A Holiday Romance

I fell in love with Seville by degrees; building by building, parakeet by parakeet, squeak by squeak. Having arrived at the concrete coach park beneath Plaza de Armas in the early evening, tired and tetchy from a long day of travel, I’d be lying if I said it was love at first sight. This is occasionally the case—as it had been for me with the likes of Monaco, Geneva and Berlin—but more often than not there’s a certain amount of wooing that must take place first: a few sunsets, at the very least a cup of coffee. This is true of most cities I now adore, not least my beloved hometown of Dundee.

As usual I’d dropped my things at the hostel on arrival and set off for a quick reconnoitre, but much of that first evening was devoted to finding a towel and a padlock rather than searching for hidden gems. All I could find were Carrefour Expresses, which supplied me with toiletries and snacks but little else. In the end I returned to the hostel and rented both from reception—something a less sleepy me would have done to begin with. Exhaused, I skipped dinner and went straight to sleep. Seville would have to wait.

I awoke to blue skies and a Spanish sun, but even though my mood had improved my map-reading abilities hadn’t. My first port of call was the cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest Gothic church in the world. You might expect—as I did—that this would make for a pretty useful landmark. But rather than orienting me in the plaza the building’s dizzying dimensions had the exact opposite effect, while a vortex of screaming swifts served only to disorientate me further. I kept losing track of which side I was on and how many corners I’d turned. So I went in instead.

Given its scale, perhaps the most amazing thing about Seville Cathedral is that it still manages to feel bigger on the inside. I suspect this is partly due to the fact it’s split into so many sections while still accommodating vast open spaces. The Main Chapel feels like a church within a cathedral, while the various remnants of the original Almohad mosque almost double the complex’s footprint. These include the Giralda, a minaret-turned-belltower that’s ascended via ramp rather than staircase (ideal should you wish to ride your horse to the top) and an ablutions courtyard that’s now full of luscious orange trees.

Unfortunately I hadn’t brought my wide-angled lens with me, making it a struggle just to capture a coherent picture of the space—let alone comprehend it. Again, you’d imagine such a strikingly asymmetrical shape to be easily navigable, but every time I tried to map it in my mind I couldn’t make the sections fit together. Still, it was captivating. I especially loved the doors, from the detailed and dominating Door of Assumption to the plainer but no less imposing Door of Forgiveness, a horseshoe gate inherited from the old mosque. It wouldn’t be until much later in the trip that I’d happen across another door, across the square, which would lead to a staircase and then a terrace that would let me appreciate the cathedral in all its multifaceted, multifaith glory.

My next date was with the Real Alcázar, another sprawling complex with Islamic and Christian influences, only this time a royal palace that still serves as the king’s official residence in Seville. Incredibly colourful due to its elaborate tiling and bright paintwork—never more so than in the gilded Hall of Ambassadors—the Alcázar also houses tapestries, texts and artworks from around the world and throughout history. More recently, it doubled as the Water Gardens of Dorne in Game of Thrones, which should give you some sense of its opulence. None of this, however, compares with the walled gardens themselves.

I’d been aware of the monk parakeets building nests in parks and gardens across the city, their cries audible even over those of the swarming swifts, but the size of the trees in places such as Parque de María Luisa made it difficult to see them up close. This wasn’t the case in the orchards of Jardín del Marqués de la Vega-Inclán. All around, birds crashed into orange and lemon trees, chewing through twigs and stems in an unending search for building materials. The peacocks and peahens were even louder, though their displays didn’t seem quite as ostentatious as usual next to the ornamental outbuildings. I went for the morning but ended up staying for much of the afternoon.

However, Seville’s pièce de résistance—or pieza de resistencia given we’re in Spain—somehow tops both the cathedral and the palace. Plaza de España, sometimes nicknamed “the Venice of Seville” (already an improvement on the Italian version if you ask me), is a Moorish paradise that will keep you coming back for more. What helps distinguish it from Seville’s ticketed attractions is how lively it is, how vital, how free. Most horse-drawn tours terminate by the Vicente Traver fountain, daily flamenco performances reverberate throughout the ground-floor portico and would-be boaters paddle beneath the bridges over the crescent canal.

I couldn’t stay away; I visited multiple times each day, then again at night. Buskers would perform from the staircases, serenading those on the balconies above. Along the concave outer wall runs 48 colourful alcoves, each painted to represent a different Spanish province. Ceramic bookcases are installed beside each, some stacked with second-hand books for others to take away and read. On Sunday the complex is flooded with women in traditional dress—traje de flamenca—in costumes as elaborate as anything worn by Natalie Portman in her guise as Queen Amidala of Naboo, when Plaza de España stood in for Theed Palace.

However, it was by night that I loved Sevile most of all, and once the crowds dispersed and the performers retired I had the plaza practically to myself. Well, save for the taxi driver feeding stray cats from his car on Avenida de Isabel la Catolica. I walked the city’s squeaky streets for hours every night. Squeaky clean, sure—if it weren’t for the rotting oranges and horse manure everywhere Seville the cleanest city I’ve ever visited, with armies of street sweepers deployed every night—but also squeaky sounding. I’d arrived just after Semana Santa (or Holy Week) and the processions had left the cobblestones coated in wax. For once it wasn’t my Converse that were the cause.

Before I knew it my love for the architecture and the wildlife and the culture had grown to consume the rest of the city, too. I had my first-ever Michelin-starred meal at Ovejas Negras, whiled away an evening listening to the Hang being played in the shadow of the cathedral and watched a traffic-jamming horse-drawn procession past the bullring and over Triana Bridge. I even started to find my way around, venturing further afield to the aquarium, the train station and The Mushrooms—the largest wooden structure on Earth. Seville certainly didn’t do things by halves, and I was all in.