Contested urban heritage: Discourses of meaning and ownership of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain

Contested urban heritage: Discourses of meaning and ownership of the Mosque- Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain Brian Rosa, City University of New York Jaime Jover-Báez, Universidad de Sevilla Abstract Córdoba, Spain is currently at the centre of a national, and increasingly international, dispute surrounding its most recognizable symbol: the Mosque-Cathedral. Built for Muslim worship beginning in the eighth century, and consecrated as a Catholic church in the thirteenth century, this temple is protected as a World Heritage Site (WHS) and is widely promoted as a symbol of religious coexistence. Contemporary conflicts, arising as Córdoba began promoting an economic development model based on cultural tourism, revolve around the appropriate restoration, ownership, and cultural meaning of the monument. The local chapter of Catholic Church, in an attempt to cement its claims of ownership, has increasingly minimized the building’s Muslim past and used the site for evangelization. Exploring contemporary conflicts surrounding this monument offers a paradigmatic case to examine the political economy and cultural politics of urban heritage and the importance of discourse in shaping political agendas around memory, identity, and ownership. ! Keywords Córdoba Mosque-Cathedral heritage discourse analysis scalar politics politics of memory archaeology Introduction: Whose heritage? Scalar politics and ownership narratives In his study of the ‘social production of (social) space’, Lefebvre noted that ‘Monumentality […] always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message. Monumental buildings mask the power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought’ (1974: 143). One might add to this prescient analysis that the narration of monumentality, in its reductive, interpretive power, is imbued with power. It is difficult to overstate the monumentality of the Mosque-Cathedral1 of Córdoba, located in the Andalusia region of southern Spain. An eighth century mosque with a sixteenth century church constructed within it, it is the oldest continuously occupied building in Spain (Nieto Cumplido 1995) and is generally regarded as the most important Islamic monument of the western world. It is among Spain’s most visited and admired sites, and increasingly so: 2015 set a record for visitor turnout (nearly 1.7 million), as did the year before. However, ‘The turmoil of Andalusia's extraordinary past seems to hover just beneath the surface of its pleasant landscapes and […] urban life’ (Said 2002). The tumultuous history of the monument and region continue to manifest in contemporary conflicts at the local, regional, national, and international scales. The focus of this article is not to narrate a balanced historical overview of the monument, but to explore the ways that historical discourses have been mobilized along ideological lines to narrate the meaning, value and ownership of this massive and breathtaking temple. Globalization has situated Córdoba and its storied built environment within the circuits of cultural tourism and, rhetorically, as a keystone in shifting geopolitical and religious antagonisms. Since the World Trade Center attacks of 11 September 2001, the city has been idealistically presented as a worldwide paradigm of intercultural and interfaith coexistence (Arigita 2013). Indeed, the links between the narration of Córdoba’s past – imagined as an antidote to the ‘clash of civilizations’ between Christianity and Islam in the western world – alludes to scalar politics and social imaginaries that are unabashedly contemporary. As Swyngedouw (2004: 33) notes, ‘spatial scales are never fixed, but are perpetually redefined, contested and restructured in terms of their content, relative importance and interrelations’. We argue that these shifting scalar politics require a fresh look at the power geometries (Massey 1993) of heritage discourses, fluctuating between the local and the planetary. ‘Scalar narratives’, as defined by González (2006: 840–41), are ‘stories about the changes in the spatial patterns of socio-political processes that are uttered by actors or groups embedded in specific historic and political contexts’ placing limitations on the political horizon, performing a ‘discursive fix’ that renders fluid and flexible capitalism as ‘a relatively static and self-enclosed entity’. Since the conflicts around the Mosque-Cathedral are indivisibly political, economic and religious, we must look from this specific site outward towards, and up to, the planetary scale to understand the terrain(s) of conflict. Furthermore, considering the spatio-temporality of this particular case, the study requires a regressiveprogressive view of the socio-spatial production, where understanding the future can only be accomplished by reconstructing spatial histories (Lefebvre 1974). With the politics of scale and of heritage embodied in the Mosque-Cathedral, the ideological nature of archaeology is undeniable, the seemingly innocuous act of naming is deeply conflictual, and public-private and secular-religious divisions are readily apparent. However, in debates around the meaning of this ancient structure, history is imagined in a timeframe that eludes memory, instead relying on the interpretation of artefacts and ancient documents, emphasizing moments of rupture and