10 Days in Sevilla:
Andalucía Without Rush

The traveller came into Seville by bus, arriving at the Estación de Autobuses del Prado at the eighteenth hour of the twenty-sixth day of September — having crossed the Strait of Gibraltar by ferry that morning, traversed the white fields of Andalucia by coach, and arrived in the city with enough of the day still remaining to walk without purpose for an hour. The hotel stood in a street behind San Lorenzo. The suitcase was dropped. The windows opened onto warm air and the sound of pigeons.

The first errand was a small pilgrimage of sorts: the Real Betis Tienda Oficial, to pay respects to the green and white. The traveller is not given to great sentimentality about football, but there is something satisfying about walking into a club shop in a city you have just arrived in, as though the act of acknowledging the local religion earns you some measure of welcome. Seville has two religions. One involves crosses. The other, two football clubs whose rivalry defines the city more thoroughly than any guidebook will admit.

Dinner was at Eneko Basque, on the Plaza de la Magdalena — a Basque kitchen in an Andalusian city, which is not as strange as it sounds. Spain's north and south have always traded more than geography admits. The opening meal was modest: a settling-in, not a declaration. But the food was honest, the plaza was beautiful in the early dark, and the traveller went to bed with the particular quiet satisfaction of someone who has, at last, arrived somewhere worth arriving at.

The second day was given over to the unexpected. Isla Mágica — the theme park built on the grounds of the 1992 World's Fair on the Isla de la Cartuja — is not a place that appears in the great travel chronicles. It is exactly the sort of detour that a certain kind of traveller finds embarrassing to admit. The traveller admits it without embarrassment. It is enormous fun, historically peculiar in its framing (a sixteenth-century Spanish colonial adventure, told through roller coasters and a Mayan water park), and the kind of afternoon that reminds you that travel does not require constant cultural solemnity. El Sella for dinner afterward — somewhere in the eastern quarter — restored the necessary gravity.

The third day opened the first of Seville's great ceremonial circuits. The Convento de San José del Carmen, known as Las Teresas in the Barrio de Santa Cruz, came first — a small, quiet opening, the kind of place that sets the register for everything that follows. Then through the Museum of Illusions, a concession to modernity that the traveller endured with good humour, and on to lunch at Tradevo before crossing the river to CaixaForum Sevilla.

But it was the afternoon that earned the day its place in the chronicle. Plaza de España — that astonishing semi-circular monument to Ibero-American ambition, built for the 1929 World's Fair, tiled in the coat-of-arms of all forty-eight Spanish provinces, surrounded by canal, crossed by four bridges, flanked by baroque towers — hit the traveller with the full force of a place that photographs cannot prepare you for. One stands in the centre of the curve and something happens that is difficult to name. The city reveals itself as capable of grandeur. Not vague grandeur. Specific, tiled, mathematically-arranged grandeur, with fountains, and a channel of green water, and the late afternoon light coming in at an angle that turns the terracotta warm as amber.

Parque María Luisa came immediately after — the great park that lies behind the Plaza, full of Moorish fountains and exotic trees and the white pigeons of Plaza de América, allegedly descended from a Philippine delegation's gift to the 1929 Expo. The traveller stood among them for some minutes. Then dinner at Lalola, and the walk home through streets that were already beginning to feel familiar.

The fourth day was the day the traveller understood Seville's deepest quality. It began early, with the Real Fábrica de Tabacos — the eighteenth-century tobacco factory that now forms part of the University of Seville, its baroque doorway decorated with reliefs depicting the discovery of tobacco in the Americas, its courtyards still carrying the echo of a thousand women at work turning Virginia leaf into snuff and cigars. Then a ten-minute walk to the Real Alcázar.

There are palaces that overwhelm you immediately and there are palaces that accumulate. The Alcázar belongs to the second category. The traveller had booked a skip-the-line guided entry and was inside by half past ten, before the worst of the crowds arrived. What follows is almost impossible to describe in a way that does not sound like mere inventory: the Patio de las Doncellas with its reflecting pool and horseshoe arches; the gilded dome of the Salón de Embajadores; the gardens stretching away in a green surprise beyond the palace walls, full of orange trees and peacocks. This is a palace that has been continuously inhabited since the Moors built it in the twelfth century. The Christian kings who inherited it chose to preserve and extend what the Moors had created. That decision explains almost everything about southern Spain.

