This paper will focus on the poetry of Ibn Zaydun, an eleventh century Andalusian poet and native Cordoban, and the use of the imagination and memory as a means to commemorate public spaces and how the introduction of nostalgia transforms these public spaces into intimate locales punctuated with personal experiences. The role of memory in this poem is significant as D. F. Ruggles writes, “memory is often more powerful than reality because it engages the imagination: ruins remind us of what was, allowing the mind’s recollection to reconstruct the place as it might have been and as it ought to have been.” The poem is a memory palace for Cordoba and representative of a culture that is forever lost but whose legacy will forever remain in tact. Ibn Zaydun’s personal reflections of his life in Cordoba and Madinat al-Zahraʾ is what Svetlana Boym would classify as reflective nostalgia, which concerns itself with an individual and cultural memory that clings to slivers of details in an attempt to situate and temporalize space. With the fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba in 1031, Ibn Zaydun experienced the disintegration of his homeland from afar, composing his muwashshah while imprisoned in Seville. Throughout the text, he compares Cordoba’s urban space, with its lush gardens and ornate palaces and estates, to a paradise on Earth. The city, as a result, is textually reconstructed with exacting detail through his memories and nostalgia. The terrain and layout of the Caliphate are highly specific as he makes reference to numerous places, gardens, and landmarks for in many instances, these were also the locations of his trysts with the princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi. As a result of this simultaneous mapping and memorialization of Cordoba and the palace Madinat al-Zahra’ within this text, Ibn Zaydun creates a physical and literary monument to a Paradise Lost. Using archaeological, historical, and literary sources documenting eleventh-century al-Andalus, I intend to create and present a series of maps and diagrams based on Ibn Zaydun’s memories that will analyze and situate the locations of geographical markers, man-made structures, and spaces within Cordoba, effectively recreating the city from its ruins.