disjuncture. Accordingly, the histories and values of the monument consistently rouse debate, calling into question the appropriate management, narration, and rightful ownership of the temple. Within this context, contested interpretations of the monument are ultimately mobilized to debate a singular overarching question: to whom does the Mosque-Cathedral belong? This article will begin by briefly introducing contemporary academic approaches to critical heritage studies, discourse analysis, and the role of heritage-oriented tourism in urban political economy. With some notable exceptions (Monteiro 2010; Ruggles 2011; Arigita 2013), conflicts surrounding heritage in Córdoba have received scant attention in anglophone academia. Córdoba conjures a global cultural imaginary focused on its distinctive history as the capital of the Muslim Kingdom of Al-Andalus (8th–11th centuries CE), stretching across much of the Iberian peninsula. The ‘Córdoba paradigm’, according to Arigita (2013), tells the story of a medieval society before the Reconquista (Reconquest) of Catholic monarchs from the North of current-day Spain, when Muslims coexisted in with Christians and Jews. The discourse of convivencia (coexistence) surrounding the idealized multicultural and interfaith society of Al- Andalus has inspired a number of reconciliatory, interfaith initiatives throughout the world – as we will see later – and is central to the way that Córdoba’s tourism-oriented growth coalition (Logan and Molotch 1987) has branded the city. Contemporary debates surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral emerged in the 1970s, concomitant with the city’s initiatives to stimulate cultural tourism through its bid to have the temple recognized as a World Heritage Site (WHS) by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This symbol of the city has found itself in the midst of ideological, political, religious and economic battles, with increasing internationalization of geopolitical conflicts. The appropriate management of the temple and the narration of the building’s history have been the subject of local and national debate. Since the 1990s, the local Cabildo Catedralicio (Cathedral Council) of the Catholic Church have increasingly downplayed the building’s Muslim past, including changing its name from the ‘Mosque-Cathedral’ to the ‘Cathedral, former Mosque’, to simply the ‘Cathedral’ or ‘Holy Church’. Most recently, regional and national debates have revolved around the revelation that the Catholic Church had, in 2006, surreptitiously registered the Mosque-Cathedral in its own name, along with over thousands of other buildings and plazas that had been presumed to be public properties. In an era of fiscal austerity, leftist civil society organizations throughout Spain – and gradually some political parties – have characterized these inmatriculaciones (property registrations) as a nationwide land grab of epic proportions, with the Mosque-Cathedral (Figures 1 and 2) as the most contentious example. FIGURE 1 Through analysing public and specialist discourse surrounding the monument since the 1970s, including debates among the architecture and archaeology communities, news media representation, public speeches and academic publications, we analyse the discursive spheres and scalar terrains of conflict. Along with these documentary sources, this article relies on a variety of public documents and strategies, tourist brochures, and legislation within the context of Spain’s historic relationship with built heritage. Additionally, we rely on ten interviews conducted in early 2015 to probe the motivations, concerns, and attitudes of different local actors, as well as many more informal conversations with former tour guides, Córdoba residents, and international visitors.2 Since this article presents an analysis of current events and research was completed in 2015, we emphasize that political agendas and alliances shift quickly. 2015 was an intense electoral year in Spain that introduced new power relations within many institutions, and this dynamic continued in 2016 as Spain repeated elections after failing to form a coalition government. It is worth noting that in April 2016, when this research was already under review, the Church returned the name ‘Mosque-Cathedral’ to brochures and some signage under pressure by activist groups and the newly elected city government. This, in turn, reflects contemporary political dynamism and uncertainty, and ultimately how heritage politics are about imagining society’s future as much as its past. In 2017, after a sustained, nationwide citizen campaign, a number of local governments and the national government are coordinating on an effort to take inventory of the inmatriculaciones, and the city of Córdoba has begun an investigation into the management of the Mosque-Cathedral. FIGURE 2 ! Heritage as socio-spatial practice Heritage is ‘intrinsically political and symbolic’ (Viejo-Rose 2011: 9), responding and contributing to local, regional and national – and in some cases international – cultural identities through the narration and display of history’s traces. Or, as Lowenthal (1985) puts it, ‘the past is a foreign country’ at service to the desires of the present. As a discourse and practice, heritage (patrimonio in Spanish) serves as a powerful tool in the construction of historical memory of a place or nation, offering a sense of perceived continuity, collective inheritance and