Seville: Cathedral, Alcázar & Santa Cruz

Inside the tower, there are no stairs. Instead, thirty-five gently sloping ramps spiral upward through seven vaulted chambers. The ramps were wide enough that the muezzin could ride a horse to the summit to call the faithful to prayer five times a day.

The cathedral itself was begun in fourteen oh-two, after the Christian authorities tore down the mosque that had stood here. According to the story, the city councillors who commissioned the project declared: let us build a church so great that those who see it finished will think we were mad. They were not wrong. The building took over a century to complete, and what they produced is staggering: one hundred and twenty-seven metres long, eighty-three metres wide, with a central nave soaring forty-two metres overhead. Five aisles, eighty chapels, a forest of stone columns, and enough gold leaf in the main altarpiece to make you genuinely dizzy.

Go inside before you do anything else. The scale is impossible to take in from the street. And when you are inside, stand in the middle of the nave and let the height settle over you. This is the third largest church building in the world, after Saint Peter's in Rome and Saint Paul's in London. It was the largest in the world when it was completed, and it held that title for over a century. The clergy who built it were making a statement to the whole of medieval Europe about the wealth, the ambition, and the faith of Seville.

Seville's connection to Columbus runs deeper than his burial. It was from the port of this city — from the docks along the Guadalquivir river — that Columbus departed on his first voyage in fourteen ninety-two. Seville was the logical departure point: it sat on a navigable river sixty kilometres from the Atlantic coast, it had the merchant infrastructure to fund and provision a voyage, and the Spanish crown, which had just completed the Reconquista by taking Granada in the same year fourteen ninety-two, was eager to project power westward.

After Columbus returned, Seville became the exclusive entry point for all trade with the Americas. The Casa de Contratación — the House of Trade — was established here in fifteen oh-three, giving Seville a legal monopoly on New World commerce that lasted for over two centuries. The gold and silver that poured in from Mexico and Peru transformed this city into one of the wealthiest in Europe. At its peak in the sixteenth century, Seville had a population of over one hundred and fifty thousand people, making it the largest city in Spain and one of the largest on the continent. The wealth you see in this cathedral — the gilded altarpieces, the art, the sheer extravagance of it all — was paid for by the Americas.

The palace you are entering was largely built by Peter I of Castile — known as Peter the Cruel, though his supporters called him Peter the Just — in the thirteen sixties. Peter commissioned a palace in the Mudéjar style, deliberately choosing Muslim aesthetic traditions over the Gothic style that was fashionable in the rest of Christian Europe. He brought craftsmen from Toledo and from the Nasrid court of Granada, which is why parts of the Alcázar feel closely related to the Alhambra — built around the same period, the same craftsmen moving between courts.

The details inside are extraordinary: carved stucco walls with Arabic inscriptions and interlocking geometric patterns, tilework in dozens of colours arranged in complex mathematical designs, wooden ceilings with star-shaped inlaid patterns called artesonado, and archways with muqarnas — those stalactite-like carved plaster ornaments that seem to dissolve the boundary between architecture and sculpture. Walk slowly through the Salón de los Embajadores, the Hall of Ambassadors, and look up at the half-orange dome overhead. It was made in fourteen twenty-seven from hundreds of interlocking wooden pieces forming a star pattern of extraordinary complexity, with gilded highlights that glow in the light.

The gardens at the back of the palace are a separate pleasure: shaded paths between clipped hedges, fountains, orange and lemon trees, jasmine that scents the air even in winter. The Spanish royal family still uses the upper floors of the Alcázar when they visit Seville. This is not a museum of a dead world. It is a living palace.

The history darkens in thirteen ninety-one. An anti-Jewish pogrom spread through Castile that year, beginning in Seville and spreading to other cities. The Jewish quarter was attacked, thousands were killed, and survivors were forcibly converted to Christianity or driven to exile. The neighbourhood that had been the Judería was renamed Santa Cruz — Holy Cross — and the synagogues were converted to churches. A century later, in fourteen ninety-two — the same year Columbus sailed — Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews from Spain who refused to convert to Christianity. The community that had lived in this neighbourhood for centuries was gone.

