First published: 26/03/25.

2flow2 2.5

Medina Azahara

Medina Azahara (Inscribed)

Medina Azahara by Els Slots

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 function very well. It uses your phone's GPS location to track where you are walking and try to give you general information about the area you are in, but it is very clunky and it's often hard to tell what the computerized voice is talking about and understand how (if at all) it connects with what you are seeing.

Points granted for the first half of the experience, with the museum. Points subtracted for the poor second half of the experience, seeing the actual ruins.

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