, and aqueducts
were reused to bring water to the palaces
and to water gardens like the ones
that must have adorned the Great Mosque
and the old Alczar, or fortress.
In Roman times, those aqueducts fed
large cisterns that distribute water
throughout the city, whether to public
fountains open to everyone
or to certain homes
that had their own water supply.
In Moorish times, the Roman fountains,
wells, houses, and aqueducts
supplied water to large buildings
like the Grand Mosque,
or the Alczar of the Caliphate.
I'm entering a parking garage
below Cordoba's bus station,
where I can find the remains
of a Roman aqueduct.
It was so efficient
that when it was discovered in the 1990s,
it still carried water to the city.
It had been working
ever since ancient Roman times.
This three-dimensional reconstruction
will help Fabio Amador to understand
how this urban circulatory system was
organized and used to bring the water
that the Romans, Visigoths, and Muslims
drank in Cordoba.
Following the trail of the city's water,
I descend back into the underground belly
of Cordoba.
I want to keep discovering
the city's hidden history.
I've reached a place known today
as the Baths of the Caliphate's Fortress.
The Caliphate's most influential men came
here to establish social relationships,
plan political conspiracies, rest,
and, of course, carry out
the purification rites before praying.
According to the historical chronicles,
in the Cordoba of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III
there were some 300 public baths,
and that number doubled under Almanzor,
another of the city's
most important rulers.
The public baths became so popular
that they have survived down to our times,
and even today, several of them are still
operating in the city of Cordoba.
The baths are an example
of social and cultural sophistication.
All thanks to water, and the Romans'
mastery of the techniques to find it,
bring it up out of the ground,
and transport it.
These aqueducts used to bring water
from the nearby mountains,
and that's where
my investigation is taking me.
Following the trail of water
leads me to a magical city
that disappeared only a few years
after it dazzled the world.
Medina Azahara was the high
point of the Cordoba of the Caliphs.
It competed with Damascus, Istanbul,
and Cairo in importance and beauty.
Founded between the years 936 and 940
in the foothills
of the mountains outside Cordoba,
just eight kilometers from the city,
it was the headquarters
of the Caliphate's administration
and the official residence
of Abd al-Rahman III,
who ordered its construction.
One of the most beautiful cities
ever built on the Iberian Peninsula
during the Islamic Period, it drank the
water brought by an ancient Roman aqueduct
and raised from wells that the Arabs dug.
And so, Rome supported the progress
of this new era of splendor,
and the Muslims,
accustomed to living in arid climes,
improved the Romans' canals, wells,
and irrigation ditches
to the point of becoming true experts
in hydraulic technology.
Using a laser scanner
and the innovative GigaPan technology,
I'm going to reconstruct
some of the splendor of these halls.
GigaPan is an automated robotic
hardware to capture
extremely high-definition panoramas
right down to the most minuscule detail.
Once the area to photograph is set,
the GigaPan system divides the objects
in the selected area into rows and columns
and calculates
the number of images required.
Then the robotic arm does the rest,
and a computer program combines
the hundreds of photographs into one
single, incredibly high-quality image.
The ruins around me
are barely a fuzzy sketch
of the lost city hidden beneath my feet.
I want to know what this city was like,
and what efforts are being made today
to salvage the splendor
that I've read about in history books.
Contemporary historical accounts say
that it took up to 10,000 people
to build Medina Azahara
from the start of construction in 936.
Abd al-Rahman used the best
building materials of the period,
marble, precious stones, gold
worked by the best craftsmen
to make the city a symbol of power,
just as Abd al-Rahman intended.
I walk part of the city, taking
notes and analyzing everything I see.
Alberto Montejo, the director
of the Medina Azahara complex,
comes out to help me in my quest.
Alberto wants to show me the
Hall of Abd al-Rahman III, or Saln Rico,
the greatest expression
of 10th-century architecture and art.
The first thing the visitor sees
in Medina Azahara,
and above all in the Saln Rico, is power.
In other words, the person
who sits back there, that is, the Caliph,
is demonstrating that he is able
to build this because he is
the most powerful person on the Iberian
Peninsula or in the Western Mediterranean.
That is the message. And depending on your
cultural level, you're going to understand
what's on the wall
because it's a very clear message.
The structure of the reception hall
was designed to have three levels.
One part is earthly, with plant motifs,
another is the framing section,
and features arches,
while the highest part
is the astral section,
and is decorated with cosmic elements.
It is a celestial hall, a representation
of the cosmos that envelops the person
who is God's representative on Earth,
and who sits back here.
Spread out all over
the Saln Rico lies an enormous puzzle,
for which there is no model to follow
in order to assemble it.
We've calculated that there are
between 500,000 and one million
of these fragments of arabesques,
which are the decorative elements
that cover the wall.
