Barrio Santa Cruz

This tangled labyrinth of whitewashed alleyways and jasmine-draped patios was once the most feared address in Seville. When Ferdinand III conquered the city from the Moors in 1248, he corralled the entire Jewish population — the second largest on the Iberian Peninsula after Toledo — into this walled neighborhood. For nearly 150 years the juderia thrived behind its locked gates, producing scholars, merchants, and physicians. Then came the pogrom of 1391, when mobs slaughtered thousands and forced mass conversions. A century later, the Alhambra Decree of 1492 finished the job, expelling every remaining Jew from Spain.

The neighborhood fell into centuries of neglect after that, which ironically preserved its medieval character. The narrow streets were originally designed to provide maximum shade — some alleys are barely a metre wide, and on Calle Reinoso, legend says you can lean out of a balcony and kiss your neighbor across the way. The whitewashed walls reflect heat, and the enclosed patios create natural cooling systems that predate air conditioning by half a millennium.

In the early twentieth century, the city gave Santa Cruz a romantic makeover for the 1929 Exposition, planting gardens in former convents and creating small plazas like the Plaza de Santa Cruz, where an ornate iron cross marks the site of the demolished parish church. But the bones of the medieval quarter survive underneath: follow any alley far enough and you will hit a dead end, a remnant of the neighborhood's original defensive layout.

Look for the former synagogue-turned-church of San Bartolome, and duck into the tiny Plaza de Dona Elvira at dusk, when guitar music drifts out of hidden courtyards and the orange trees fill the air with the scent that defines Seville.