Videos shared widely on Friday night showed flames and smoke pouring from inside the mosque-cathedral of Córdoba. The fire broke out at about 9:00 pm (1900 GMT) and brought back memories of the 2019 blaze at Notre Dame in Paris.
By Saturday the building was open to visitors again. Mayor Jose Maria Bellido stood outside and told reporters the damage was “significant” but “very, very localised.” A chapel took the worst of it. Its roof “completely collapsed,” he said, from the flames and from the weight of the water used to fight them. Two neighbouring chapels suffered what he called collateral damage, mostly smoke harm to altarpieces and other artworks. He put the burned area at 50 to 60 square metres of a vast interior.
“Fortunately yesterday a catastrophe was avoided that could have meant losing the entire mosque-cathedral,” Bellido said.
Drills paid off
Thirty-five firefighters stayed through the night to watch the site and cool the walls once the fire was out. Daniel Munoz, head of Córdoba’s firefighting service, said crews have drilled in the building every year since an earlier fire there in 2001. That meant they knew the entrances, the corridors and where to connect hoses.
The cause is not yet established. Forensic police were at the scene. ABC and other Spanish newspapers reported that a mechanical sweeping machine had caught fire inside the site. On Saturday, fire engines and police lined a nearby street while people gathered to look at the building, an AFP photographer said. The damaged section, the Almanzor nave, was fenced off with waist-high barriers.
The building draws two million visitors a year and sits in the centre of the city, ringed by the old Jewish and Moorish quarters. Abd ar-Rahman, the Umayyad emir, built it as a mosque between the 8th and 10th centuries, on the site of an earlier church. After Ferdinand III of Castile and the Christians reconquered the city in the 13th century, it became a cathedral and was altered over the following centuries. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 1984, describing “an architectural hybrid that joins together many of the artistic values of East and West.”
