San Bartolomé, Córdoba

San Bartolomé, Córdoba tickets: which one to buy

This is a small, easily missed building and the practical problem is getting in at all. The chapel is reached through a courtyard on a lane in the old quarter, inside what is now a university faculty, and its opening hours are short, seasonal and prone to change. Check them on the day rather than in advance. Entry costs very little.

Guided walks of the Juderia, the old Jewish quarter, are the usual way visitors find it, and those tours combine the chapel with the synagogue a few streets away, the small squares of the Alcazar Viejo district and the Mudejar detail that survives on ordinary house fronts. Taking a guide is genuinely useful here, because there is almost no interpretation on site and the interest of the room is entirely in reading the decoration. If your time in Cordoba is short, the mosque-cathedral has to come first, but this chapel makes the better second stop than the crowded flower-filled lanes nearby.

Visiting San Bartolomé, Córdoba: what to see

The chapel is a funerary building of about 1390 to 1410, put up as the Alcazar Viejo district was developed and around the time the Jewish quarter beside it was emptied. It is rectangular and tiny, roughly nine metres by five, built of rusticated sandstone with a small porch and courtyard. What matters is the surface. The lower walls are faced with geometric tilework in the Andalusian manner, and above them runs carved plaster of great delicacy, with interlacing bands, vegetal motifs and Arabic and Latin inscriptions worked into the same scheme.

The ceiling is timber in a coffered Mudejar pattern. This is Christian patronage using Muslim craftsmen and a Muslim design vocabulary, a generation after the conquest of the city, and few buildings anywhere show the arrangement so compactly. It served as a parish church until the seventeenth century and was restored in 1953 and again in 2006. Half an hour is enough, but it repays looking slowly at one wall rather than glancing at all four.

San Bartolomé, Córdoba opening hours and the best time to go

Cordoba in July and August regularly passes forty degrees and the old quarter empties in the afternoon, which is exactly when the chapel is likely to be shut anyway. Spring is the season here. The courtyard festival in the first half of May, when private patios open to the public and the city is full, is the most enjoyable and the most crowded time, and accommodation should be booked months ahead.

Early morning is best for the lanes around the chapel, before the tour groups reach the Juderia from the mosque. Opening is generally in the morning with an afternoon session on some days, and the chapel closes entirely on certain weekdays, so a plan that depends on it is a plan that may fail. The mosque-cathedral is five minutes away, the Alcazar gardens ten, and the Roman bridge and the far bank of the Guadalquivir make the natural continuation in the cool of the evening.