identity integral to the constitution of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). Built heritage – in the form of archaeological sites, historic buildings and districts – is often also targeted to visitors from outside a host culture, particularly tourists. However, heritage cannot be simply equated with history or with monuments. Rather, it should be understood as dynamic social practice with considerable cultural and economic impact in which history, memory and tradition are strategically mobilized to narrate a particular story, usually by or with the approval of the state, for the aims of historical education, solidifying national identities and, in more recent years, the promotion of cultural tourism. In critical heritage research, perhaps the most influential work on discourse analysis has been by Smith, who explores authorized heritage discourse [which] focuses attention on the aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places, and/or landscapes that current generations must care for, protect, and revere so that they may be passed to nebulous future generations for their education and to forge a sense of common identity based on the past. (2006: 29) ! Smith argues that heritage is a cultural process that should be led by local communities to define, value, and manage collective historical resources. Of course, local communities may not agree on the values or meanings of heritage, as we find in the case of Córdoba. As many scholars have noted, heritage claims are often used to promote discourses of nationalism (Trigger 1984), identity (Meskell 2002), and accordingly, belonging and exclusion (Silverman 2011), which may contradict more universal or pluralistic conceptions of shared inheritance. Contemporary social processes constitute the values and meanings of material artefacts, and beyond the material realm, the designation of heritage has increasingly expanded to the immaterial: local traditions, ceremonies, festivals and culturally specific forms of expression. Understanding the multiple and overlapping discursive and scalar regimes that shape heritage practice – legal discussions of property rights, economic impact assessment, regulatory frameworks – are all of integral importance to unpack the politics and spatial implications of heritage. As Harvey explains, the way we imagine heritage and its relation to history should be reversed: ‘Heritage is about the process by which people use the past – a “discursive construction” with material consequences’ (2004: 19). In these complex relations of values, meanings, social relationships and practices, performed and practiced at a variety of geographical scales, heritage is constituted from the site-specific and hyper-local to regional, national to international organizations such as the European Union. The most prestigious mark of heritage to bestowed upon a site, landscape or monument is designation as a WHS by UNESCO. Since the ratification of the World Heritage Convention of 1972, the symbolic value bestowed on a site through WHS designation is highly sought after by public and private institutions seeking to promote cultural tourism. In the WHS framework, heritage is understood as a common resource for all humanity, and while designation often serves to boost tourism and investment in the conservation of monuments, it also places limitations on the use and management of sites: ‘world heritage’ is idealistically, though vaguely, conceptualized as a ‘public concept’ (Jover-Báez and Rosa 2017), belonging to humanity as a whole and typically administered by state (i.e. ‘public’) entities. Undoubtedly, heritage designation of a place or monument has significant impact on the global circulation of capital, particularly through tourism and related service industries, along with property speculation responding to the valorization of proximate real estate (Di Giovine 2009). Indeed, travel and tourism – along with the interrelated cultural industries – are among the world’s largest industries. Cultural tourism has emerged as presenting ‘attractions acting as key cultural experiences, in which meaning is created through consumption’ (Richards 1996: 263), and in a period of economic decline, tourism is one of the Spain’s few growth industries. Aside from heritage attractions, cultural tourism is driven by other, less tangible elements of the cultural economies of lifestyle and leisure including arts and music festivals and the marketing of local handcrafts and cuisine (Duarte Alonso 2015). Urry (2002), in exploring the significance of tourism as a global industry, argued that tourists travel – often to distant lands – to partake in the ‘tourist gaze’: seeking authenticity and truth by removing themselves from their familiar environments to experience time and space differently. However, in an all-encompassing, highly commodified experience, the distinctiveness and perceived authenticity of cultural landscapes may shape entire districts or cities as symbolic landscapes of consumption (Zukin 1995; Degen 2008; Miles 2015), calling any notions of authenticity into question (Zukin 2010). Reflecting the manufacturing of heritage, new centre-periphery relations, and power imbalances underlying globalized cultural tourism, AlSayyad comments: ‘Today one must take the history of political and cultural domination into account if one is to analyse issues related to the invocation of heritage in the built environment’ (2001: 5–6). As much as heritage