We worked with 5,000 fragments
just in the most recent operation
to reconstruct the faade
and the counterfaade alone.
We've collected about 25,000
but the work is very arduous
because thousands of these fragments
appeared in the big excavations
of the 1940s and the '50s.
They're still kept in the area
that's closed to visitors,
but they're scattered all over the dig.
We've been given instructions to collect
them because they're deteriorating,
and to move them into the museum,
which was created ten years ago.
Abd al-Rahman III surrounded himself
with the best doctors,
mathematicians, and astronomers,
all at the service of the Court.
Knowledge was power, and al-Hakam II,
his son and successor as Caliph,
was a supporter of that idea.
We believe that what the intellectuals
were doing with the design,
with the whole symbolic program
represented here,
was to express, in a very clear way,
all the scientific achievements
that were made in the Court of al-Andalus,
that is, in the Court of Medina Azahara,
which surpassed those of his opponents,
of his enemies,
the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad.
The size
of the archaeological site is tremendous,
approximately 115 hectares,
of which they have so far been able
to excavate only ten percent.
Each season at the digs,
new surprises appear,
and new fragments that have to fit
into this huge puzzle.
But beneath the Medina Azahara
that we can see, under this Saln Rico,
there are more constructions
from the previous phase of Medina Azahara,
which can help us to understand how
the urban design and art of Medina Azahara
had evolved since the beginning.
In the year 1010, a little less
than a century after the creation
of Medina Azahara, a civil war
against the Berbers razed the city,
and the destruction was so great
that even its name and location were lost.
In just a few years,
the city became a dream of the past.
When the city was abandoned,
it also abandoned us completely.
At the beginning of the 11th century,
the city served as a source of building
materials, of capitals and pedestals.
Metals were stripped from the doors
and lead pipes were yanked out.
And later, beginning in the Christian era,
in the Early Middle Ages,
Medina Azahara was used
as a quarry, the perfect quarry,
because builders could obtain stone blocks
that had already been cut.
Medina Azahara is still alive
and surprises us constantly.
A team including researchers
from the Autonomous University of Madrid,
the German Archaeological Institute,
and Alberto himself,
has just made a much-awaited discovery--
the eastern entrance
to the main square of the city.
The entrance gate,
which was four meters wide,
was lost when the city burned
in the year 1010.
Now the archaeologists have found
the remains of the catastrophe--
hinges, nails, ornaments,
and roofing tiles.
Barely a week after the digging began,
the entrance to the plaza
started to emerge from the earth.
Similar in size
to the Plaza Mayor in Madrid,
the place where the Caliph
received ambassadors and emissaries
is returning from its past of splendor,
violence, and neglect.
Medina Azahara, like all of the city
of Cordoba, is alive, hidden underground,
waiting for the urban underworld
to resurface and tell us its secrets.
It seemed as if everything had been
written about the history of this place,
and yet here I am, among ruins that
have hardly begun to tell us their story.
Employing various techniques, I have
managed to reconstruct and visualize
in a very precise way
some of the archaeological treasures
that remain out of sight.
All this work will be available so that
other archaeologists and researchers
can continue advancing
and shedding more light
on a past that is still largely unknown.
After using 21st-century technology,
I return to that of the 19th century,
the technology often used by the
archeologists and travelers of other times
to depict cities like this one--
a camera lucida.
Perhaps the city's conspicuous splendor
prevents us from seeing
that a major part of Cordoba
is still waiting to be explored.
But if there is anything that I take away
from here as a sure fact,
it's that behind every discovery
there is an indelible mark.
Rome will always remain.
a universal city distinguished
with four UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
More than one million visitors
come each year
to contemplate the marvels
in the Cordoba of the Caliphate.
But beneath these extraordinary monuments
lies another, more ancient and unknown,
Cordoba that conceals its history.
Islamic Cordoba never
would have become as important as it was
without the Roman city.
Now, a National Geographic
contributor will use the latest technology
to discover what's below
its buildings and streets,
seeking to reveal its
most deeply hidden mysteries.
When we visualize something,
we aren't just creating a space,
but also recreating
how it was used over time.
Fabio Amador joins the greatest
experts in the city's history
to uncover and recreate
the lost past of Cordoba,
a key place in the history
of Western civilization.
Fabio Amador isn't just an archaeologist.
He's a time traveler.
Working for National Geographic,
he's explored some of the most important
archaeological digs in Mesoamerica.
The pyramids of Teotihuacn,
the Mayan ruins of the Yucatn Peninsula,
and many more major archaeological sites.
Now, Fabio Amador is in Cordoba
on a high-tech adventure
utilizing ground-penetrating radar,
LIDAR, and 3-D scanning.
He will join the historians
and archaeologists working on site
to visually revive a hidden city
that is more than 2,000 years old.
