How to draw QURTUBA

Greetings friends!

We launch our new year of tangles with Qurtuba, a lovely and easy Monday tangle from Spanish CZT Aida Rico. It’s her fifth tangle on the site.

Aida explains her inspiration for Qurtuba,

Qurtuba came to me during a visit to the Córdoba Mosque last October.

When I saw one of their ornamented doors, I told to myself that at least a tangle must be hidden in it.

In this close up from part of the above image, you can see the vine-like Qurtuba inspiration framing the section.

Interested to learn a little about this intriguing edifice in Córdoba, Spain, we turned to a lengthy and detailed article on Wikipedia about its history and amazing architecture. Here’s a little taste of its origins in the 700s up to its current use as a Cathedral today:

The Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba (Spanish: Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba), officially known by its ecclesiastical name, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption (Spanish: Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, is the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Córdoba dedicated to the Assumption of Mary and located in the Spanish region of Andalusia. Due to its status as a former Islamic mosque, it is also known as the Mezquita (‘mosque’ in Spanish) and as the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

According to traditional accounts, a Visigothic church, the Catholic Christian Basilica of Saint Vincent of Saragossa, originally stood on the site of the current Mosque-Cathedral … The Great Mosque was constructed on the orders of Abd ar-Rahman I in 785, when Córdoba was the capital of the Muslim-controlled region of Al-Andalus. It was expanded multiple times afterwards …

The mosque was converted to a cathedral in 1236 when Córdoba was captured by the Christian forces of Castile during the Reconquista. … Today, the building continues to serve as the city’s cathedral and Mass is celebrated therein daily.

By Toni Castillo Quero – Flickr: [1], CC BY-SA 2.0,

The mosque structure is an important monument in the history of Islamic architecture and was highly influential on the subsequent “Moorish” architecture of the western Mediterranean regions of the Muslim world.

It is also one of Spain’s major historic monuments and tourist attractions, as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984.

Aida illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Qurtuba below and in several lovely tiles she demonstrates some ways to explore it including “in the round” and in a grid.

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From The Book of Zentangle:

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"Keep the tangles as little like 'drawing something' as possible."

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5. Linda's List of Zentangle-Original Patterns — here is the complete list of original tangles (aka "official tangles") created and introduced by founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, including those not published online. If you are new to the Zentangle Method I highly recommend learning a few of the published Zentangle classics first.
6. "A Zentangle has no up or down and is not a picture of something, so you have no worries about whether you can draw a hand, or a duck. You always succeed in creating a Zentangle." Thus patterns that are drawings of a recognizable naturalistic or actual object, figure, or scene, are not tangles. A pattern is not always a tangle — here's what makes a tangle. TIP: tangles never start with pencil planning.
   • Un motif n’est pas toujours un tangle — Qu’est-ce qu’un tangle ?
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7. How to submit your pattern deconstruction to TanglePatterns
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