Iglesia del Carmen de Córdoba, Renaissance and Baroque temple in Córdoba, Spain.
Iglesia del Carmen de Córdoba is a single-nave church covered by barrel vaults on transverse arches, with a barely marked crossing under a domed vault bearing Cárdenas coats of arms. Its main portal, built in the first half of the 17th century, is now walled up; the entrance is on the left side, under a lintel with a niche holding a Virgin of Carmen. A brick bell gable stands at the left of the foot of the church.
Calced Carmelites settled in Córdoba in the first half of the 16th century; by 1580, under Philip II, their convent church was under construction, with the marquises of Villaseca holding its patronage. French troops occupying the city during the Peninsular War expelled the friars and damaged the convent, and the Mendizábal Desamortización of the 19th century ended monastic life there. Worship was suspended in the early 20th century after a collapse and restored in the 1940s; from the late 1970s surviving convent buildings became the University of Córdoba's Law Faculty.
The church keeps the Virgen del Carmen as its titular figure, shown in a niche above the main door and in a neo-baroque altarpiece in the left transept. The main altarpiece, designed by Sebastián Vidal in 1639 and painted by Juan de Valdés Leal from 1655, depicts the prophet Elijah carried to heaven in a fiery chariot and the Cordoban martyrs Acisclo and Victoria.
The main portal at the foot of the church is walled up and unusable; entry is through the door on the left side, under a lintel with a niche holding a statue of the Virgin of Carmen. The church stands in the old convent complex whose surviving parts now house the Faculty of Law of the University of Córdoba.
The main portal at the foot of the church, built in the first half of the 17th century, is now walled up and unusable. Above its semicircular arch framed by paired pilasters, a triangular pediment carries the coat of arms of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The entrance actually used today is on the left side, under a lintel with a niche holding a sculpture of the Virgin of Carmen.
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