The afternoon crossed the river into Triana, which the traveller had been advised to take seriously. Triana earns that seriousness. The ceramics quarter, the market, Calle Betis running along the waterfront — this is a neighbourhood that knows it is not the main city and is quietly proud of the distinction. The Mercado de Triana at the afternoon's end. Then back across the Puente de Isabel II into the old city for dinner at Eslava, a restaurant on the street of the same name that the traveller had been told not to miss by three separate people.

They were right. Eslava is the kind of restaurant Seville is quietly full of: serious about its ingredients, not serious about its atmosphere, and producing food that is simply better than it needs to be. The slow-cooked egg, the oxtail croquette, the glass of fino that arrived without being asked for — each one a small victory.

The fifth day of the wandering departed from Sevilla-Santa Justa at the seventh hour on the fastest of the iron serpents — forty-five minutes to Córdoba on the high-speed rail, arriving at a city that was once the most populous in Europe, the seat of the Caliphate, the place where Islamic civilisation in the west reached its highest and most brilliant expression. The traveller spent eight hours there and returned the same evening. This is not the only way to see Córdoba, but it is a worthy way.

The Mezquita-Catedral is unlike any other building the traveller has encountered. It begins as a forest: eight hundred columns of jasper and marble standing in a vast hall, their red and white striped double arches stretching away in every direction, so that the eye cannot find a wall and the mind cannot find a scale. Into the centre of this forest, in the sixteenth century, the Christian authorities inserted a complete Gothic cathedral — a decision their contemporaries criticised as an act of desecration, and which the Emperor Charles V, who authorised it, later regretted himself. The resulting combination is not beautiful in any ordinary sense. It is something stranger than beautiful. It is the whole history of Andalucía made architectural.

The Jewish Quarter and the Synagogue — the only surviving medieval synagogue in Andalucía, built in Mudejar style in 1315 — occupied the late morning. The afternoon was given to heat and lunch and the long walk across the Puente Romano, which spans the Guadalquivir at a point where the river feels very wide and the city feels very old. The return train departed at 20:25. The traveller was back in Seville, at a table near the Alameda de Hércules, by nine o'clock.

The seventh day was the day the traveller understood that Seville does not reveal itself in a single pass. Casa de Pilatos — the sixteenth-century palace on the Plaza de Pilatos — is one of the buildings that Seville keeps slightly hidden. Not geographically hidden: it is a short walk from the Cathedral. But it requires intention. Tourists who follow the standard circuit miss it. The traveller did not miss it.

The palace was commissioned by the first Marquis of Tarifa, who had spent time in the Holy Land and Italy and returned determined to build something that synthesised what he had seen. The result is a prototype of Andalusian domestic architecture — Mudejar honeycomb ceilings meeting Italian renaissance courtyards meeting Roman sculpture in the gardens. Every room is named after a station of the Via Dolorosa. The whole building is a kind of devotional journey, translated into tile and plasterwork and shade.

Before lunch, a detour to Yemas de San Leandro — the convent on the Plaza de Pilatos itself, where nuns sell egg yolk sweets through a revolving wooden hatch, as they have done for centuries. The traveller bought a box. They were very good. Then lunch at La Huerta 9, then the long afternoon arc through the Hospital de las Cinco Llagas, the Expo 92 Grounds, a sequence of smaller churches west of the city, and the return to the old centre for dinner at Abacería del Postigo and a late drink at El Garlochi — the most singular bar in Seville, decorated entirely in the imagery of the Semana Santa brotherhood, smelling of incense, and serving cocktails with names that are either blasphemous or devout depending on your temperament.

There are days in Seville that are given over to the church. The eighth day was one of them, in its own way: beginning at the Basílica de la Macarena, home to the Virgen de la Esperanza — the weeping Madonna with painted teardrops, patron of matadors, carried through the streets on Good Friday by a brotherhood that has existed for four centuries. The traveller stood before her and tried to understand the quality of the devotion the statue inspires, which is intense and specific and not quite like anything in northern religious experience.

