Mudéjar, gótico, modernismo

Twenty words that let you read a Spanish building

Spain and Latin America keep their history in their buildings, and the plaque on the wall is rarely translated. Twenty words turn a nice old church into something you can actually read.

mudéjar is the word to know

After the Christian conquest, Muslim craftsmen went on building in their own techniques for Christian patrons: brick, geometric plasterwork, carved wooden ceilings. That is mudéjar, and you will see it from Toledo to Zaragoza.

It is not a period. It is a way of working that lasted centuries, which is why a plaque can say mudéjar beside a Gothic date without contradicting itself. Nowhere outside the Iberian peninsula has it, which is a decent reason to learn the word before you go.

A patio is not a patio

In English a patio is paving outside a back door. El patio is the open centre of a building with the rooms around it, and it is the whole point of the plan: shade, air and water in the middle rather than at the edge. Córdoba holds a festival for them every May.

The other parts come up constantly on tours. La fachada is the front. La bóveda is the vault, the curved ceiling, and la cúpula is the dome. El campanario is the bell tower and la campana the bell inside it.

azulejo does not come from azul

Nearly everybody assumes the glazed tiles are named after the blue. They are not: azulejo comes from the Arabic for polished stone. They are on walls, benches and station platforms across Spain and Portugal, and they are decoration and insulation at the same time.

The styles, in the order they arrive

El románico is heavy walls, round arches and small windows. El gótico is pointed arches, height and glass. El barroco is the one that covers every surface. And el modernismo is Catalan Art Nouveau, which is to say Gaudí, and it does not mean modernism in the English sense at all.

Three questions that open a conversation

¿De qué siglo es?, what century is it from, gets you an answer like del siglo doce. ¿Se puede subir? asks whether you can go up the tower. And en obras, under works, is the sign you will meet more often than any of them.