From the highway outside Córdoba the hills east of the city look like quiet pastures. A few oaks, some grazing land, nothing more. Yet a new analysis of national laser mapping data has revealed a buried grid of terraces and rectangles in this landscape that could mark the long-sought palatine city of Madinat al Zahira, built for Almanzor at the height of the Caliphate of Córdoba.
The work, led by archaeologist Antonio Monterroso Checa at the University of Córdoba, uses high-resolution LiDAR data collected by the Instituto Geográfico Nacional de España.
LiDAR (short for Light Detection and Ranging) sends millions of laser pulses from aircraft and measures how they bounce off the ground and vegetation. When specialists strip away trees and crops in the digital model, what remains is the bare shape of the terrain.
What the lasers saw under the dehesa
In the area known as Los Cabezos de las Pendolillas, near the neighborhood of Alcolea and about twelve kilometers from the famous mosque cathedral, the LiDAR model shows more than 1,200 meters of subtle ridges and platforms. They form terraces packed with rectangular and square footprints that line up in a regular pattern.
A few of those buildings break the grid and tilt toward the southeast, in the direction Islamic sources associate with religious orientation.
All of this sits on gentle slopes of only a few degrees. To the naked eye, walking a dog across that hillside, you would see nothing but uneven pasture. On the screen, though, the hillside starts to look a lot like a planned city.
Early measurements suggest the complex extends over roughly 120 hectares, comparable in size to the already excavated caliphal city of Medina Azahara on the opposite side of Córdoba. That match in scale and layout is one reason Monterroso proposes that the buried site corresponds to Madinat al Zahira.
A thousand year mystery with new physical evidence
Madinat al Zahira was built in the late 10th century as Almanzor’s own power center and was destroyed only a few decades later during civil conflict.
For centuries, scholars have placed it in at least twenty two different spots in and around Córdoba, usually based on medieval texts and isolated finds rather than hard measurements.
The new study stands out because it ties those written sources to a measurable footprint in the landscape. The terraces and building plots occupy royal pastureland recorded since the 15th century as a dehesa under the Crown and later as home to royal horse studs.
That long history of low-intensity use has limited urban growth in the area, which may have helped preserve the buried city as a kind of fossil under the oaks.
High-tech archaeology with a light footprint
For environmentalists and archaeologists alike, one of the most striking aspects of this work is what has not happened. No heavy machinery has dug into the soil. No trenches cut through pasture or tree roots. The team is reading a thousand years of history using data that were already collected for nationwide mapping and made available as open information.
In practical terms, that means any future excavation can be more targeted and less disruptive. Researchers already know where walls and platforms probably lie, so they can plan small, strategic test pits instead of opening large areas blindly.
That approach helps protect the dehesa ecosystem, which combines grazing, trees, wildlife and rural livelihoods in a single landscape.
The work is still a hypothesis, not a final verdict. The authors themselves stress that only systematic field surveys and dating of materials can confirm whether the structures under Pendolillas truly belong to Almanzor’s short-lived capital.
Upcoming national LiDAR flights with even higher detail, along with experimental airborne magnetic surveys, could sharpen the picture further before anyone lifts a shovel.
For now, though, the idea is hard to ignore. A lost caliphal city may have been hiding in plain sight beside a modern road, revealed not by chance digging but by a laser scan from the sky.
The official statement was published by the University of Córdoba.