Walk through it now, in the afternoon heat, and you will hear flamenco guitar from a bar somewhere nearby, the sound drifting through an open door or down from a balcony. Flamenco, the music and dance that has become synonymous with Andalucía, has its roots partly here, in the cultural fusion of Romani, Moorish, and Jewish musical traditions that developed in cities like Seville over centuries. It was declared a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in two thousand and ten. In the evenings, the tablaos — traditional flamenco venues — are full.

The callejón del Agua, the Water Lane, runs along the old Alcázar wall and is one of the prettiest streets in the neighbourhood. The wall beside you provided water to the royal gardens inside the palace. The novelist Washington Irving lived near here in the eighteen twenties while writing Tales of the Alhambra and gave the neighbourhood some of its Romantic mythology.

More recently, the Hospital de los Venerables has become the home of the Focus-Abengoa Foundation's collection of works by Diego Velázquez, the greatest painter Seville ever produced. Velázquez was born in this city in fifteen ninety-nine, trained here under Francisco Pacheco, and was shaped entirely by the visual culture of Seville before leaving for Madrid in sixteen twenty-three, where he became court painter to King Philip IV and spent the rest of his career. The paintings on display here include works from his Seville period, when he was developing the naturalistic style that would eventually produce Las Meninas, universally regarded as one of the greatest paintings in the history of Western art.

Seville in Velázquez's time was still one of the great cities of Europe, though its monopoly on New World trade was fraying. The silver from the Americas had created extraordinary wealth, but it had also created inflation that was eating through the Spanish economy. The city was home to painters, writers, poets, and architects of the highest calibre — the Golden Age of Spanish culture, the Siglo de Oro, was happening here and in Madrid simultaneously. Velázquez, Zurbarán, and Murillo were all painting in Seville in the same generation. The art you are seeing in this building is the product of one of the most concentrated bursts of artistic genius in European history.

Stand in the courtyard for a moment before you leave. The proportions are perfect, the orange trees in the centre fragrant, the arcade casting cool shadows across the stone. In the heat of a Seville afternoon, this is the most civilised place in the city.

After the Reconquista, the tower served various purposes over the centuries: a prison, a chapel, a customs post for ships arriving from the Americas. The Gold in its name may refer to the golden tiles that once covered its exterior, which have since been lost. Or it may refer to the gold and silver from the New World that passed through here when ships docked at the adjacent quay — the treasure of the Americas being logged and taxed before entering the city's economy. Both explanations have their proponents; neither has been definitively proved.

The river in front of you is the Guadalquivir, and it is worth taking a moment to appreciate its role in Seville's history. Guadalquivir comes from the Arabic Wadi al-Kabir, the great river, and it was this waterway that made Seville the most important port in the Spanish empire. The river is navigable from here to the Atlantic, about eighty kilometres downstream, meaning ocean-going ships could sail directly into the city. At the height of the sixteenth-century trade monopoly with the Americas, the docks along this bank were among the busiest in the world: hundreds of ships arriving and departing each year, loading wool and oil and ceramics outbound, unloading gold, silver, tobacco, sugar, and cochineal dye on the return.

Sit for a moment on the riverside path, watch the water move south toward the sea, and let the scale of what happened here settle over you. This quiet river was once the economic artery of an empire that stretched from Mexico to Manila.

Triana, the neighbourhood on the western bank where you are now heading, is one of the most historically significant in the city. It was traditionally the home of sailors, fishermen, potters, and gitanos — the Romani people of Andalucía whose presence in Seville dates back to the fifteenth century. The gitanos of Triana are credited with a crucial role in the development of flamenco: their musical tradition, merged with Moorish and local Andalucían influences, produced the deep flamenco style known as flamenco jondo, or cante jondo — deep song.

Triana's ceramic tradition is equally important. The neighbourhood has been producing distinctive tin-glazed earthenware tiles — azulejos — since the medieval period, when the technique was introduced from North Africa. The brilliant blue, green, white, and yellow tiles you see on buildings throughout Seville, and throughout southern Spain, were made here. The name azulejo comes from the Arabic word for small polished stone. The factories that produced them were concentrated along this bank of the river, and several have survived as working studios.

Stand on the bridge and breathe the air coming off the water. On a warm evening, this is where the city comes to walk — young couples, families with pushchairs, old men who have watched the river their whole lives. The Guadalquivir is the pulse of the city. Everything important in Seville's history — the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors, the Reconquista, the Americas trade — came through or along this river.

