Juderia, horse and cart ride through Sevilla, Catedral de Sevilla, and Real Alcazar

Ian was first up today; I lagged by about a quarter of an hour. By 8:30am, both of us were seated in the lobby restaurant, Ian with water absorbed into Fiber One and I with queso Manchego slices and a cup of té de poleo menta.

Day 5
7:00am Breakfast
9:00am Depart on coach for morning sightseeing in the harder-to-reach parts of Sevilla.

Grey morning clouds concealed the atmosphere’s typical Sevillian-blue, so named as a result of the influence that the region’s skies have exerted on many artists’ palettes. Our bus followed a bridge across Rio Guadalquivir and entered Isla Magica, the Island of Dreamers. Distinctive structures only slightly recalled the excitement of the 1992 Olympic events held in this capital of Andalucía. Time had given newer purposes to the buildings, and now they all held high-tech enterprises or were under renovation and slated to reopen as museums, science centers, and the like.

Puente del Alamillo brought us back across Rio Guadalquivir, and some tour members stepped outside to appreciate the design of this bridge created by an architect whose bridgework also appears in other notable locations (but not notable enough for me to remember those locations).

Why so many San Fernando statues in the city? Sevilla honors Fernando III as its patron due to his patronizing its cultural, religious, and education institutions and to his capturing it back from the Moors in 1248. Maybe a little conquering goes a long way; Pope Clement X canonized Fernando in 1671. Before and during Fernando III reign, Sevilla was a city of prominence. It was a capital, along with Marrakech, under the Muslim sultanate during its hold on southern Spain in the twelfth century. Earlier, Sevilla was the second city of the Roman Empire, next capital in line after Rome. Later, in 1503, Queen Isabella granted Sevilla harbor exclusive trading rights to the New World, making it the richest city in Spain.

Entering Macarena—with relation to the song, whose artists hail from Sevilla and sang about a woman who held this common local name—we passed a large statue of her, “La Esperanza de la Macarena” often referred to as Our Lady of Hope. In 1785, an earthquake shook the ground from Lisbon to Seville, devastating the lands (including the mountaintop village where we met Juan “the little, old olive oil maker”) right up to the outer limits of Seville, leaving intact the harbor city, which commemorated its salvation by rejoicing in the city’s “hope.”

Eight kilometers of wall, Las Murallas, surround the area; this perimeter was first constructed by Julius Caesar during his governance then destroyed by the Moors to be replaced with a stronger, taller wall; sightseers could see preserved portions of the original.

10:00am Group photo followed by walking tour to visit the world-famous Giralda Cathedral and picturesque streets of the former Jewish quarter of Santa Cruz.

At Plaza de América, we disembarked the bus, stepped into Glorieta de los Palomas, and avoided pigeons in Parque de María Luisa. Surrounded by Museo Arqueológico and Pabellón Real, we posed for a group picture, backdropped by Pabellón Mudejar, Museo de Artes y Costumbres Populares (the building’s claim to fame was its appearance in Lawrence of Arabia as the British military headquarters in Cairo) and efficiently shot by a local high-society photographer.

Tauck group photograph lineup…
Back Row: Tour Director Karen Whitcomb, Ron Kaliebe, Harvey Chasen, Ian Ippolito, Raul Cardoso, Lou Kahn, Rosalva Zuniga, Kenneth Deutsch, Mark Gilbert, Karen Gilbert, Joe Giordano, David Aronson, Steve Keegan, Walter Garrett, Carlos Socarras, Arnold Kimmel, Roslyn Kimmel, Sally Garrett
Front Row: Student Director Annie Schley, Tom Finn, Marielena Finn, Carol Kaliebe, Marsha Chasen, Dawn Ippolito, Barbara Smyth, Ila Deutsch, Martha Aronson, Harriet Schultz, June Schultz, Isabel Socarras, Susan Lesser, Richard Lesser

Tour-guide Karen delivered a surprise horse-drawn ride through Plaza de España, past Casino de la Exposición Teatro Lope de Vega (which never actually operated as a casino), to the Plaza del Triunfo. Ian, Martha, David, and I shared a buggy while Annie sat shotgun and translated for us the driver’s tour descriptions. Like Fred Astaire and Cyd Chasrisse’s Central Park ride, our time in the open carriage was charming and relaxing until the unexpected merge into high-speed automobile traffic on Avenida de Isabella Catolica and San Fernando, turning the milieu into something of a Ben Hur chariot race.

Back on the pavement and avoiding gypsies bearing “gift” rosemary branches, we joined up with city tour guides America and Manuel, who highlighted some of the sights from where we stood: Real Alcazar (Arabic for “palace” or “fortified”), the oldest Royal Palace still in use and a demonstration of Christian-Islamic design fusion; Archivo de Indias (West Indies Archives) building; and Catedral de Sevilla, the world’s third largest.

We separated into two groups and followed the correct raised umbrella through the Juderia (old Jewish Quarter), known for high-quality ceramics and inspiring the stories of The Barber of Seville, Figaro, and Don Juan:

• Le Barbier de Séville in 1773 and Le Mariage de Figaro or La Folle Journée in 1778, stage comedies by French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais;
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1786 Italian opera buffa (comic opera) Le nozze di Figaro ossia la folle giornata (The Marriage of Figaro or the Crazy Day), a collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte;
• Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Playboy of Seville and Guest of Stone) by Tirso de Molina in the 1600s then
• Don Giovanni in the dramma giocoso (playful drama) by Mozart and da Ponte in 1787; and
• …many other adaptations.