I've come to Cordoba
in search of a hidden past.
And to uncover it, I want to meet one
of the greatest experts in Roman history
and in the later cultures
that inhabited the city.
- Hi, how are you?
- Good morning. Good to see you.
Desiderio Vaquerizo
is a professor of archaeology
at the University of Cordoba.
To my surprise, he decides to show me
an ancient sewage system.
But not just any sewage system.
I feel like we are exploring
the skeleton of the Roman world.
We are right in the underworld.
Yes, indeed. It's important
to realize that all this was underground.
Keep in mind that we're on the first level
of the parking garage
of a modern, privately owned building.
And several meters below us,
there's a line that marks, shall we say,
the underworld of the Roman city itself,
which is the sewage system,
which was just as good as ours,
and which shows the enormous scale and
the magnitude of this sort of urban plan,
as well as the image that
the new Roman Cordoba wanted to project
at the service of the Imperial idea.
To obtain a volumetric image
of these sewers,
I'm going to use a laser scanner.
By means of a laser beam,
the scanner calculates the distances
to the objects in front of me.
A revolving mirror makes this beam
of light hit every point on its surface,
creating a cloud of points, which,
once processed,
will allow me to understand what it's like
and what all this infrastructure
was like in the past.
So,
we're talking about a triple sewer system.
The one in the center, which,
as you can see,
is at a slightly lower level,
drained the amphitheatre.
Look at the size of the inspection tower.
It's huge.
Of course, amphitheatres were where
the Romans held the spectacles
where blood was spilled.
Cleaning up afterwards
must have been essential,
and must have required
large amounts of water.
This concept of public health services,
of water supply, of waste water removal,
the idea that it was essential for the
city to get rid of its waste water--
To find something like this, we
would have to jump ahead a lot in history,
probably to the 19th century
in many cities. It's totally modern.
After showing me the sewer,
Desiderio takes me to the spot
that fed this drainage system,
a dig where he's working now,
and where one of this city's
great monuments used to stand.
We're outside the Roman
city walls in the western outskirts,
at the excavations of the ruins
of the colony's amphitheatre.
How big is this?
Well, what we have here is a tiny part
of a truly colossal building
whose exact dimensions we don't know,
but which was probably
among the largest in its time,
and which must have measured much more
than 150 meters along its main axis.
What were the events
that were held in this amphitheatre?
How do we know what they were?
The amphitheatre in Rome
had a very clear function.
It was the building
dedicated to blood sports,
fundamentally,
fights that pitted man against man,
man against beast,
and beast against beast,
as well as the damnatio ad bestias--
that is, execution by wild animals,
and many other sorts of fights,
all somehow turned into a show.
This big building was integrated
in a reurbanization of the area
that also included the construction
of a large avenue 16 meters wide,
with a double portico
and triple sewer system,
which made it possible
to handle the huge number of people
that a building of this sort holds,
and to bring them
and take them back to the city.
Cordoba was largely a reflection of Rome.
Its rulers imitated the Imperial capital
and sometimes surpassed its splendor.
Its religion, customs, and way of life
were similar
to those of other large Roman cities.
My mission
is to solve mysteries of the past,
but to do that, I need to know
how the city was planned,
and how the inhabitants
of Roman Cordoba lived and died.
To achieve it, I'm meeting Ana Ruiz,
an archaeologist who has specialized
in the burial rites of that time.
Since the proclamation of the first known
law in Rome in the 5th century BC,
known as the Law of the Twelve Tables,
there was a requirement to always bury
human remains outside the city,
whether an interment or a cremation.
It was completely forbidden
to bury people within the city walls.
The diseases transmitted
by corpses and the smell of decomposition
were the reasons
that led the Roman authorities
to prohibit burials within city limits.
So, in this case, the city walls
became the border
between the city of the living,
who remained inside,
and the city of the dead,
who were left outside.
Only important people,
such as the emperors,
could enjoy the privilege
of being buried within the city.
Fabio Amador has arrived
in Cordoba,
at a key moment
in the archaeological research.
Although historians have been working
for many years in this city,
the last 30 have borne the most fruit.
On the one hand,
the number of research projects has grown,
and on the other, the boom in construction
has enabled some unexpected discoveries.
All this has completely changed
the consensus
on what Cordoba's urban structure
was like.
The amphitheatre,
the sewer system,
how residents spent their free time,
and the relationship of Cordobans
to death in Roman times
makes me rethink the city's history.
Today the prevailing image of Cordoba
features Islamic culture
as its main reference point,
but I'm discovering something unexpected.
The Roman city of Corduba
had a very carefully planned
and meaningful urban structure.
The checkerboard design, the city walls,
and the large public buildings
where the people met
to take political decisions,
have fun, or pray,
established the main axes of the streets.
