Spain · Andalusia · Córdoba
Santa Marina, Córdoba — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Buttresses front the Plaza del Conde de Priego in Santa Marina, a barrio in the north of Córdoba's Distrito Centro, built around a fernandina church.
About Santa Marina
Where to stay in Santa Marina
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Santa Marina fills the northern lanes of Córdoba's Distrito Centro, a quarter of enclosed convents and noble houses set well back from the river. It remains a residential quarter. Rooms near the Plaza de Santa Marina put the Monumento a Manolete and the Iglesia de San Agustín within a few minutes on foot, while Calle Rejas de Don Gome runs straight to the Palacio de Viana and its twelve patios.
If you want an easy walk to the Mezquita-Catedral, down in the old medina, without sleeping in the crowds that press against it, this quarter suits.
About Santa Marina
What are the main landmarks in Santa Marina?
Santa Marina takes its name from the Iglesia de Santa Marina de Aguas Santas, a thirteenth-century fernandina church raised after Fernando III took Córdoba in 1236. Four buttresses grip its west front. A rose window sits above them, the Renaissance bell tower came three centuries later, and the church has ranked as a national monument since 1931.
The Monumento a Manolete faces it across the Plaza del Conde de Priego. Twelve patios and a garden lie behind the grilles of the Palacio de Viana on the Plaza de Don Gome, and the Convento de Santa Isabel de los Ángeles encloses Calle Santa Isabel.
What is the history of Santa Marina?
Santa Marina began as a parish quarter of the Axerquía, the walled eastern town that grew outside Córdoba's Muslim medina and took its name from the Arabic for the east. The wall gave way in 1236. Christian troops scaled it at the Puerta del Colodro, a gate on the north line just beyond the barrio in Ollerías, and Fernando III's parish churches went up across the conquered quarter within a generation.
The Augustinians moved their house to the Plaza de San Agustín in 1328. The Fuente de la Piedra Escrita was set at the corner of Calle Moriscos in the early eighteenth century, its water still running from two carved lion heads.
Where is Santa Marina?
Santa Marina lies at the north of Córdoba's Distrito Centro, edged by Ollerías, San Lorenzo, San Andrés-San Pablo, and Campo de la Merced-Molinos Alta.
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More areas in Córdoba
Updated September 2026