The city stretched, shrunken, between the train station -for The daisies– and the riverbank, where the sunsets and nights were an invitation to walk in a remarkably different way. The good thing about the dividing line of the Renfe station is that as soon as you crossed it, some gardens appeared, those of Los Patos or La Agricultura, where the station was once installed. Seneca Library, and which became famous for setting up student fair booths there. The southern border of the city, which vanished along the Guadalquivir and the gardens of the Alcázar, he also had a student background. Over there, in front of the Seminary, on Amador de los Ríos Street, where the students of the so-called Bishop’s College made the seminarians tremble, in direct presence or through bars and windows, the books of the Provincial Library have also existed until a few days ago. The one in the north of the city, the station line and the gardens, has always been a mundane space, of landscapes and music groups, of life lived and written in books. Open.
The The southern border, the one that separates the Guadalquivir River from the rest of the city, is a peculiar space, almost sacred, because there, for centuries, divine power has been installed and has manifested itself in its different garments: from caliphs to bishops through altar boys, priests, canons, penitentiaries and certain humans almost with the ownership of angels or demons . To the south, where the Guadalquivir River soothes the nights of July and August with its coolness, the city continues to display its almost sacred profile because here it has given shelter to kings, caliphs, queens and priests in their old age.
There is a reason why it is the surroundings of the Mosque, the most beautiful and sacred place in Córdoba. A space that has been adapting to the century and that since those dying winter afternoons-nights, where not even cars passed along the Paseo de la Ribera and a complicit silence parked among the orange trees of that marked eternity, has become a crowded space of tourists who play at crossing the invisible line that connects Calahorra with the Arc de Triomphe where the city has found a space to show itself, in the Visitor Reception Center, and where to invite a drink in its reopened bar or in the brand new Episcopal Palace.
The truth is that the city has been searchingto the north and to the south, by the border of the Estación and the Brillante, and by the Guadalquivir and the gardens of bad times, culture in the form of books where human beings have left their experiences written. That is why these days an event that exalts Córdoba resonates with such insistence: the inauguration of the Grupo Cántico library, whose name hides the most outstanding group of poets in the city, precisely in the Gardens of Agriculture, of the Ducks, converted into park by the French at the beginning of the 19th century.
When the then Minister of Culture Carmen Calvo announced the construction of a library in the public gardens of the north of Córdoba, we had the feeling that the officials were going to snatch landscapes from our lives and were going to place shadows where the roses grew. But history adjusts life to its landscapes and humans, who We are the ones who inhabit it, we get used to the new. This is what we expect from this time that began on February 8th.
Feel culture again in its most intimate expression, which is nothing other than introducing yourself into the silence of the world. and discover that on a desk you can find the wisdom of life in the form of poetry, history, novel, report, biography or simply beauty. There, to the north, where the city stretched, shrunken, between Las Margaritas and La Ribera.