Two tombs stand
on the main Corduba-Hispalis road,
outside the city walls but still
quite close to them and to the city gates.
They were discovered in 1993,
and are a clear example
of extramural burials.
It was also the custom to locate
burial sites beside the roads.
A large number of epitaphs
and burial inscriptions
have been found along these boundaries.
It's increasingly obvious to me
with each step.
Under the well-known Arab Cordoba
lie many centuries
of undiscovered history.
Rome was here first
and shaped this city in a profound way.
This should be my line of research
if I want to understand the past
and whatever is hiding underground
in Cordoba.
But why did Rome choose this spot
for the provincial capital?
Who were the first people to arrive here,
and what made this city
one of the most important in the Empire?
Cordoba's special geographic
location was the reason for its founding.
The city stands on fertile flatlands
along the Guadalquivir River,
and at the foot of a mountain range
that was once full of valuable metals,
such as copper, gold, and silver.
The river connected the city with the sea,
the metals from the mountains
fueled industry and trade,
and the abundant water supply
allowed extensive farming.
Nevertheless,
although the first human settlement
was created here about 5,000 years ago,
it wasn't until the 1st century AD,
when Corduba had already been declared
a Roman colony,
that the city reached
the level of importance and splendor
that would mark its history forevermore.
After several days investigating
what is hidden in the city,
now I want to look
into whether it is possible
to understand modern Cordoba without Rome.
Desiderio and I have agreed
to meet at the School of Humanities.
He wants to show me
one of his most important discoveries.
In the image, you can see
an overall diagram of the city of Cordoba.
To the east lies the circus,
with that great dramatic setting
presided by the Roman temple.
In the city center
stood the colonial forum,
the forum adiectum, which was modeled
on the forum of Augustus,
and to the west we have the amphitheatre.
All this was connected by a ceremonial
road, the Decumanus Maximus.
The city was structured
around the Cardo Maximus,
which was the main north-south road,
and the Decumanus Maximus,
which was the east-west axis.
Roman Corduba was founded
in the mid-2nd century BC,
at the same settlement where the Iberian
people called the Turdetani lived,
today Cruz Conde Park.
Later, the city moved to a natural terrace
that was easy to defend,
located a scant 750 meters
from the earlier site.
This place then became the center
of Cordoba.
After a bloody war
between Caesar and the sons of Pompey
that partially destroyed the city,
Cordoba reemerged to become
the capital of the province of Baetica,
with the title Colonia Patricia.
It was the start of an era of splendor
in which the city's great monuments
were built,
of which we can still find vestiges today.
The circus, the temple, the theater,
and the amphitheatre
comprised the city's offering
of entertainment.
Together, they created a common idea, the
idea of belonging to a single structure.
It was the ideal place
to display the power of Rome,
but also to create
shared signs of identity.
These large constructions
are going to guide my research.
Thanks to Desiderio, I've learned
how the city's main roads were laid out
and the different spaces
for the living and the dead.
But will I be able to find more remains
of the great buildings of Roman Cordoba?
To that end, I'm going to meet
with Mara Dolores Baena,
the director
of the Archaeological Museum of Cordoba.
Part of what I'm looking for
lies beneath the museum.
What's so attractive
about the museum
is that it's the very image of the city,
where that whole mix of cultures
become visible,
where we can see all the elements
that form part of the city.
Through the museum we can explain
its history, its life, its custom,
why we are the way we are today.
In addition to having
a magnificent collection
from all the historical periods,
many museums from around the world ask us
to loan them pieces for their exhibitions.
The museum itself has some elements that
make up that image, that soul of the city.
We're on top of Cordoba's Roman Theater,
which is open to visitors.
That's why this museum is both a blend
and the image of what the city is.
What we've got in the basement
is the remains of the infrastructure
at the foundation level, because it
was a quarry within the city limits.
When the theater fell into disuse,
it was gradually dismantled
to construct other buildings.
What they did was to take
these architectural elements,
that ashlar, that stone,
to raise another building.
And bit by bit, they left behind
what was of no use to them,
which was the decorative elements.
That decoration allows us
to reconstruct, for example,
the whole faade of the theater as it was.
It wasn't wars, nor earthquakes,
that destroyed these buildings,
but rather neglect and time.
The stonework and what little is left
of the seating give me a starting point
to visually recreate the ancient theater.
What can't we see in those
theaters? How a Roman theater was built.
And that's what we have here.
Because we can see the way it was built,
we can see the opus caementicium,
which is the first known concrete
in history,
and which set there 2,000 years ago.
I've managed to reproduce what's
left of the theater in three dimensions
and to reveal the designed foundation,
and a part of the area
destined for the spectators.
Once again,
by scanning what's left of the theater,
we can capture at least some
of the elements of the seating
and, well, that begins to give us an idea
of how big that monument was.
