Hospital de la Caridad

The man who founded this hospital was, by most accounts, the worst person in Seville before he became the best. Don Miguel de Manara was a seventeenth-century nobleman whose reputation for drinking, gambling, and womanizing was so extreme that he became the rumored inspiration for both Byron's Don Juan and Tirso de Molina's Don Giovanni. Then in 1662, after the death of his young wife, Manara experienced a religious conversion so total that he devoted his remaining years and fortune to caring for Seville's abandoned dead and dying.

He took over the existing Brotherhood of Charity and in 1674 began building this hospital, which still operates today as a home for the elderly. But it is the chapel that stops visitors cold. Manara commissioned the greatest Baroque painters of his era to fill the walls with images of death, decay, and divine judgment. Juan de Valdes Leal's two masterpieces — "In Ictu Oculi" (In the Blink of an Eye) and "Finis Gloriae Mundi" (The End of Worldly Glory) — are among the most unflinching paintings in Western art. The first shows Death snuffing out a candle over symbols of worldly power; the second depicts rotting corpses of a bishop and a knight being weighed on a divine scale.

Bartolome Esteban Murillo, by contrast, provided gentler counterparts: tender paintings of charity and mercy that line the nave. Manara deliberately placed the grim and the hopeful side by side, forcing viewers to confront mortality and then choose compassion. Murillo's works were so prized that several were looted by Napoleon's troops during the Peninsular War.

Manara himself is buried in the crypt, directly beneath the threshold of the chapel, having requested that his grave be placed where every visitor would literally walk over him — a final act of humility from a man who spent the first half of his life as anything but.