Mudejar Architecture

Mudejar art, or Mudejar style, is a decorative and ornamental tradition of the Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia, applied primarily between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries to buildings otherwise designed in the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance styles. Its constructive and decorative motifs, including horseshoe and multi-lobed arches, honeycomb muqarnas vaulting, wooden roof structures, fired brick, glazed ceramic tile work, carved stucco, and geometric and vegetal arabesque patterning, derive from forms brought to or developed within Al-Andalus, the Muslim ruled regions of the Iberian Peninsula. The term itself was coined by the art historian Jose Amador de los Rios y Serrano, referring to the Mudejars, Muslims who remained in former Al-Andalus territory after the Christian reconquest and were permitted to practice their religion within limits. Mudejar architecture is generally read as physical evidence of the centuries of coexistence between Muslim and Christian communities in medieval Spain and Portugal, a coexistence that ended when Spain's Muslim and Jewish populations were forced to convert or leave the country between the late fifteenth and mid sixteenth centuries.