Seville: Santa Cruz & the Cathedral

The most obvious survival is the tower rising beside you. That is the Giralda, and it began its life as the minaret of the Almohad mosque, completed in eleven ninety-eight. At the time, it was the tallest structure in the world. The decorative brickwork you see on the lower two thirds, those geometric lozenges and interlocking patterns, is original twelfth-century Moorish work of extraordinary fineness. The upper section with the bells and the bronze weather vane — the Giraldillo, a female figure representing Faith — was added by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. You can climb the Giralda via a series of gently sloping ramps rather than stairs, because it was designed for a muezzin to ride up on horseback to call the faithful to prayer. The view from the top at ninety-seven metres reaches across the whole sevillano panorama.

Inside the cathedral, the scale hits you afresh. The nave vaults rise forty-two metres overhead. There are five aisles, eighty columns, and so much gold leaf that the interior seems to generate its own amber light. The high altar retablo is the largest altarpiece in the world, a dizzying gold-encrusted structure fifteen metres high and twenty metres wide, containing forty-five carved scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin, begun in fourteen eighty-two and taking nearly a century to complete.

But before you look at any of that, find the tomb near the south entrance. You are looking at the tomb of Christopher Columbus. Four bronze pallbearers on pedestals carry the coffin, each representing one of the medieval kingdoms of Spain: Castile, León, Aragón, and Navarra. Columbus made his first voyage in fourteen ninety-two, landing in the Bahamas in October of that year and returning to report to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. His remains were transferred here in nineteen oh two after a complicated journey through Cuba and Santo Domingo. The cathedral is the final resting place of the man whose voyage changed the shape of the world.

Stand in the courtyard and look at the tilework and plasterwork covering every surface. The intricate interlocking geometric patterns, the arabesques, the calligraphic inscriptions — this is the highest achievement of medieval Iberian decorative art. The work is so fine that it looks fragile, as though it might crumble if you breathed on it. It has survived six hundred years.

The gardens extend behind the palace for hectares, a progression of terraces, fountains, orange trees, and fragrant hedges that feel worlds away from the heat of the city streets. The smell of jasmine and orange blossom hangs in the air here in spring and early summer with an almost physical weight. These are not formal European gardens designed to impress at a distance. They are intimate, sensory, designed to be walked slowly, with shaded pavilions and the sound of running water at every turn.

Then came thirteen ninety-one. Anti-Jewish riots swept through Castile and Andalusia, and in June of that year, a mob attacked the Seville judería. The violence was catastrophic. Most of the community was either killed, forcibly converted to Christianity, or fled. The neighbourhood that had been the heart of Sevillian Jewish life was effectively destroyed in a few days of violence. The synagogues were converted to churches. The streets were renamed. A century later, in fourteen ninety-two, the same year Columbus sailed west, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, expelling all remaining Jews from Spain entirely.

What you walk through today is a neighbourhood rebuilt over those foundations. The streets are still medieval in their dimensions and their logic — narrow, winding, designed to stay cool in summer by limiting direct sun exposure. The whitewash on the walls is functional as well as beautiful, reflecting heat. The iron grilles on the windows, the tiled house fronts, the interior courtyards glimpsed through open doorways — this is Andalusian domestic architecture at its most characteristic.

Find a bench in one of the small plazas — Plaza de Doña Elvira or Plaza de los Venerables — and sit for a few minutes. Watch the cats in the shadows. Smell the jasmine. This neighbourhood rewards stillness.

The church attached to the hospital is the real revelation. Step inside and look at the ceiling. It is entirely covered in frescoes painted by Juan de Valdés Leal and his son Lucas Valdés between sixteen eighty-six and sixteen eighty-nine — a continuous painted programme that covers every inch of the vault and walls. The figures float and spiral overhead with a Baroque intensity that is almost hallucinogenic. Angels, saints, clouds, drapery, allegorical figures — all executed with a sense of dramatic movement that was the defining quality of Seville's late Baroque painting tradition.

The hospital is now managed as a cultural centre by the Focus Foundation, and the spaces regularly host exhibitions of Sevillian art, including works by Diego Velázquez, who was born in Seville in fifteen ninety-nine and spent his early career here before moving to Madrid. One of the great joys of Seville is how frequently you encounter world-class art in places that are not world-famous.

But the detail is what makes it extraordinary rather than merely large. Around the entire base of the building runs a continuous series of tiled alcoves, one for each of the forty-nine provinces of Spain at the time. Each alcove contains a painted tile map of the province, a ceramic mural depicting an important historical event from that province's history, and a bench where you can sit. The tiles were made in Seville's famous tileworks and represent some of the finest examples of the Sevillian tradition of painted ceramic work. Tourists and locals sit in the alcoves, read, eat their lunch, and watch the fountain. The design makes a five-hundred-metre colonnade feel intimate.

