Fire extinguished in Spanish building converted from mosque to cathedral
Madrid, August 9 (Hibya) - On Friday, the Mayor of Cordoba, Spain, announced that a fire had broken out in a historic building converted from a mosque into a cathedral, but firefighters quickly extinguished it, saving the monument.
Flames and smoke rising from the tourist site, visited by 2 million people each year, were seen in widely shared videos.
Josep María Bellido told Cadena TV: “The monument has been saved. There will be no spread, there will be no disaster, let’s put it that way.”
Firefighters had earlier stated that the fire was under control but not yet extinguished.
The large fire, which broke out at around 9:00 p.m., raised concerns for this early medieval architectural marvel and recalled the 2019 blaze that destroyed Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral.
The fire is believed to have started when a mechanical sweeping machine caught fire.
Considered a jewel of Islamic architecture, the building was constructed between the 8th and 10th centuries as a mosque on the site of an older church, by order of the southern city’s then Muslim ruler and Umayyad dynasty emir, Abd al-Rahman.
Christians converted it into a cathedral after Spain’s reconquest in the 13th century under King Ferdinand III of Castile, and architectural changes were made in the following centuries.
British News Agency
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