What's more, I think this tool
is a tool for the future,
that can make it possible
to easily reconstruct the whole building.
Because one of the criteria which makes
things easier in Roman architecture
is that it is extraordinarily modular.
That means that if we know a part,
just a small part
of this kind of building,
we can recreate practically all the rest.
But to give you an idea of its size,
look at this.
It's a photo superimposed
on a map of modern Cordoba,
and the theater takes up a bunch
of buildings,
including the convent garden,
historical services, et cetera, et cetera.
That's why it may be impossible
to excavate it all,
and why it's brilliant
that precisely the Archaeological Museum
is a 16th-century palace that was declared
a National Heritage of Cultural Interest,
so it's impossible to demolish it
in order to dig beneath it.
We have to play precisely with new
technologies to be able to see the past.
The big buildings tell me about
the city, but I'm also looking for clues
that can show me
how those Roman Cordobans lived.
I want to know what their homes were like,
how they were decorated,
and how they reflected
their culture within their walls.
I'm still looking for answers,
and this time, I'll find them someplace
that I never would have imagined.
Following Mara Dolores Baena's directions
I've reached the Palacio del Bailo,
a palace in the heart of the city
that's been turned into a hotel.
I'm meeting here with Carlos Castejn,
the former owner of the building,
to find out how a 16th-century palace,
like so many other buildings in Cordoba,
can hide underground surprises.
Carlos had lived in this house
since he was a child,
and remembers a crucial moment
in its history.
Well, when firewood and coal were carried
from the front door
to the back of the house,
that made the house quite dirty.
One day, my grandmother was
complaining to my grandfather
about how filthy that made the house.
So, to solve the problem,
he said to her in a rather manly outburst,
"Mara Isabel, don't worry.
I'm going to make a tunnel
that will go from the back of the house
to the entrance for the workers to use.
And they won't track dirt
into your salon anymore."
And so, they started tunneling.
And when they had dug halfway,
they found the Roman ruins.
And that was how
they discovered
one of the best-preserved Roman domus
found anywhere in the world today.
This typical upper-class Roman house
lay hidden underground.
A Roman domus had multiple rooms,
such as bedrooms, a dining room,
an atrium to receive visitors, bathrooms,
and many other amenities.
But not all Romans could afford
this level of comfort.
The humbler classes lived in insulae,
very simple buildings
filled with apartments
that often had only one room.
The poor quality of the materials
used to build the insulae
made them vulnerable
to frequent collapses and fires.
Fortunately, the domus were built
with better-quality materials,
allowing houses like this one
to survive down to our times
as a valuable source
of information for archaeologists.
Inside contemporary
modern buildings
we have the ruins of Roman houses,
what we call domus,
which are single-family homes.
These domus feature mosaics,
and these mosaics are also preserved.
In some areas of Cordoba they are
preserved just as in this museum.
These mosaics can help me
to better understand
how the people of the city lived.
To learn more about them,
I'm meeting Luz Neira,
an archaeologist who is an expert
in Roman mosaics
at the Alczar de los Reyes Cristianos,
which houses a collection of mosaics
recovered from beneath the square
called the Plaza de la Corredera.
Mosaics are an essential source
of information to reconstruct
the history of the Roman Empire,
and especially the history of the elite,
because mosaics are preserved in the place
for which they were originally designed.
This is essential because
other ancient art forms are moveable,
they've been transported.
But within the misfortune of falling
into ruin, the collapsed roofs and walls
protect the mosaics so that we find them
in their original location.
And that location, as is logical when
talking about a mosaic such as this one,
an opus tessellatum mosaic, is linked
to domestic life in the large domus
in a city like Corduba Colonia Patricia
or in a big Roman country house.
The Romans were very superstitious,
especially regarding those issues
related to death.
Magic symbols, tablets bearing oaths,
or curses on the epitaphs that accompanied
the dead were quite common.
And that superstitious protection
was also employed in their homes.
Their mosaic floors feature numerous
elements that reflect those Roman beliefs.
The Romans were terrified of evil spirits,
of hexes,
and that's why they protected themselves
with these kinds of symbols.
Anyone who thinks that these
are merely decorative motifs
is tremendously mistaken, because in
reality what the head of Medusa represents
is a form of protection for these rooms,
above all to ward off evil spirits.
The scenes depicted
in the mosaics allow me to understand
part of the history of Roman Cordoba,
a heritage which, gauging by what
I'm seeing in this marvelous city,
is still quite alive.
From the tower of the Alczar,
the Royal Stables are going to put me
on the trail of another of the elements
that left the deepest mark
on the lives of the Romans and that
the city's inhabitants valued most.
The Romans held Spanish horses
in very high esteem.
Horses were their method of transport,
essential work tools,
and a symbol of social class.
At the eastern end
of the Decumanus Maximus
lies Cordoba's spectacular circus.