We passed a former hospital for retired clergy Hospital de los Venerables and a street called Aqua against a Roman wall separating the Juderia from the aqueduct that, at the time, supplied water to Real Alcazar. The streets wound and curved and squeezed and often guided us right back to where we’d been.

Upon arriving where we had begun the walk, we entered a group queue in Plaza Virgen de los Reyes to enter Catedral de Sevilla, its striking minaret-turned-bell-tower looming above us. The tower, visible throughout this section of town and beyond, displayed archetypical Mudéjar design in three distinct sections: the lower portion consisted of the only preservation of the Mosque that originally occupied this location (King Ferdinand III the Catholic converted it to a church in 1248, the year of his re-conquest), the upper portion was a Catholic addition during Renaissance times, and it was topped with a spinning wind vane.

Inside the Cathedral, its grandiosity exemplified what an early presiding priest of the diocese once effused to his congregation, paraphrased “Let’s build a temple so big that the people who see it will think we’re crazy.” It contained the usual Main Chapel for seating royalty, pew section for nobility, enclosed Choir for clergy, and Popular Chapel for the commoners. The organ was, claro que si, monstrously tall and shiny, requiring 40 operators in its original years but only one in the contemporary. Unusual was the cathedral’s additional fifth nave, or aisle. Contestable was its claim to housing, along with those of the explorer’s son Diego, the remains of Christóbal Colón.

Un cuento del bandito: Face-on, one discerns large stitch scars above the head of the kneeling titular saint in Vision de San Antonio, a large painting hanging in the baptism room of Catedral de Sevilla. Nearly thwarted by the painting’s size, resourceful (or perhaps desperate) burglars cut out and hawked the portion of the painting containing Saint Anthony; it was later recovered in New York and returned to the Cathedral.

Afternoon is at your leisure.

Ian was… and I mean: hungry. We hid out from the rain under a covered sidewalk and ordered plates of Manchego cheese (quickly becoming a favored dish of Ian’s), olives, and prawn omelette. Thence, we parted ways, each with a city map in hand and plans to meet for la cena 7pm. Ian headed off to siesta while I to explore Alcazar, the Moorish fortress with extensive gardens redesigned in the Gothic palace-like fashion and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

My 7 € ticket read, “Ayuntamiento de Sevilla / Patronato del Real Alcazar / Patio de Banderas, s/n – 41004 Sevilla”. Though I thoroughly enjoyed practicing my Castilian while inquiring my way through town and making purchases (y créame, necesité la práctica, as you can read), English-language audio guides were an oasis of tourism communication.

The tour begins in the Patio (Courtyard) del León…
Two afternoon bells signal the hours beneath the hoots of daylight owls. Occasional breeze carry gentle pigeon coos to float among the tall, living wood and tap off the enclosing stone fortifications. With concordant uniqueness, a disparate bird caw calls attention away from muted ambulance sirens outside the walls—an-other world of bustle and bluster, only meters away but seemingly unable to pervade the peaceable surrounds. Citrus scent diffuses outward from fruit-laden stems—too gently to tremble your sense, less than a tingle. Flap, drift: both bird-wing and wind make this motion such that I imagine wing invents wind when I hear, when I feel both’s vibrations swiffing through my hair and Doppler-ing my ears. Those birds—they ascend air columns behind fair-shaped [square-shaped] shrubs and sail toward wall stone, settling inside nooks or at palm trees, alighting upon pointed bark.
Then I enter the palace.

Mudéjar, Muslim-Christian-Jewish design symbiosis, dominated La Alcazar: for example, the Islamic architectural theme of water (reflecting pond, fountains, and flowing canals on the floor) and a Christian chapel and paintings of saints. Near the palace front, the dominating view in Patio de Montería (Hunting Courtyard) is the central palace wall with peak carved by Christian carpenters from Toledo, Arabic “None but Allah conquers” inscribed in Grenada style on the center, Gothic framing around the door, and a caption stating that Peter ordered its construction in 1492.

By 3:30pm, I had visited each palace room and concluded my stroll through the extensive gardens. For the nest two hours, I wandered—got lost, actually… literally—in the streets of Sevilla’s residential, commercial, and tourist districts. The Old Town was especially directionally bewildering to me, so I headed for the more easily navigable Paseos de Las Delicias y de Christóbal Colón along Rio Guadalquivir. When I arrived at the hotel, Ian was out—gallivanting, I have no doubt—so I picked up the clunky, metal key from the concierge, caught up on the goings-on of tourmates who were tooling around lobby, rode the elevator to my floor, pulled on the strangely-placed mid-door handle, jumped onto my bed, and broke out the computer for some R & R and journaling time while snacking on a 64% cacao bar (the one from Barcelona’s Museu de la Xocolata, the one I was to see to).

At 7pm, Ian found me in the room with an empty chocolate wrapper and a fair amount of lethargy. Ian joined Harvey, Marsha, Kenny, and Ila for dinner at an Italian restaurant within walking distance. Bizarrely, walking distance to the restaurant (during which travels the rain returned) was markedly shorter than the return, considering the circuitous course Ian ended up making. Meanwhile, back at the hotel… I dined on Luna and protein bars, a packet of fiber cookies from an earlier morning’s breakfast buffet, and warm fruit tea while journaling. Together again around 10:30pm, we wrapped our wares (clocks and olive oil bottles) in plastic leak protection and clothes padding, zipped our bags, and settled in for the night. Ian finshed pre-midnight and I after showering, when “:28” displayed on the television’s clock LEDs.