Parque de María Luisa

Half of this park was a private garden that belonged to the Palacio de San Telmo until 1893, when the Infanta Maria Luisa Fernanda — Duchess of Montpensier and sister of Queen Isabel II — donated the grounds to the city of Seville. For three decades it remained a pleasant but unremarkable green space. Then came the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition, and French landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier was hired to transform it into something worthy of a world's fair.

Forestier blended formal French garden design with the Moorish water-garden traditions already embedded in Andalusian culture. The result is a park that feels like walking through a dream sequence: tiled benches along shaded avenues, fountains surrounded by glazed ceramic frogs and ducks, and the famous Plaza de America with its pair of ornate pavilions — one Mudejar, one Renaissance — facing each other like architectural rivals. Parrots roost in the tall palms, and peacocks strut across the paths as if they own the place.

The park's most photogenic spot might be the Glorieta de Becquer, a monument to the Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Becquer featuring three bronze women seated around the base of a massive Taxodium tree. The sculptures represent love gained, love possessed, and love lost. It is peak nineteenth-century melodrama, and Sevillanos love it.

At 34 hectares, the park is large enough to absorb the crowds, and on hot afternoons the shade under the ancient rubber trees and Washington palms drops the temperature by several degrees. Locals come here to run, nap on benches, and feed the pigeons at the Plaza de America. It is the closest thing Seville has to Central Park, but with better weather and more tiles.