That's where the Romans
held their horse races,
which they were
extremely passionate about,
just as they were about the games
featuring gladiators.
Jockeys were revered in the same way
that many star athletes are today,
and the winning horses,
along with their trainers,
were glorified,
and their feats immortalized in mosaics.
The circus, where
the famous horses in the mosaics raced,
has since disappeared.
The few ruins that remain
lie beneath the Orive Palace.
But a temple overlooked the circus.
Some remains of it can still be found,
and a tiny part has been rebuilt.
It's the perfect opportunity
for me to reconstruct it digitally
using the laser scanner.
What happened to such
magnificent constructions as this one?
Why did they disappear?
During the 4th century AD,
the decadence of the Western Roman Empire
reached the city of Cordoba.
Most of the public buildings
fell into disrepair
and their materials were reused
to build new constructions.
It was a slow transformation
of the city that took several centuries
and erased
most of Cordoba's Roman heritage.
After the Romans came a period
that we call Late Antiquity,
which is when the Visigoths ruled.
That period is being studied now and had
a lot of influence on what would become
the Cordoba of al-Andalus,
Islamic Cordoba.
Archaeological research
has shown that the city's urban design
underwent substantial changes
during the 6th and 7th centuries,
from roads to hydraulic infrastructures,
and even in homes and public spaces.
The Christian community's contributions
were especially important,
in the form of churches and basilicas,
which even today are little known.
The Moors took over from the Visigoths,
and expanding on what
the Romans had created,
they once again placed Cordoba
among the world's most important cities.
The Mosque-Cathedral
is Cordoba's most distinctive emblem.
The splendor of the Umayyad caliphate,
which began with the arrival
of Abd al-Rahman the First,
eclipsed the city's past.
But the information that I have
suggests that inside here, too,
if you know where to look, are hidden
vestiges of Rome and the Visigoths.
Construction
of the Great Mosque began in the year 786,
and immediately, everyone
who visited it greatly admired it.
The mosque grew
as each new ruler rose to the throne,
ordering a series of expansions
that made it more important, bigger,
more beautiful, and more spectacular.
Finally, after reconquering the city, the
Christians built inside it the cathedral
that today
juts up from the building's silhouette.
To learn more
about the city's past
in the period
between the Romans and the Arabs,
I'm meeting
with the archaeologist Alberto Len
and the engineer Rafael Ortiz,
who are in charge of an ambitious project
to discover what's hidden
beneath the Mosque.
Their studies suggest
that under the floor lie a basilica
and a monumental Christian complex.
Their findings may become the basis
of a truly important discovery,
and may confirm the idea that Cordoba has
witnessed a continuous flow of cultures
through its gates.
What we are looking at here--
Is that a basilica or not?
What do you think?
What we're saying, so as not
to keep making the same mistakes,
is that we shouldn't be talking
about Saint Vincent's Basilica,
and that the fundamental question
is not to interpret this structure
as part of Saint Vincent's Basilica.
What we're proposing
is that we should work from the concept
of the episcopal complex, that is,
of a large neighborhood within the city
that is much bigger than the basilica,
and that corresponds to part of the chapel
in the mosque, and is oriented
in different ways in different phases.
The archaeologists
maintain the hypothesis
that when Abd al-Rahman the First
arrived in Cordoba in the year 756,
an episcopal complex that the Christians
had built in the 6th and 7th centuries
already stood inside the city walls.
The complex was very large,
covering more than two hectares,
and included several Christian buildings
in addition to Saint Vincent's Basilica.
It's believed that Abd al-Rahman the First
ordered the Great Mosque
to be built on top of the basilica.
The Romans had disappeared
centuries earlier,
and the Visigoths reused the materials
in their temples, houses,
buildings, and monuments.
The Muslims did the same thing.
The architecture
is very dynamic in this area.
That means that a lot of the monuments
were built in this part of the city,
and one of the things
Rafa has studied is proof of that.
The reuse of the architectural elements
that decorated that building
in the construction of the Mosque.
You've found that in this context too?
During the construction
of the first mosque,
they used a lot of scavenged material,
both Roman and Visigothic,
and we can see when we enter the building
pedestals, shafts, capitals.
They're all elements that have been
recovered from various buildings.
And the interesting thing is
that in this dynamic context,
many of those buildings, many of those
materials, were made with Roman elements
that had already been reused
in Visigothic constructions.
We may never be able
to excavate nor see
the Christian and Roman ruins
beneath the Mosque-Cathedral.
Current and future studies will be carried
out with the use of indirect techniques
that won't destroy the heritage
preserved today,
and are based on the three-dimensional
analysis of images
like the techniques Fabio Amador uses.
Many mysteries
will remain buried underground,
and that is the great challenge
archaeologists face--
how to study the past
without destroying the present.