The reason they stand in this particular plaza is partly accidental. The city had been trying to redevelop this square for years when archaeological excavations for a planned underground car park in the nineteen nineties revealed extraordinary Roman remains beneath the surface — mosaic floors, intact walls, structural elements of a Roman city that had been buried under medieval Seville for fifteen centuries. The car park was cancelled. A design competition was held for a structure that could cover and protect the archaeological site while revitalising the square above.

The Roman ruins are now displayed in a museum beneath Las Setas — you can go down and walk among them, looking at mosaics and domestic objects from a city that was already here two thousand years ago. Above the ruins, the square hums with daily life: a morning market selling produce and fish, bars that open at noon and close sometime after midnight, children running under the canopies in the heat of the afternoon.

Take the walkway that runs along the top of the structure. It costs a small fee to access the elevated promenade, but the panoramic view from the upper level — looking out over the rooftops of the old city, the cathedral towers to the south, the river gleaming to the west — gives you a perspective on Seville's urban layout that you cannot get from the street. The city is smaller and more compressed than it seems from inside its lanes.

Las Setas has been controversial since the day it opened, as anything this strange and this visible in a historic city will always be controversial. But it has also become a genuine meeting point for the city's residents, which is what a public structure in a plaza is supposed to be.

Whatever its name, the building itself is extraordinary. The architecture is the same Mudéjar-Renaissance fusion you encountered at the Alcázar, but here it belongs to a private family rather than the crown, and the accumulation of four centuries of collecting makes it feel more intimate and more eclectic. The central courtyard is considered one of the finest examples of Mudéjar architecture in Seville: marble columns and arches, tilework wainscoting in brilliant blues and yellows covering the lower walls, carved stucco above, and in the corners Roman sculptures acquired by the family during travels in Italy.

The Roman collection is serious. Busts of emperors, statues of gods and heroes, funerary urns — the Enríquez de Ribera family were among the first Spanish collectors to acquire classical antiquities systematically, and their collection arrived here in the early sixteenth century when the fashion for Roman art was at its height among European nobility. The contrast between the Islamic tilework and the Greco-Roman statuary would look jarring anywhere else. Here it seems entirely natural — a single room that summarises the cultural history of the Mediterranean world.

The upstairs apartments, accessible by guided tour, contain frescoed ceilings, coffered wooden ceilings in the Mudéjar style, Flemish tapestries, and paintings accumulated by a family that has been connected to the Spanish royal court since the medieval period. The gardens at the back of the palace are quieter than those at the Alcázar and feel genuinely private — a place where a family has been growing its roses and its oranges for five hundred years.

The traffic outside the palace gate, the tuk-tuks and the tourists consulting their phones: all of that feels very far away once you step through the entrance arch.

The most remarkable feature is the series of alcoves set into the curved base of the building, one for each province of Spain — forty-nine of them in total — each decorated with a tiled bench and panel depicting a map of the province and a scene from its history. Walk along the curve and you are reading a tiled history of Spain, province by province: Castile and its castles, Andalucía and its Moorish palaces, Galicia and its coast, Catalonia and its medieval cities. It is kitsch in the grandest possible sense — decorative tiles covering an area the size of a football pitch — and it is wonderful.

The canal is crossed by four bridges, one for each of the former kingdoms of Spain. You can rent a rowboat and paddle along the canal's length, which is a gentle and peculiar thing to do in a city this old and this serious about its history.

Hollywood has noticed the plaza's visual power. It appeared as the Royal Palace of Naboo in Star Wars Episode II, and as a location in Lawrence of Arabia. The Spanish military still occupies part of the main building, their presence marked by a flag and a no-photograph sign. The rest of the plaza is public, free, and open from dawn to late evening.

Find a tiled bench in one of the provincial alcoves and sit down. The heat of the day will be softening by now, the light going golden over the brick towers. Somewhere nearby, perhaps from the park behind you or from a bar on the road into the city, you might catch the sound of a guitar — a few notes of flamenco, unhurried, disappearing into the evening air. This is where Seville ends: in beauty that is slightly too much, which is exactly right.