Seville, Spain

We arrived in Malaga airport around noon on Friday, hopped in the car, and were within seconds lost. They didn’t provide us a map, but thanks to the time out Seville guide, it provided a vague, but detailed enough map to get us on our way to Seville, via Ronda. We made it to Ronda pretty unscathed, driving through the Sierra Nevada national park, passing amazing olive trees, mountains, and vistas. Ronda was a nice stop, a picturesque Peubles Blanos (white village) situated on either side of a 400+ foot gourge….really beautiful. Following Ronda, it was back to the poorly labelled roads, so we didn’t quite find the second town we wanted to see on the way. No bother though, Seville was awaiting. From the second we arrived in Seville, we were hooked. Amazing architechure, beautiful weather (hot but dry…okay, a little too hot), amazing food and night life. After the strolling around Plaza Espana and having our first tapas order written in chalk on the bar in front of us at Los Columns, we were home!

After our first tapas bar, it was on to the next, then the next, and then another. We did our first night of tapas crawling in the Barrio Santa Cruz, where we stayed at Puerto de Seville Hotel, which is very affordable and highly recommended. We were out pretty late that night, nothing a greasy churro didn’t solve the next morning, before making our way to the Real Alcazar, a beautiful depiction of Moorish architecture built in the 13th century, and formally home to Ferdinand and Isabella after the Spanish Requisition. The building itself was absolutely amazing, better than most Moorish architecture in Marrakech even.

After the Real Alcazar, we had a bite for lunch and then wandered towards the river and toured the plaza del toros, a gorgeous bull fighting ring. We unfortunately didn’t see a fight, but the arena was beautiful with striking colors. We picked up a cool poster that will hopefully go up in our house in the Minny when we move back.

After the Toros, we went to the Seville Cathedral, which was built around a former mosque tower (which the Spanish put a peak on the standard Arabic flat-topped tower (see our Marrakech post for an example). The church was great and also had remains of Chirstopher Columbus, proved by DNA tests in 1996. The church was absolutely massive, the ceilings were super high throughout the church and there were countless separate rooms and chapels. The church is said to be more volumous than St. Peter’s (I think we’ll have to go back to Rome and see for ourselves).

We went to the Centro area of the town that night and went to a couple more great tapas places (one was a gastronomic delight called Bar Europa, the other called Los Bodegas was packed with locals and lots of fun). Seville treated us very very well, it’d be worth a trip from the states to visit. The next morning it was off to Granada!