Then the Convento de Santa Paula, where an active Carmelite community receives visitors into its Gothic-Renaissance-Mudejar complex and sells marmalade and pastries made by the nuns. Then Palacio de las Dueñas, the aristocratic palace associated with the poet Antonio Machado, who was born there. Lunch at Taberna la Auténtica Regina — three minutes' walk away, noisy, perfect. Then the Condesa de Lebrija, which is not famous enough: a sixteenth-century palace whose floors are covered in Roman mosaics removed from the ruins at Itálica, whose staircase has a honeycomb ceiling rescued from a medieval palace, and whose family rooms upstairs still feel inhabited, as though the Countess simply stepped out.

The evening was the one the traveller had been planning since before the trip began. First the Museo del Baile Flamenco for the afternoon show — flamenco performed in the central patio of an eighteenth-century building constructed over the foundations of a Roman temple. Then a rest. Then, at the nineteenth hour, flamenco again, at a proper tablao. The art form requires witnessing, not merely hearing about. The traveller witnessed it. Late dinner at Balbuena y Huertas in Triana, the kind of meal that feels like a reward.

The sixth day of the wandering departed at the seventh hour from Sevilla-Santa Justa. Granada is three and a half hours by rail — longer than Córdoba, more demanding as a day trip, absolutely worth it. The traveller had booked a guided Alhambra entry weeks in advance: there is no other responsible way to approach the matter. The Alhambra's Nasrid Palaces sell out months ahead. Arriving in Granada without pre-booked entry is simply arriving to look at the outside of a wall.

The Alhambra sits above the city on a long red hill between the plain of Granada and the first ridges of the Sierra Nevada. The traveller had been before, on a separate journey, and had understood it differently then — more overwhelmed, less able to receive it. On this visit, with a good guide and a more settled eye, the place gave up more of what it actually is: not primarily a palace, but a city. An entire enclosed Nasrid city, with the Alcazaba fortress at its western end, the extraordinary Palacios Nazaríes in the centre, and the Generalife summer palaces and their gardens at the east. The water everywhere — fountains, channels, reflecting pools — is not decorative. It is an engineering achievement and a philosophical statement simultaneously. The Nasrid rulers understood that the control of water in a dry land was the most eloquent expression of power available to them.

The afternoon was given to the Albaicín — the old Moorish quarter on the hill facing the Alhambra across the valley — and a stop at the Mirador de San Nicolás for the view that every travel writer is obligated to mention and that deserves every mention it gets. The return train left at 18:55. The traveller arrived back in Seville at 19:25 and ate at El Disparate on the Alameda de Hércules. It was a long day. It was entirely worth it.

The ninth day was the day Seville assembled itself into its fullest declaration. The Museo de Bellas Artes opened the morning — housed in a former convent, its collection drawn largely from ecclesiastical properties seized during the nineteenth-century religious suppressions, its Murillos and Zurbaráns hanging in rooms that still feel like they belong to a religious order. Then Plaza Nueva. Then lunch at Baratillo, beside the river near the bullring, where the traveller ate well and unhurriedly.

The afternoon was the great arc of monuments. The Real Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza — one of the oldest and most important bullrings in Spain, baroque façade, fourteen thousand seats, a museum that traces the history of the corrida from the eighteenth century and includes a Goya. The Torre del Oro beside the river, built in 1221 by the Almohad dynasty as a military watchtower and later, improbably, a prison, a warehouse, and a maritime museum. The Archivo de Indias, which deserves more time than it usually gets: a Renaissance building housing eighty million original pages of Spanish colonial history — the journals of the conquistadors, Columbus's letters, Cervantes's own hand on the page, all kept on eight kilometres of shelving behind glass. The Cathedral and Giralda at the sixteenth hour, because one must climb the tower, and the view from the top of the old minaret across the red city is one of the available confirmations of the traveller's faith in travel.

Then Barrio de Santa Cruz — the former Jewish quarter, narrow and shaded and full of orange trees and bars — before the walk north to the Metropol Parasol, the immense wooden mushroom structure in the Plaza de la Encarnación that the city fought over for a decade and which now, ten years after completion, has become simply part of the city's vocabulary. The view from the top at dusk is excellent. Then dinner at El Pimiento, and the knowledge that one more day remained.