Catedral de Sevilla and La Giralda

Sevilla’s main tourist attractions are Catedral de Sevilla (UNESCO WH) and La Giralda. One of the largest churches in the world, the Catedral is gothic and built on top of a 12^th-century mosque. The cathedral was the first of two religiously-hybrid buildings we would visit on our trip to Andalucia. The cathedral’s sheer size is humbling, and ornate statues and religious art work are everywhere inside the cathedral. The Patio de los Naranjos was pleasant but not as nice as the one inside the Mezquita, I later decided after visiting Cordoba. My favorite aspect of visiting the Catedral and La Giralda was the 32-story climb up the tower’s steps to the top of the bell tower where I got a closer look of the Catedral’s gothic design.  

Barrio de Santa Cruz

Barrio de Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter is by far the nicest part of Sevilla. A walk through the neighborhood reveals everything that one would expect from a small city in southern Spain—Christmas-season poinsettias in every window, quaint homes and commercial spaces painted in tropical hues, small plazas furnished with tiled benches and fountains lined with orange trees. Orange trees are everywhere in Sevilla, and I often caught M quietly marveling at a tree and contemplating its existence in December in Spain. Growing up in the Caribbean, orange trees were a familiar part of the landscape for M.

Torre del Oro

From the top of the Torre del Oro, a Moorish watchtower on the Rio Guadalquivir, we could see all of Sevilla sprawl in all directions. Once a fort, the Torre del Oro later became a storage space for gold from the New World. The tower’s maritime museum is a bit unsophisticated, but the view from the tower’s roof is worth the visit. In particular, seeing the Catedral de Sevilla with its magnificent double buttresses and La Giralda and its bells towering over surrounding buildings is a breathtaking sight.

La Maestranza and Flamenco

Never having visited a bullring, La Maestranza looks exactly like images of ones I’d seen in the movies and on television. I immediately thought about Ernest H.’s The Sun Also Rises where scenes take place in a bullring in Spain and did not regret that the bullfighting season had already passed.

One can’t visit Sevilla without noticing what a prominent place flamenco has in the local culture—and how heavily marketed the tradition is to tourists. Images of flamenco singers grace the tourist shop T-shirts, store fronts showcase flamenco dolls, and flamenco CDs are sold on the street. We attended a flamenco show at Casa Carmen where we listened to a woman sing mournful songs with the accompaniment of a lone guitar. The first thought that occurred to me as she began singing and clapping her hands was how flamenco clearly influenced the music of the Gipsy Kings, whose concert we attended back in October at the Royal Albert Hall. Whereas the guitarist was amazing, I didn’t begin fully enjoying the show until the dancers joined in and began stomping their heels to the rhythm of the music. Many of their poses, arms poised over their heads and legs planted firmly on the ground but bent at the knees, reminded me of the paintings of bullfighters we saw at La Maestranza. No doubt, the two Andalucian traditions inspired one another.

Museo de Bellas Artes

At the Museo de Bellas Artes, we viewed mostly religious Spanish art that depicts JC’s death at the cross. The museum is known as having the best collection of Spanish art outside of Madrid; the collection is housed in what was once a convent so apart from admiring the art work, one can also enjoy the courtyards inside the walls of the museum. The museum collection foreshadowed the themes in the paintings, sculpture, and architecture we would see throughout our visit to Sevilla, Cordoba and Granada—much of the cities’ art revolve around the death of JC at the cross.

 

After visiting the Alcazar and the Museo de Bellas Artes, we decided that the typical Spanish design of having outdoor inner spaces, courtyards around which rooms are constructed, is what gives Andalucia’s sites their natural beauty and makes them so tranquil (at least during the off-season!).

 

Alcazar

Flights out of Heathrow were canceled in the days leading up to our trip due to heavy fog.  On the way to Stanstead Airport, I could see the fog settling on the landscape outside my window—it was the color of dirty snow, and I was glad to escape London and start our adventure in southern Spain’s Andalucia.

Our first morning in Sevilla, we started with a walk up the Paseo de Christobol C. which is lined with blooming orange trees even in late December.  Something that immediately struck me about Sevilla, where Prince Ferdinand and Queen Isabella greeted Christopher C. upon returning from the New World, is the preponderance of reminders of the historic event in the city’s street and restaurant names, monuments, and art work that memorialize the historical event.  Nowhere we visited in Andalucia is as commercialized as other cities we’ve visited in Europe in the last year—there are no H&Ms, and at most I counted 1-2 Starbucks in both Sevilla and Granada.  However, the discovery of the New World is still in itself a heavily-promoted event that is advertised all over Sevilla’s landscape.  The Alcazar (UNESCO WH), where the king and queen met Christobol C. upon his return, had once been a Moorish palace so the building’s design reminded me of the tile work we saw in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace.  The Alcazar has intricately carved arches in every room and turquoise tiles that epitomize Moorish design.  However, the grounds outside the Alcazar differentiated itself from the Topkapi Palace: there are endless mazes of carefully-manicured gardens, ponds filled with swimming goldfish, and working fountains that surround the palace.