Spanish for architecture

These are the buildings every Spanish speaking town has, and the names are on the map: iglesia, palacio, muralla, ayuntamiento. Learn them and you can read a town plan before you can read a sentence.

Parts of buildings are what guides point at. Fachada, bóveda, patio and campanario come up on every tour, and knowing them lets you follow a guide's explanation without catching every word.

Styles end in o and take el because estilo, style, is masculine and understood: el gótico is el estilo gótico. Learn them in order and they become a timeline, from románico to modernismo.

Siglo, century, is how Spanish dates buildings, usually in Roman numerals: siglo XII. Lo construyeron, they built it, uses the plural with no subject, the usual way to say something was done without saying who.

After the Christian conquest, Muslim craftsmen kept building in their own techniques for Christian patrons: brick, geometric plasterwork, carved wooden ceilings. That is mudéjar, and it is on buildings 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 next to a Gothic date.

In English a patio is paving outside a back door. In Spanish el patio is the open centre of a building, with 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 in May.

Not from azul, blue, although nearly everybody assumes it does. They are the glazed tiles on walls and benches across Spain and Portugal, and they are decoration and insulation at once.