If one can claim to know a city by the sheer number of steps one has taken along its streets, then I am well on my way with Sevilla. As has become my habit, I ambulated quite a bit, first on my own and then on a delightful walking tour with a smart, witty woman named Concepción.
Puenta de la Barqueta looking north along Calle Rey Juan Carlos
Painted garage door - I saw many like this!
An evening street view in Sevilla
La Giralda - atop El Catedral de Sevilla. Per Concepción (and my own eyes), it is one of the highest objects in Sevilla and a good landmark
I learned from her that Sevilla dates to the 800s BC and the Phoenicians. Sevillans prefer, however, to say that Hercules founded the city (I have to say I find that origin story pretty compelling, too).
Sevilla was once Spain’s main port, and as such the most important and wealthy city in the country. Monarchs and even an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire lived here. Christopher Columbus sailed on his fateful voyage from this place, and there is even an archive with millions upon millions of documents recording this and many other sea voyages.
On the advice of the patron saint of traveling, Rick Steves, I booked time with Concepción for a tour of the Alcázar as well. A good decision, if I daresay. It has become something of a ritual but I was once more awed by the architecture on display in Spain. In El Alcázar, the areas of Moorish design touched me especially - geometric tilework of painstaking intricacy and hand-carving that made my fingers cramp just to gaze upon.
Detail from an arch in El Alcázar
I could not get enough of the arches in El Alcázar
The subtext of the palace impressed me yet more strongly: material evidence of cultures hand-in-hand, or foot-on-neck, or foot thrust off of neck. Pastiche construction reveals story upon story through time and blood, both good and bad, human brothers and sisters figuring out how to occupy space together (or not).
One of my favorite highlights of El Alcázar is a recently-unearthed sunken garden. Less than 20 years ago, archaeologists were conducting a modest dig in one of an ongoing series of efforts to find the structure’s oldest foundations. Quickly and quite by surprise, they found what appeared to be an arch just a few feet below a marble floor.
After obtaining Unesco’s permission they expanded the dig, unearthing a never-completed, two-storey garden that filled the entire room.
Imagine: for hundreds of years, thousands of feet trod upon a darkened garden, doubly-darkened by the fact that it never entirely emerged from the imaginations of its designers. An extension of an aqueduct (which was never built) would have filled a pool. This pool, in turn, would have passed water downward into a partially-dug lower level, irrigating fruit trees (never planted) that were to grow up from 10 or 20 feet below. It would have been a new luxury for the rulers living in El Alcázar: strolling the upper level, casually plucking sweet fruit hanging within arm’s reach.
For reasons as lost to time as the garden itself once was, work was halted. Did this coincide with a shift in power or fortune? First the idea was laid to rest, then its evidence was entombed until this century, in which we can wonder anew at the permanent mystery of this unrealized ambition.
Interior shot of El Catedral de Sevilla
Illuminated manuscript, preserved in La Iglesia el Divino Salvador
And here, from 5/26, just a few hours before I left for Córdoba, are some pictures of the soul-stilling Romana-Museo-Antiquarium. It seems construction hardly begins in Spain before someone discovers another historical treasure! This time, on the site of a new plaza that was being built (the Metropol Parasol) most of an ancient Roman town was discovered. It has been preserved beneath the M.P.
(I am pretty sure the bed/altar is a recreation)
I love archaeology
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