is commodified, this is not to suggest that the practices associated with historic sites are detached entirely from the ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ history of the built environment, or that historical artefacts are unworthy of conservation. Indeed, we wholeheartedly agree that the Mosque-Cathedral is one of the world’s most awe-inspiring works of architecture and built heritage and should be recognized as such. Rather, we emphasize that difference. Seeking the attention of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the organization that bestows WHS status – the conference was promoted with the claim that ‘cultural pluralism is [the city’s] originality and this cultural diversity is […] a symbol of overcoming conflicts and rivalries of the past’ (cited in García Verdugo 1996a). FIGURE 5 The 1980s and 1990s were a period of great transition in the historic core of the city, driven by nascent strategies of memorializing the city’s multicultural and interfaith past. Aside from the Mosque-Cathedral, the city began restoring its fourteenth century synagogue, along with erecting a statue of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, branding this zone the Judería (Jewish Quarter). Cultural tourism was greatly boosted by the WHS listing of the ‘Great Mosque of Córdoba’ in 1984 (UNESCO 2014), later expanded to the district surrounding it. By 1994, after two decades of effort, the city was experiencing a tourism boom, stimulated by the opening of a high-speed railway station in the same year, greatly increasing Córdoba’s accessibility to other Spanish cities and international airports. Tellingly, the new railway station is located next to a new plaza signalling the city’s branding strategy: the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas (Plaza of Three Cultures).7 As previously introduced, Córdoba’s history of interfaith coexistence has become romanticized by those seeking religious reconciliation and tolerance: ‘The history of Al-Andalus plays a central role as a model and reference point for a counter-narrative designed to welcome Islam and subvert the powerful image of Islam as the historical ‘other’ for Europe and the West’ (Arigita 2013: 21). Increasingly, the name ‘Córdoba’ has become synonymous with this historical imaginary of convivencia. By the early 1990s convivencia had become an essential element of the city’s brand, included its successful bid to expand the area of its WHS designation to the nearly 200-acre historic core in 1994, and beginning in 2002, in an unsuccessful bid for 2016 European Capital of Culture. Arigita (2013) identifies what she calls the ‘Córdoba paradigm’, noting a number organizations worldwide which use Al-Andalus as reference point for religious coexistence. This image has been potent in the United States, where a proposed Islamic community centre and mosque near the former World Trade Center in New York City was originally called the ‘Cordoba House’ (Elkin 2010) before the project became mired in controversy and maligned as the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’. Barack Obama invoked Córdoba as an example of Muslim tolerance in his 2009 speech in Cairo entitled ‘New Beginning’. As Waterton and Watson (2012) argue, the driving force behind cultural tourism in Córdoba is the consumption of otherness, referring to the Muslim past and its enduring presence. Appropriating Urry’s term ‘the tourist gaze’ they refer to the ‘Moorish gaze’, through which ‘tourism providers and promoters have also helped realize the potential of a particular Moorish Spain story, especially if it can be linked to marketable notions of “real Spain” in contradistinction to the mass tourism of the costas’ (2002: 179). In this sense, it is the imagined authenticity of the ‘real Spain’, anciently multicultural, that directs this gaze. However, the model of marketing convivencia to cultural tourists has hit a roadblock: there are ever-increasing contradictions between the city and regional governments’ approaches to the Mosque-Cathedral and the way the monument has been managed by the local administration of the Catholic Church. When examined closely, there is not even a consensus on where the cathedral starts and ends. To the local and regional authorities that produced the Illustrated Guide Córdoba, the depiction of the monument begins with a rich description of the ‘Mosque’ before reference to the ‘cathedral’: the physical space of the sixteenth century church constructed within it. However, the official brochures offered to visitors from 2010 to 2016 were very clear that [t]he entire grounds of this outstanding building […] were consecrated as the mother church of the Diocese in the year 1236. Since then, every day with no exception, the Chapter solemnly worships in this fine and magnificent church and the Christian community gathers to listen to the Word of God. (Excelentisimo Cabildo Catedralicio de Córdoba n.d., emphasis added) The undeniably evangelical nature of the explanatory materials helps to introduce the polemics of competing discourses surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral, and also explains the creation of the activist group ‘Platform for the Mosque-Cathedral: Everyone’s Heritage’ (here on the ‘Platform’). This organization advocates, according to its spokesperson Marta Jiménez, for the monument’s ‘public, transparent and professional management, respecting its liturgical Catholic use’ (personal interview, June 2015). The Platform understands the temple from a multicultural standpoint and convivencia in terms of cultural identity. FIGURE 6 ! Contemporary debates and conflicts surrounding the use and meaning of the Mosque- Cathedral Towards the end of the Franco regime, debates surrounding the restoration of the Mosque- Cathedral began intensifying, with drastic interventions on the table. From the 1950s, Cordovan architect Rafael Castejón defended the ‘purification’ or ‘pristine remaking’ (repristinar) of the monument through the removal and relocation of the Christian elements of the building, at which point it would be turned into a desacralized museum in line with the heritage management of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.8 In the early 1970s, Franco was reportedly in support of transporting, piece by piece, the cathedral to another site in the city (Riobóo Camacho 2008). The proposal was ultimately buried in 1972 because the controversy it created in the city. To be clear, plans to relocate the Cathedral to another location in the city were not based on locals’ indifference to the centuries-old cathedral. Though the temple was, and continues to be, colloquially referred to as the mezquita (mosque), it has been and continues to be a site of clear importance to Catholic residents as the ‘mother church’ of the entire region. Rather, the ‘purification’ initiative was a calculation intended to appeal to a simplified, ‘universal’, more easily packaged heritage. In response to this 1970s debate, local heritage officer and architect Riobóo Camacho argues that ‘we cannot simplify history […] To remove these testimonies, these partial or complete memories, is to lose the expression of the authenticity of heritage: the continuous social and cultural evolution of man’ (2008: 69–70). While we agree with this point, there is a certain apolitical neutrality and sense of inevitability to Riobóo Camacho’s depiction of the temple’s uses, management and ownership, by which ‘every time period has appropriated the monument, living in it and making it their own, incorporating their new needs […] in a process of sincerity and identity with their time’ (2008: 297–98). That even-handed depiction of the Mosque- Cathedral’s heritage value is based on the assumption that there is, or ever has been, societal agreement regarding the meaning of the monument. The presupposition that the monument reflects different cultures’ values and tastes in different epochs, or that there is ever societal consensus on such matters, implies an imagined consensus masking very real discrepancies about what the monument was, is, and should be. A) The Church’s attempted erasure of the building’s Muslim past As previously mentioned, the Mosque-Cathedral is managed by the Cathedral Council of the local Diocese of the Catholic Church. Visitors, aside from residents of the Province of Córdoba, are required to pay an entrance fee of 10 Euros, which, for an additional fee, includes an audio guide told from the perspective of the Church. Among the many regulations placed upon visitors to the temple, tours led by non-clergy or official tour guides are forbidden, as is Muslim prayer, and the only brochures and interpretive materials made available are produced by the Cathedral Council. In this way, visitors’ understanding of the structure are highly controlled, and the Church has taken tourist visits as an opportunity for evangelization. For example, with the publicly subsidized Soul of Córdoba nighttime tour, participants are asked to sit in church pews and listen to liturgical music while scenes of local martyrs carved in mahogany are described as ‘the history of salvation’. FIGURE 7 The most notable distortions began in 1998 when the name of the monument was changed by the Cathedral Council from the ‘Mosque-Cathedral’ to the ‘Cathedral (former Mosque)’ and reached a new level from 2010 to 2016, when it was simply the ‘Cathedral’ in its signage, tickets, website and brochures. Accordingly, interpretive texts and brochures became increasingly one-sided. To this day, even to churchgoers, the building is most commonly known as the Mezquita, as city officials also confirm (personal interviews, May 2015). As Berg and Kearns (1996) note, the naming of places is highly normative and often political, create symbolic order allowing those in power to impose meanings onto landscapes, therefore manipulating the relations of identity between people(s) and places. Yet, as we have already seen, the Mosque-Cathedral is one of Córdoba’s main economic resources. The manager of the public-private Tourism Consortium of Córdoba admits that ‘if we didn’t have that resource, Córdoba would hardly be positioned where it is positioned today’ (personal interview, June 2015). They suggest that, as of 2015, the tourist market has not been affected by the controversy surrounding the Church’s removal of the name mosque from the building, diminishing it as a ‘local conflict’, and in regard to promotion and maintenance, ‘everything the [Cathedral Council] does has never harmed us’. However, he acknowledges that ‘the moment you name it the Cathedral of Córdoba, we don’t have the name to sell to the tourists. You have to sell the Mosque of Córdoba. The whole world knows that it’s the Mosque of Córdoba’. Along these lines, as Di Giovine emphasizes, monuments themselves can become the ‘main characters’ of heritage and tourism discourses. Through their