Mudejar architecture
Quintessentially Spanish - and Arab
The Moors ruled Spain – or parts of it - for seven centuries, and they left behind them great monuments of Arab style – the Alhambra, the Giralda, the great Mosque at Cordoba. But even after the Arabs had gone, the styles of architecture and decoration they had created remained influential in Spain.
In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdoms were still tolerant, multi-cultural societies in which Jews and Muslims coexisted with their Christian rulers. So although Toledo, for instance, was reconquered in 1085, Jews and Muslims continued to live in the city – indeed both the extant synagogues were built under Christian rule.
Muslims living in the Christian lands were known as mudejares, from the Arabic mudajjan – ‘domesticated’. In many cases the mudejares dominated the building trade, and it was through them that the style spread throughout Spain.
Mudéjar style adopts the horse-shoe arch and the polylobe arch, as well as using pointed arches like those of the Gothic style. In many cases, mudéjar appears to the English eye as a sort of arabised Gothic. However even where simple pointed arches are used, you can often distinguish mudéjar by the use of the alfiz, a rectangular panel which encloses the arch. 
Mudéjar style is also notable for its ornament, particularly in stucco (plaster) work and carpentry. The plasterwork’s sharp outlines derive from the fact that the designs were carved in it after the plaster had set; undercutting is common and creates a play of light and shadow across the surface. Coffered ceilings, and doors made of interlocking geometrical shapes cut out of wood, are also common features of the style.
Sahagun, in the province of Leon, was probably the cradle of the style. Its fine brick-built churches date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and display the typical arcaded apses of mudejar work, together with powerful towers. Moorish style can be easily detected in the use of the alfiz. The town seems almost unvisited these days, though it’s a stop on the Camino de Santiago.
Toledo is a high point of the mudéjar style, and here you have the chance to compare real Islamic work of about the year 1000 (the Mezquita Cristo de la Luz and Mezquita de las Tornerias, two similar, small mosques) with later mudéjar structures (the two synagogues and many brick churches). In fact the Cristo de la Luz contains both styles – the original mosque had a mudéjar style apse added to it just after the 1085 reconquest.
Toledo’s Transito synagogue, dating from 1360 – nearly three centuries after the Christians took over the city - displays the characteristic eclecticism of the style. The fine plaster decoration includes Arabic inscriptions, as well as the arms of the Christian king Pedro the Cruel – patron of the synagogue’s builder, Samuel Ha-Levi. This was a truly multicultural society – it was only in the 1400s that pressure began to build towards ‘purifying’ the Christian state, leading towards the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.
Segovia’s Alcazar contains some fine mudéjar work, including a fine set of ceilings. However, much of the work here dates from the nineteenth century, after a fire destroyed much of the original work. The synagogue, too, is a reconstruction. But there’s a lovely original mudéjar ceiling at the church of San Lorenzo, just outside the town – close by a typically Arab falaj or qanat (water channel) which the mudejares used to irrigate the market gardens.
In some cases mudéjar work has been added to an original Moorish building. For instance in Seville, the Alcazares Reales contain earlier Islamic work which forms the kernel of Pedro the Cruel’s palace, built in the 1360s. It’s interesting that Pedro appears to have seen the Arab style as particularly suitable for impressing royal power on the viewer – he even hired craftsmen from Granada, still under the rule of the Nasrid dynasty.
Pedro’s palace also borrows its plan from Islamic work. Passages run round right angles to prevent you from seeing straight into rooms; arcades separate rooms from each other while leaving an effect of transparence and interpenetration. This is a very different view of architecture from the Gothic cathedral with its processional spaces or great hall with its single axis – and it creates a quite different feeling, of privacy and finery rather than grandeur.
The Aljaferia in Zaragoza, too, is an original Moorish structure where mudéjar work was added later, after the Christian kings had taken it over as a palace.
An exceptional late mudéjar work is the castle of Coca, built in the late fifteenth century between Segovia and Valladolid. It’s entirely built in brick – the mudéjar construction material par excellence – and its crinkly crenellated outline resembles the stalactite stucco work so common in Moorish architecture. However, the plan, with a curtain wall and polygonal turrets, owes more to northern European architecture than to anything the Arabs ever built.
For fans of mudéjar work, one of the greatest concentrations of monuments is in Aragon – specifically in the town of Teruel, where many of the church towers display mudéjar brick and glazed pottery designs like architectural fair isle sweaters. The great treasure of Teruel is the cathedral ceiling, a fine coffered ceiling painted with images of fantastic beasts, the months of the year, tradesmen and kings – as well as inscriptions in both Arabic and Latin letters.
The mudéjar died out about the same time as the Renaissance came in. While work carried out by the Catholic Monarchs still contains traces of the mudéjar style, emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain) brought a severe Renaissance style with him in the 1530s onwards.
But that’s not quite the end of the mudéjar style, because like many other historical styles it saw a revival in the late nineteenth century. Neo-Mudejar became almost a compulsory style for bull-rings – you’ll also see mudéjar post offices (in Zaragoza for instance) and railway stations (Toledo). Even the architects of ‘modernisme’ in Barcelona borrowed from the style, which has become in many ways an architectural shorthand for Spanishness.
