The City Council of Córdoba approved last Thursday in an extraordinary session the Management Plan for the Historic Center of the city, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 and which includes as an indissoluble whole the mosque-cathedral and the historic center of the city. city. In the document – required by this United Nations body to guarantee the conservation of the universal value of the property -, although reference is made to the predominant importance of the temple, the concern for the preservation of its Andalusian character is not addressed, as experts have questioned. and intellectuals and a recent report by the international NGO World Heritage Watch (WHW), which advises UNESCO on the status of World Heritage monuments. A gap that is relevant, since UNESCO can only report on this document, as it is the only one that the Government of Spain, as a State Party, can send to the World Heritage Committee and its advisory bodies for evaluation.
The Management Plans are the planning instruments that UNESCO considers mandatory for the properties inscribed on the World Heritage List, intended for the effective execution of the tasks of knowledge, preservation and dissemination of their Exceptional Universal Values, although from the Córdoba City Council It is alleged that its preparation is voluntary. The document should have been ready in 2022, which is when the periodic reports on the conservation and management of sites had to be presented, but this project has been delayed over time. The main basis is based on an exhaustive report that the UTE Patrimony Living drafted and which was delivered this summer, to which the council has made contributions.
The document addresses the main threats facing the Historic Center, emphasizing mobility, tourist overcrowding, especially around the mosque-cathedral or climate change, and proposes 64 actions that have heritage as the main axis and who approach it from different perspectives. The economic and business, promoting the strengthening of the artisanal and artistic sector or the promotion of Andalusian gastronomy; the environmental, with a decontamination plan and minimization of visual and sound impacts; the implementation of a public transport network between the mosque and Medina Azahara (another World Heritage property), or the regeneration and opening of green spaces and the creation of metropolitan cultural corridors; the administrative, with the creation of a digital twin of the city and heritage to speed up decision-making; or the social and urban planning with a rehabilitation plan to provide housing for young people and revitalize the historic center.
The Management Plan recognizes that the mosque-cathedral “mainly supports the declaration of Outstanding Universal Value, integrity and authenticity” of the World Heritage site constituted by the Historic Center of Córdoba, and emphasizes that it is “property of the Catholic Church since the 13th century.” and that it is “managed by the Cathedral Chapter” and points out that “although it has its own Master Plan, carried out within the framework of the National Cathedral Plan, this Management Plan takes into consideration the importance and specific weight of this important monument” . However, among the action proposals included in the document, none makes specific reference to the need to guarantee and preserve the integrity and authenticity of the monument.
To prepare the initial proposal of the Management Plan, drawn up by the Living Heritage entity, tourism technicians, architects, archaeologists, members of neighborhood associations, environmentalists, cultural or business, university professors, members of the Cabildo and the City hall. Among the answers they offered, there are only three that expressly mention the mosque-cathedral to warn of the “controversial management of the mosque-cathedral”, “concealment or disregard of the historical and artistic values of the Islamic dimension of the mosque-cathedral in front of to the Christian dimension” and the “excessive concentration of tourists around the mosque-cathedral.” However, the proposals included in the Management Plan only address concerns about the agglomeration of tourism in the area around the temple.
A siding to preserve cultural integrity
The experts, as well as the Cathedral Mosque Platform – which also participated in the interviews – and, recently, an article published in the WHW annual report, have pointed to the Master Plan, which establishes the guidelines for the management and conservation of the mosque. cathedral, as the document that protects the preeminence of the Catholic condition of the building, ignoring the importance of the Andalusian legacy and denying and relegating, therefore, the artistic, historical and cultural values that were recognized by UNESCO to grant the monument its status as World Heritage Site. The fact that neither Unesco nor Icomos – Unesco’s advisory body on heritage issues – can report on this document, as it is a report from the council whose supervision corresponds solely to the Junta de Andalucía, and which, therefore, The Government of Spain as a State Party cannot refer to the World Heritage Committee, focused attention on the content of the Management Plan, on which UNESCO could report.
However, this does not seem to be the appropriate way for UNESCO or Icomos to study whether the colonization of images and religious paraphernalia that the Cabildo has been promoting in recent decades—to the point of preventing the contemplation of the qibla—represents a violation of the guidelines that determined that the mosque-cathedral was considered a World Heritage Site, as sources familiar with the actions of UNESCO and Icomos explain to this newspaper. The Management Plan is a document of proposals for action and as proposals, UNESCO or Icomos have no obligation to evaluate them, these sources emphasize. The mechanism for these organizations to study whether it is necessary to initiate a review process is through complaints, something that the president of Icomos already conveyed to the Cathedral Mosque Platform when he met with them a few months ago.
The approval of the Management Plan in an extraordinary session of the Government Board, when the City Council of Córdoba itself had suspended all events due to the consequences of the damage, has surprised the Council of the Citizen Movement of Córdoba because the document had not been presented previously to the Historic Center Board so that they could add their contributions. “We thought that the Board was going to be convened before approval,” explains Juan Andrés García, the president of the Council of the Citizen Movement, whose members are part of that board. This circumstance means that for them the text is not “definitive”. “After months of talking about previous considerations, with the approval by the City Council, what we understand is that we now have an official document on which to work and make our contributions,” he adds. García explains that a few weeks ago they met with the council’s Culture delegate precisely so that she could make them aware of the text. “We will send our considerations before the end of the year, but what worries us most is whether the cost of the measures is incorporated into the budget and who is going to be in charge of controlling that they are managed,” he indicates.