I understand why such beauty
has eclipsed the city's Roman past.
But Rome is also present here,
in the heart of the Mosque.
Rome forms part of everything
I'm coming across in Cordoba,
its houses, its monuments,
its urban design.
Roman Cordoba grew
to a population of 50,000
in one of the warmest areas
in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.
Nevertheless, its inhabitants enjoyed
gardens, public baths,
and plots of fruits and vegetables.
The water supply
was not a problem for Cordoba.
My next step will let me discover
the Romans' precise and astonishing
hydraulic engineering.
On my walks through the streets
and patios of Cordoba,
I'm constantly surprised
by how green it is,
by the number of plants that cool off
this city in the scorching south of Spain.
So, I want to know
where all that water comes from
and how it reaches
every corner of the city.
Despite what many people think,
Cordoba is a region rich in water.
The Guadalquivir River
was always a transport route to the sea,
but water for farming and domestic uses
was also supplied to the city,
and is still supplied today
from the area's generous water table.
Real pioneers, the Romans were specialists
in bringing underground water up
to where it could be used on the surface,
and their technology
was very advanced for the times.
The Arabs were great masters
at channeling and handling water,
and they appreciated
the Romans' work and engineering.
Wells, cisterns, and aqueducts
were reused to bring water to the palaces
and to water gardens like the ones
that must have adorned the Great Mosque
and the old Alczar, or fortress.
In Roman times, those aqueducts fed
large cisterns that distribute water
throughout the city, whether to public
fountains open to everyone
or to certain homes
that had their own water supply.
In Moorish times, the Roman fountains,
wells, houses, and aqueducts
supplied water to large buildings
like the Grand Mosque,
or the Alczar of the Caliphate.
I'm entering a parking garage
below Cordoba's bus station,
where I can find the remains
of a Roman aqueduct.
It was so efficient
that when it was discovered in the 1990s,
it still carried water to the city.
It had been working
ever since ancient Roman times.
This three-dimensional reconstruction
will help Fabio Amador to understand
how this urban circulatory system was
organized and used to bring the water
that the Romans, Visigoths, and Muslims
drank in Cordoba.
Following the trail of the city's water,
I descend back into the underground belly
of Cordoba.
I want to keep discovering
the city's hidden history.
I've reached a place known today
as the Baths of the Caliphate's Fortress.
The Caliphate's most influential men came
here to establish social relationships,
plan political conspiracies, rest,
and, of course, carry out
the purification rites before praying.
According to the historical chronicles,
in the Cordoba of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III
there were some 300 public baths,
and that number doubled under Almanzor,
another of the city's
most important rulers.
The public baths became so popular
that they have survived down to our times,
and even today, several of them are still
operating in the city of Cordoba.
The baths are an example
of social and cultural sophistication.
All thanks to water, and the Romans'
mastery of the techniques to find it,
bring it up out of the ground,
and transport it.
These aqueducts used to bring water
from the nearby mountains,
and that's where
my investigation is taking me.
Following the trail of water
leads me to a magical city
that disappeared only a few years
after it dazzled the world.
Medina Azahara was the high
point of the Cordoba of the Caliphs.
It competed with Damascus, Istanbul,
and Cairo in importance and beauty.
Founded between the years 936 and 940
in the foothills
of the mountains outside Cordoba,
just eight kilometers from the city,
it was the headquarters
of the Caliphate's administration
and the official residence
of Abd al-Rahman III,
who ordered its construction.
One of the most beautiful cities
ever built on the Iberian Peninsula
during the Islamic Period, it drank the
water brought by an ancient Roman aqueduct
and raised from wells that the Arabs dug.
And so, Rome supported the progress
of this new era of splendor,
and the Muslims,
accustomed to living in arid climes,
improved the Romans' canals, wells,
and irrigation ditches
to the point of becoming true experts
in hydraulic technology.
Using a laser scanner
and the innovative GigaPan technology,
I'm going to reconstruct
some of the splendor of these halls.
GigaPan is an automated robotic
hardware to capture
extremely high-definition panoramas
right down to the most minuscule detail.
Once the area to photograph is set,
the GigaPan system divides the objects
in the selected area into rows and columns
and calculates
the number of images required.
Then the robotic arm does the rest,
and a computer program combines
the hundreds of photographs into one
single, incredibly high-quality image.
The ruins around me
are barely a fuzzy sketch
of the lost city hidden beneath my feet.
I want to know what this city was like,
and what efforts are being made today
to salvage the splendor
that I've read about in history books.
Contemporary historical accounts say
that it took up to 10,000 people
to build Medina Azahara
from the start of construction in 936.
Abd al-Rahman used the best
building materials of the period,
marble, precious stones, gold
worked by the best craftsmen
to make the city a symbol of power,
just as Abd al-Rahman intended.