The canal is navigable by small rowing boats available for hire, and the sight of couples rowing past the Baroque towers and bridges in the morning light, with pigeons wheeling overhead and the smell of the park beyond, is one of those Seville images that lodges permanently in the memory. Nearby, the sound of a street guitarist playing flamenco rhythms drifts across the plaza, and for a moment the whole city seems to pause.

That monopoly, held by the Casa de Contratación — the House of Trade — from fifteen oh three until the monopoly was transferred to Cádiz in seventeen seventeen, made Seville the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan city in the world for much of the sixteenth century. Every ship returning from the Americas docked here. The gold and silver of Mexico and Peru flowed through this river. In fifteen nineteen, Ferdinand Magellan's expedition departed from Seville on the voyage that would become the first circumnavigation of the globe. Of the five ships and two hundred and seventy or so men who set out, one ship, the Victoria, returned three years later with eighteen surviving crew members. The cargo they carried — cloves from the Spice Islands — was worth enough to pay for the entire expedition and turn a profit.

Stand on the riverbank and look across the Guadalquivir toward the Triana neighbourhood on the far bank. You can see the bridge ahead. That is where we are going next. But for now, imagine the river in the sixteenth century: crowded with caravels and galleons, the shouts of dockhands and merchants, the smell of tar and salt water, the whole chaotic machinery of an empire flowing through this single waterway.

King Charles the Third converted the exchange into an archive in seventeen eighty-five, following the suggestion of the historian Juan Bautista Muñoz, who wanted to consolidate the scattered documentation of Spain's colonial enterprise in a single place. Today the archive holds approximately nine kilometres of shelving, containing eighty million pages of documents. Among them are Columbus's original journals from his four voyages, the maps that Amerigo Vespucci drew of the coastlines he explored, Magellan's orders for his circumnavigation, the letters of Hernán Cortés describing the conquest of Mexico, and the administrative records of every colonial governor, every land grant, every commercial transaction in the Spanish empire for three centuries.

The archive is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is open to researchers. Even if you cannot enter the research rooms, the building's courtyard and staircase are accessible and worth seeing. Stand in the courtyard and think about what is stored in the rooms above you: the paper record of a world being remade.

For its first two centuries, the Alameda was the fashionable promenade of Sevillian society: the place where aristocrats and merchants strolled in the evenings, where deals were made and courtships conducted under the trees. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the city's centre of gravity shifted, the neighbourhood around the Alameda became progressively less fashionable and more bohemian. Painters, writers, bullfighters, and theatre people were its inhabitants. Today the Alameda is firmly a neighbourhood of bars, restaurants, and terraces, and on warm evenings the whole promenade fills with people sitting outside until midnight or later.

The culture of the Alameda has long been associated with Seville's counter-cultural life. It has historically been one of the more welcoming corners of the city for those who lived outside the mainstream — a quality that goes back centuries. Sit at one of the terrace bars, order a cold Cruzcampo or a glass of manzanilla sherry, and watch the evening promenade begin.

In nineteen ninety-two, the island was transformed beyond recognition to host Expo ninety-two, the World Exposition that celebrated the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage. For six months, from April to October of that year, the Expo attracted over forty-one million visitors. The Spanish government invested enormous resources in building new bridges, a high-speed rail line connecting Seville to Madrid, and a vast exhibition campus on the island. More than one hundred and twelve countries participated.

The legacy of Expo ninety-two in Seville was mixed. The infrastructure improvements — particularly the high-speed rail — transformed the city's connectivity and contributed to a genuine economic revival. But the Expo campus itself became a white elephant for years after the event closed, with pavilions falling into disrepair and the vast grounds underused. Gradually, the site has been repurposed as a technology and science park. The contrast between the ambition of nineteen ninety-two and the reality that followed is a recurring theme in Spanish urban history.

The origins of flamenco as an art form are genuinely complex and contested, but most scholars agree that it developed in Andalusia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, drawing on the cante jondo — deep song — traditions of the Romani people who settled in southern Spain, which were themselves influenced by the musical cultures of the various communities that had coexisted in Andalusia for centuries. Triana was one of the crucibles of this development. The neighbourhood produced generations of famous cantaores and bailaores, and its flamenco tablaos — performance spaces — are among the most respected in Spain.

Walk down Calle Betis, the riverside street on the Triana side, and look back across the Guadalquivir toward the Torre del Oro and the cathedral tower behind it. This is the classic Seville panorama, and it hits at its most beautiful in the hour before sunset when the stone turns gold and the river holds the light. Find a table at one of the bars along Calle Betis, order a plate of jamón and a glass of the local Fino sherry, and watch the city across the water as the evening begins. You have walked from the world's largest Gothic cathedral to the birthplace of flamenco. You have crossed a river that carried Columbus's gold and Magellan's spices. This is Seville. No other city in Europe does theatre quite like this.