perceived authenticity, achieved through the manipulations of images and experiences, monuments are ‘indeed social actors, which mediate between multiple agents to create enduring claims to community’ (Di Giovine 2009: 9). That the Church aims to depict the monument as exclusively Catholic was a primary reason why citizens from Córdoba organized the Platform. Among other victories, they have managed to pressure Google Maps through an online petition to restore the label ‘Mosque- Cathedral’ after it was re-labelled as the ‘Cathedral of Córdoba’ by request of the Church (Albert, 2014), to pressure the Church to revise tourist materials, and to politicize the management of the Mosque-Cathedral. Emphasizing that, according to the UNESCO World Heritage designation, the building in question is simply the ‘Great Mosque of Córdoba’, the Platform was able to elevate the contested scalar narratives up to the regional and national governments, the European Union and UNESCO. B) ‘Stratigraphies of Forgetting’: Archaeology as an ideological tool 9 To understand the changing representation of the Mosque-Cathedral also requires looking beyond textual and media discourse to exploring material practices of excavation, curation and the coordination of public events in and surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral. In the Church’s narration of the building’s past, claims to the ‘true’ Christian nature of the site are rife, even if the historical evidence does not point to such a simple history. In the tourist brochure and website available from 2005 to 2016, the origins of the site were described as such: [b]eneath every cathedral is always a layer of hidden cathedrals. In the case of Córdoba, tradition traces back to its Visigoth origins. This fact has been confirmed by archaeological excavations, whose remains can be found at the Museum of San Vicente. (Excelentisimo Cabildo Catedralicio de Córdoba n.d.) Based upon the supposition that the site is primordially Christian, the construction of the Mosque in the eighth century was described in the previous tourist brochure as ‘The Islamic Intervention’, suggesting that the period of 450 years of the mosque was merely an interlude in an otherwise Christian history. Furthermore, in describing the ‘Christian Transformation’ of the building, the brochure emphasized that the Reconquista of current-day Andalusia by King Ferdinand III was, first and foremost, a victory of Christianity over Islam. In the Church’s supposition that a Visigoth Christian Church predated the construction of the mosque on the site, they refer to the findings of excavations in the 1920s and 1930s. However, according to a recent study by archaeologist Arce-Sainz (2015), previous excavations have not demonstrated that materials excavated are verifiably the remnants of a pre-Islamic church. Arce-Sainz calls this theory an ‘historical myth’ and an ‘historiographical obstinacy’, noting that a number of eyewitnesses and other scholars have cast similar doubts.10 Despite archaeological debate on the origin of the ruins beneath the Mosque-Cathedral, in 2005 the Church created the Museum of Saint Vincent, removing from storage and displaying materials thought to be remnants from the Visigoth basilica. Displaying photographs documenting the 1930s excavations, a floorplan of the church buried beneath the monument, a new museum was created inside the Mosque-Cathedral, one that attests to the true Christian nature of the site. The most striking element of this display is to be found near the entrance of the oldest part of the Mosque-Cathedral: a Plexiglas viewing window on the floor, in which visitors can gaze down three metres beneath to view a mosaic floor described as a building attached to the Visigoth church. This narration of history and the display of archaeological relics serve as discursive claims for the symbolic ownership of the Mosque-Cathedral by Christians. Of course, this claim completely ignores evidence that, prior to the Visigoths, the site was thought to be a Roman temple. FIGURE 8 The restrictive management of the Church over the monument goes beyond the narrative and physical alteration to other, more repressive practices that are related to the local and international Muslim community. After the Transition to Democracy, Mansur Escudero, a psychiatrist, activist and resident of the province of Córdoba, became one of foremost representatives of the newly legalized Spanish Muslim community, as president of the national Islamic Council. Known as a campaigner for the integration of moderate Islam in the West and the promotion of religious tolerance, Escudero embodied many of the pluralistic values associated with convivencia. Whereas the Church radicalized its positions regarding the Mosque- Cathedral, he began in 2004 a high-profile campaign to allow shared Christian and Muslim prayer in it, including writing a letter to Pope John Paul II in 2006.11 After Córdoba’s Bishop ruled out this arrangement, he began performing Muslim prayer at the gates of the monument to ‘soften the heart of the Bishop’. In doing so, Escudero defined the limits of the Catholic Church’s – and perhaps the city’s – willingness to enact modern-day convivencia. Nevertheless, a growing proportion of Muslim tourists have been visiting Córdoba, and this new stream of visitors has also motivated the increased marketing of the city as a tourist destination. Increasingly, Muslim tourists make pilgrimages to the