Seville Spain
In Seville, found a charming pension-the Hospedaje Monreal at Calle Rodrigo Caro, in Barria de Santa Cruz-about a block from the cathedral right in the middle of maze-like Barrio Santa Cruz with its hundreds of tapas bars on narrow windy streets. The room was three flights up-no lift.
In European hotels, btw, the first floor starts on the second floor-the first foor being, I guess, the zero floor. The room was huge (relatively) with sink and french doors opening out onto a small patio overlooking the street action below-which was ok until early morning when young giggling girls, the bread delivery man and the cathedral bells all went off at once producing a cacaphony of early morning wake-up. The WC was across the hall and the shower was next to that-an interesting little cubbyhole where it took some maneuvering to figure out where to put your old clothes and your new clothes and the towel relative to your body and the water! All this on top of the fact that once you closed the door to the shower there was no light bulb/electricity.
The next day, I fired the tour guide in Seville and walked off…having a wonderful afternoon by myself…wanted to have my own experiences. (He will undoubedtly have his own version of this story but I am writing it so I get to give you my version!)
The Alcazar and the Cathedral
But we did finally get together the next day for a self guided tour with a cassette tape through the Alcazar. I want to go into some detail because it provides a backdrop for the discovery of America and because of what is happening in the world today. Sevilla was one of the earliest Moorish conquests of the Christians in 712AD. In the eleventh century it was the most powerful of the independent states to emerge and became the capitol of the last real Moorish empire in Spain from 1170 to 1212, according to Lonely Planet guidebook. The Almohads rebuilt the Alcazar, enlarged the principal mosque as an observatory so venerated that they wanted to destroy it before the Christian conquest of the city. Instead, when the Christians kicked the Moors out, the Giralda became the bell tower of what is now the Christian Cathedral. Originally the mosque was reconsecrated as the cathedral but in 1402 the cathedral was rebuilt as a new monument to Christian glory: �a building on so magnificent a scale that posterity will believe we were mad� said Pedro the Cruel. The cathedral was completed in just over a century and is the largest Gothic church in the world by cubic capacity-even the side chapels are tall enough to contain an ordinary church (that showed the Moors didn�t it!)
The Alcazar itself, used as an enormous citadel forming the heart of the town�s fortifications, was rebuilt in the Christian period by Pedro the Cruel in 1350 employing workmen from Granada (where our son Josh lived for a summer when he was in the 7th grade and where you can see other grand Moorish
structures) and utilizing fragments of earlier Moorish buildings! That work forms the nucleus of the Alcazar today-a combination of Moorish and Christian architectural elements (called Mudajar) that takes your breath away when you consider the political tenor of the world today.
A later addition includes a wing in which early expeditions to the Americas were planned. Gives you goose bumps! Seeing all this brought to memory our visit several years to Istanbul where the Blue Mosque and Saint Sophia Mosque were originally cathedrals built by Constantine before the conquest of the Christians by the Muslim Turks-even the stained glass windows with Christian motifs are still in place!
Together these three buildings form a remarkable monumental complex in the heart of Seville. The cathedral and the Alcázar – dating from the Reconquest of 1248 to the 16th century and imbued with Moorish influences – are an exceptional testimony to the civilization of the Almohads as well as that of Christian Andalusia. The Giralda minaret is the masterpiece of Almohad architecture. It stands next to the cathedral with its five naves; the largest Gothic building in Europe, it houses the tomb of Christopher Columbus. The ancient Lonja, which became the Archivo de Indias, contains valuable documents from the archives of the colonies in the Americas. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Today in Spain you can take an about right from the Alcazar and see thousands of the best jambones (hams) in the world hanging defiantly from the ceilings of the meat shops up and down the streets.
We left the city just before the Santa Semana (Holy Week) festivities when the streets become full of thousands of revelers! This phenomenon happens all over Spain but nowhere like Sevilla. Later we saw news reports of concerns about �hippies� (per the Herald Tribune) taking drugs and causing trouble. These kids seem to just roam Europe from one festival to another…hippie wannabes.
Tags: Europe, Seville, Spain, UNESCO World Heritage Sites
Zoe
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