Gardens, Landscape and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain

An interpretation of the history of gardens in Spain during the period of Islamic rule from the 8th through to the 15th centuries.

Islamic gardens, with their cultivated garden beds and water channels, are traditionally regarded as an early reflection of paradise.

However, D. Fairchild Ruggles argues that the early palace garden was primarily an environmental, economic and political construct, and that paradisiac symbolism did not develop until gardens acquired tombs.

The text discusses three aspects of medieval Islamic Spain: the landscape and agricultural transformation as documented in the Arabic scientific literature and geographies; the typological formation of the garden and its symbolic meaning in the 8th through the 10th centuries; and the role of vision and the frame in the spatial apparatus of sovereignty through the 15th century.

Ruggles explains that, while the repertoire of architectural and garden forms was largely unchanged from the 10th through to the 15th centuries, their meaning changed dramatically.

The royal palace gardens of Cordoba expressed a political ideology that placed the king above and at the centre of the garden and, metaphorically, his kingdom. While this conception of the world began to falter in later centuries, the patrons of architecture still clung to the forms and motifs of the earlier golden age.