Mosque-Cathedral to connect with a period in which Islam was widely perceived to be a beacon of intellectualism and progress in the western world. Currently, the city is working on a strategy to create a Halal food cluster and promote Ramadan celebrations, in hopes of attracting more Muslim tourists. Despite the denial of local officials, there is a clear contradiction between the local government’s economic development strategies and the Church’s management of the WHS. FIGURE 9: Should go somewhere around here as a full-page image The Church has demonstrated an increasing desire to control the behaviour of visitors to the Mosque-Cathedral in the wake of the arrest of Austrian Muslim tourists who performed prayer at the qibla in 2010 as an act of civic disobedience. Muslim community organizations have noted a number of complaints about harsh treatment of Muslim visitors by the Mosque- Cathedral’s private security force, such as being warned not to pray and followed closely through the length of their visits (also see Calderwood 2015). In this sense, as Kamel Mekhelef, President of the Muslim Association of Córdoba, confirms: [I] don’t care about prayer, they can prohibit what they prohibit and it isn’t my priority. But the fact that if you enter with friends and family and you don’t have the right to explain elements of the building that you know, have studied, and recognize, that’s outrageous. (personal interview, June 2015) That the Cathedral Council is attempting to use the monument as a space dedicated to long-standing Christian traditions and the evangelization of tourists is perhaps unsurprising. Evangelization of the Christian faith is, after all, one of the institution’s primary objectives. However, as the following section will explain, the under-emphasis of the monument’s Muslim history is not the primary political controversy in which the Catholic Church is enmeshed, even if this is the most recognized conflict in the international media. In regional and national political debates surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral, the principal one is surrounding the Catholic Church’s contentious real estate practices, with the monument as the primary symbol nationwide (see Jover-Báez and Rosa 2017). ‘I Don’t Reclaim, I Proclaim the Public Ownership of the Mezquita’12: The politicaleconomic underpinnings In 2010, Antonio Manuel Rodríguez, Professor of Law at the University of Córdoba, after a discussion about shared prayer in the Mosque-Cathedral, became curious about who owned the monument. Searching property registries, he discovered that it had surreptitiously been claimed as property of the Catholic Church in 2006. When he contacted mass media outlets to publicize investors’ attraction the city, this publicity and these conflicts are key elements in democratizing the Mosque-Cathedral. Clearly there is a neo-liberal logic behind the city’s investment in, and management of, the historic built environment to encourage private sector investment in hospitality and leisure. If neo-liberalism is an ideology of privatizing public wealth, then we can refer to the inmatriculaciones as the neo-liberalization of heritage. Based on interviews with residents and activists involved in fighting for public ownership of the Mosque-Cathedral, there is an acknowledgement that the city’s traditions, landscape, and ‘way of life’ are being commodified for visitors. Many residents feel alienated from the historic core, which is perceived as being for tourists. However, there is also a strong belief among activists that, as a WHS, the Mosque- Cathedral does not belong exclusively to Córdoba, and that tourist-oriented economic development must result in the local redistribution of the wealth generated. The spatial histories (Lefebvre 1974) of urban heritage sites may manifest in material artefacts, but the accretive results of the passage of time and socio-spatial dynamics extend far beyond the local. It is only through the international dissemination of the debates surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral, and the complications that this creates between the Catholic Church and various scales of the Spanish state, that the privatization and evangelization of public heritage can be successfully fought. In this case, the struggle to overcome one-dimensional heritage practices and narratives cannot be understood out of a relationship of economic exploitation, exemplified in the Church’s lack of taxation and of financial transparency. To enact ‘heritage for all’ – to borrow from local activists – would require public and professional management of the Mosque-Cathedral to capture and redistribute the economic benefits of tourism for the local community and ensure a more even-handed treatment of its universal values. Acknowledgement Brian Rosa would like to thank the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the City University of New York for their support of this research through their Junior Faculty Fellowship programme. References Alba, Alfonso (2016), ‘La Mezquita Catedral de Córdoba recupera su nombre’, El Mundo, 31 March, http://www.elmundo.es/andalucia/2016/03/31/56fcf812ca474161528b45b3.html. Accessed 6 June 2017. Albert, Manuel J. (2014) ‘Mezquita en paradero desconocido’, El País, 26 November, http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2014/11/26/andalucia/1417000492_805013.html. Accessed 6 July 2017. 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