Medina Azahara

I was pretty underwhelmed with this site during my March 2025 visit (apparently just days after Alikander99 was there!) but I believe this is because I did not hire a guide.

There is a bus that runs twice a day up to this site from Córdoba (a WHS site in its own right) and it drops you off at a museum where you begin by watching a amateurly-animated (probably by a university group at some point), but very informative video in a small theatre. After the movie ends, you are released into the proper museum that they have with plaques, and artifacts, and the like. This part is great, I recommend the museum!

After the museum you take a second bus up to the actual archealogical site itself. This, sadly, is where things take a downturn. The archealogical site is decently large, but there is no signage whatsoever letting you know what anything is that you are seeing, unless you happen to have a photographic memory of what you read in the museum. I'm okay with keeping a site "preserved" by not having signs, but there should be some way to communicate to people what they're looking at, otherwise it's just a bunch of ruins. If you didn't book a private tour through a third-party company, the only way to know what you're looking at is through a barely-advertised audio guide app that is shared by lots of different sites in the world, and does not …

Well, unfortunately I missed the short window to visit the salon rico, so I won't be adding much new to the fray. 

  This is a rather polarizing site, with some ultimately disregarding it, while others give it a passing score.

Now that I've visited I understand why. The site itself is poorly preserved, and as pointed out there are some rather terrible past reconstructions standing in the park.

At the same time however, the site has, I think, a lot of unfulfilled potential.

First thing we have to remember is that the city is from the late 10th century. Its state of conservation is not that bad once you take into account its age.

Second thing, people romanticize moorish architecture. For all its wonderful decoration the architecture itself is rather pedestrian and simple. Almost all buildings in the style are basically reinterpretations of relatively short hypostyle rooms with wooden ceilings. This means they age notoriously bad and make for very boring ruins. So walking through Medina azahara is rather...unimpressive.

The good part about this is that technically the museum has the decoration, it's just mostly sitting in boxes. And the plan (mor on "the plan later) is to reinstate much of it. 

I honestly think that just giving the visitor a rough idea of how the buildings looked in situ (perhaps a visual aid, or well differentiated reconstruction) would improve the experience a lot.

Now the issue is that Medina azahara is …

Medina Azahara must have been a wonder of the age: a palace city, splendid rooms with precious ornaments with no equal at the time, at least in Europe. So, expectations can be high for an unprepared visitor, but what do you get to see? I nice museum with small finds and scraps of ornaments and explanations about the palace city. When you get on the bus to the excavations (beware: they do run only about every 20 minutes and lines can be long so you may miss one) it is not much more then empty ground walls and a few very heavily restored arches. They say it is only 10 percent of the original palace city, but it seems to be the central area and there is no reason to assume further excavations would be better preserved.
While this is an interesting visit it is certainly not a must compared to the center of Cordoba and its nice Archeological Museum. This seems to be very much inscribed for what it was and represented at the time rather than for what is left today. As an extension of Cordoba, it would add a small facet to this WHS but if we are reasonable, on its own it lacks any OUV and should not have been inscribed.

March 2017 - having visited the mezquita of Cordoba that morning it is spmewgat depressing to see ruins of a city, that was probably just that beautiful. We thought of Mdina Azahara as an Extension of the WHS, but luckily we visited anyway.

It is overwhelming, what has been built here for visitors. A giant Museum with a High amount of artefacts is welcoming you. EU visitors are paying less, lucky us:) Bus Shuttles are bringing you to the ruins.

You can walk in and between the ruins which brings you closer to the past than just looking at them. And you are free to take your time. The views were very nice and some of the ruins are still well preserved so you can imagine well how it must have been 1100 years ago. A nice visit, very close to.Cordoba

Spain’s Medina Azahara won its WH status as recently as 2018 (after having been on the Tentative List for 3 years). It wasn’t a well-known destination before that, as can be read from the previous reviewers on this website who all visited a few years earlier at most. The site has been excavated from 1910 on and has been a Spanish national monument since 1923, but the real boost in visitor numbers came after the opening of the award-winning on-site museum in 2009. When I visited, on a Saturday in late March 2019, there were literally hundreds of visitors around and the overflow parking lot was in use. A significant part of the daytrippers consisted of Spanish Muslims.

Somehow not everything adds up here regarding visitor management: strapped for cash some restorations like the one of the Rich Hall have slowed down, but there still is no entrance fee charged. Other prominent Andalusian landmarks such as the Alhambra and Cordoba’s mosque-cathedral cost 14 and 10 EUR respectively. So why does Medina Azahara not profit financially from the high visitor numbers? The only paid aspect is the bus ride to the archaeological site, but this money seems to go directly to the bus company.