I walk part of the city, taking
notes and analyzing everything I see.
Alberto Montejo, the director
of the Medina Azahara complex,
comes out to help me in my quest.
Alberto wants to show me the
Hall of Abd al-Rahman III, or Saln Rico,
the greatest expression
of 10th-century architecture and art.
The first thing the visitor sees
in Medina Azahara,
and above all in the Saln Rico, is power.
In other words, the person
who sits back there, that is, the Caliph,
is demonstrating that he is able
to build this because he is
the most powerful person on the Iberian
Peninsula or in the Western Mediterranean.
That is the message. And depending on your
cultural level, you're going to understand
what's on the wall
because it's a very clear message.
The structure of the reception hall
was designed to have three levels.
One part is earthly, with plant motifs,
another is the framing section,
and features arches,
while the highest part
is the astral section,
and is decorated with cosmic elements.
It is a celestial hall, a representation
of the cosmos that envelops the person
who is God's representative on Earth,
and who sits back here.
Spread out all over
the Saln Rico lies an enormous puzzle,
for which there is no model to follow
in order to assemble it.
We've calculated that there are
between 500,000 and one million
of these fragments of arabesques,
which are the decorative elements
that cover the wall.
We worked with 5,000 fragments
just in the most recent operation
to reconstruct the faade
and the counterfaade alone.
We've collected about 25,000
but the work is very arduous
because thousands of these fragments
appeared in the big excavations
of the 1940s and the '50s.
They're still kept in the area
that's closed to visitors,
but they're scattered all over the dig.
We've been given instructions to collect
them because they're deteriorating,
and to move them into the museum,
which was created ten years ago.
Abd al-Rahman III surrounded himself
with the best doctors,
mathematicians, and astronomers,
all at the service of the Court.
Knowledge was power, and al-Hakam II,
his son and successor as Caliph,
was a supporter of that idea.
We believe that what the intellectuals
were doing with the design,
with the whole symbolic program
represented here,
was to express, in a very clear way,
all the scientific achievements
that were made in the Court of al-Andalus,
that is, in the Court of Medina Azahara,
which surpassed those of his opponents,
of his enemies,
the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad.
The size
of the archaeological site is tremendous,
approximately 115 hectares,
of which they have so far been able
to excavate only ten percent.
Each season at the digs,
new surprises appear,
and new fragments that have to fit
into this huge puzzle.
But beneath the Medina Azahara
that we can see, under this Saln Rico,
there are more constructions
from the previous phase of Medina Azahara,
which can help us to understand how
the urban design and art of Medina Azahara
had evolved since the beginning.
In the year 1010, a little less
than a century after the creation
of Medina Azahara, a civil war
against the Berbers razed the city,
and the destruction was so great
that even its name and location were lost.
In just a few years,
the city became a dream of the past.
When the city was abandoned,
it also abandoned us completely.
At the beginning of the 11th century,
the city served as a source of building
materials, of capitals and pedestals.
Metals were stripped from the doors
and lead pipes were yanked out.
And later, beginning in the Christian era,
in the Early Middle Ages,
Medina Azahara was used
as a quarry, the perfect quarry,
because builders could obtain stone blocks
that had already been cut.
Medina Azahara is still alive
and surprises us constantly.
A team including researchers
from the Autonomous University of Madrid,
the German Archaeological Institute,
and Alberto himself,
has just made a much-awaited discovery--
the eastern entrance
to the main square of the city.
The entrance gate,
which was four meters wide,
was lost when the city burned
in the year 1010.
Now the archaeologists have found
the remains of the catastrophe--
hinges, nails, ornaments,
and roofing tiles.
Barely a week after the digging began,
the entrance to the plaza
started to emerge from the earth.
Similar in size
to the Plaza Mayor in Madrid,
the place where the Caliph
received ambassadors and emissaries
is returning from its past of splendor,
violence, and neglect.
Medina Azahara, like all of the city
of Cordoba, is alive, hidden underground,
waiting for the urban underworld
to resurface and tell us its secrets.
It seemed as if everything had been
written about the history of this place,
and yet here I am, among ruins that
have hardly begun to tell us their story.
Employing various techniques, I have
managed to reconstruct and visualize
in a very precise way
some of the archaeological treasures
that remain out of sight.
All this work will be available so that
other archaeologists and researchers
can continue advancing
and shedding more light
on a past that is still largely unknown.
After using 21st-century technology,
I return to that of the 19th century,
the technology often used by the
archeologists and travelers of other times
to depict cities like this one--
a camera lucida.
Perhaps the city's conspicuous splendor
prevents us from seeing
that a major part of Cordoba
is still waiting to be explored.
But if there is anything that I take away
from here as a sure fact,
it's that behind every discovery
there is an indelible mark.
Rome will always remain.