Nevertheless, the visit is worthwhile and I spent about 2.5 hours at the site. The museum is an attraction in itself. I especially liked the glazed ceramics with their green and manganese decorations (I had to look that last one up – it’s a metal). …

On a trip to Córdoba and Granada a few years ago, I visited the ruins of Medina Azahara (Madinat al-Zahra), about 8 km to the west of Córdoba (there are trips organized by the tourist office). The Caliph of Córdoba had this palace town built in the 10th century, but it only lasted a few decades. Only a fraction is excavated, but it is a fascinating archaeological site to visit and walk around in, and there is a very interesting museum. It could have been inscribed as an extension of the Córdoba WHS, but considering its great archaeological potential, it’s just as well that it is a separate site. When I was there, there was talk of a problem with a kind of shantytown nearby that authorities thought would dissuade UNESCO from inscribing the site (although I didn't see any and there was certainly none in the immediate vicinity).

I visited this tentative WHS (aiming for inscription shortly) as a side trip from Cordoba in September 2017. The view from above (just before the entrance) was the highlight of my visit together with the museum. The closer you get to what is left the more you notice the reconstruction work and the OUV (if any) of the what remains gradually subsides. The site's importance in Islamic architecture and its OUV in terms of what it once was would make it a worthy extension to the WHS of Cordoba but in my opinion it does not deserve to be inscribed on its own.

We visited this “about-to-be-inscribed” T List site in May 2018 and arrived at much the same conclusions about it as Zoe has since reported. Having viewed several recent TV programs which had included it, we had great hopes, but in the end it disappointed - the "on show" reality doesn't live up to the "vision" (partly because of the way it was presented) even if you try hard to add your own imagination. The Museum, however, is excellent, both architecturally and in terms of its contents - we probably gave it as much time as the site.

Entrance to the museum and site is, in theory, free only to EU citizens (but only Eur 1.50 otherwise). We were asked our nationality and this was recorded by the desk clerk. The entrance hall contains a number of (open and unused) guichets as if there was/is an intention at some time to charge more general entry fees. We asked if the impending inscription might mean that charges for all would be introduced and were told that the management hadn’t decided yet. The bus costs Eur 2.50 return with a reduction to 1.50 for “jubilados”. The road up to the site IS public and turns off to a restaurant and the monastery of San Geronimo a short way before the small site car park which is blocked by an electronic barrier which only staff and buses can open.

The naming of the site as it is to be inscribed has been …

This place used to be an ancient city in the styles one can see at the Alcazar in Sevilla but rather than "just" a palace or building the area was an entire town with garden built strategically into the slope of the mountain. Having said that the ruins don't seem as massive as it sounded like beforehand and the big importance of the site as seen in the video is not very evident.

To reach the site you need to get to the outskirts of Cordoba. The museum is at the parking lot and free for EU citizens (there was no ID check so maybe they go by accent or trust? I.e. hide your American accent and seem trustwurthy, or just fork out whatever they ask for.) Inside you watch a prerendered CGI movie about the history of the city and it's daily ongoings. It prepares you for what you are about to see up the hill, kind of.

There is a regular bus that takes you to the museum but it is not free. I guess you could walk up the hill for free but you definitely cannot drive up there in your own car. I find that a little odd because they could easily fit a parking space nearby or at least closer than where it is now.

The site itself is poorly signed. The directions of the paths are even misleading. I love the standing arches and took a lot of pictures here but …

After the WHS-gettogether in September 2017 we had a Sunday drive ending in Cordoba where we spent the night. When leaving for Malaga airport we decided to make the detour of 8 km to the archeological site of Madinat al-Zahra. It was Monday and we knew the museum and the site itself was closed, but we defied that. It is a former city - something must be possible to see!

We arrived just after noon and the museum parking lot was empty and the museum closed as expected. We looked for signs to archeological site – but there were none. Anyway we chose the most likely direction and drove – and in 5 minutes we discovered something that we agreed had to be the Madinat. It was slightly uphill so we got a nice view and with the camera lens we got a couple of nice pictures.

We could see no city, but building-structures and arcs that still are standing upright tells some of the story of what it has been. The site is the capital of the caliphate Abd al-Rahman III founded in 940, abandoned in 1010, then slowly buried in a meadow. By the years it turned into a myth of a faraway western point of Islam, then revealed in 1911.

We got the overview, but missed the archeological details. When it becomes a true world heritage site we have to revisit this place.