Seville, port of the Indies: Torre del Oro to Santa Cruz: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
River port of the Indies: Cathedral, Alcázar, Santa Cruz
The Guadalquivir made Seville the gateway to the Indies, and its shipyard, the merchants' exchange that became the archive, and the cathedral all stand within a short walk of each other, with the painter Murillo turning up again and again.
The stops
The Almohad governor of Seville ordered this twelve-sided tower built in 1220 to control access up the Guadalquivir, and it was one of two anchor points for a large chain that could close the river. Its name, Tower of Gold, comes from the golden shine its walls of mortar, lime and pressed hay gave off on the water. When a proposal came after the 1755 earthquake to pull it down and widen the road, the people of Seville appealed to the king, who intervened.
Photo: JaimePF55 — CC0 This baroque charity hospital still cares for the aged and infirm, and its church was inaugurated in 1674. Between 1666 and 1672 Murillo painted eight pictures for Seville's Brotherhood of Charity, which he belonged to. Four are still in Seville; the other four were looted by Marshal Soult in 1810 and now hang in Washington, London, Ottawa and Saint Petersburg.
Photo: Anual — CC BY 3.0 Castile's kings built these shipyards after taking Seville in 1248: seventeen brick naves stood at right angles to the river, one of the largest industrial sites of late medieval Europe, and seven still stand. In 1503 the southernmost nave was named home of the new Casa de Contratación, the office that ran trade with the Indies, though that same year it moved to the Alcázar. Later the naves held sugar, cinnamon and noble woods from the Indies, and mercury shipped from Almadén to help extract silver in the American mines.
Photo: Anual — CC BY-SA 4.0 Until Philip II commissioned this building from Juan de Herrera in 1572, Seville's merchants did their business in the cool recesses of the cathedral. The Lonja, as the merchants' exchange was called, was not finished until 1646, and from 1660 to 1674 Murillo ran a painting academy in one of its rooms. Charles III made it the archive of the Indies in 1785, and it now holds some 80 million pages on the Spanish empire in the Americas and Asia.
Photo: Anual — CC BY 3.0 This square sits at the centre of the three World Heritage buildings: the Archive of the Indies, the Alcázar and the cathedral. It takes its name from a baroque shrine built in 1757 to commemorate the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. The monument to the Immaculate Conception, inaugurated in 1918, has four statues at its base of great 17th-century Sevillians: Murillo, Miguel Cid, Juan Martínez Montañés and Juan de Pineda.
Photo: Holger Uwe Schmitt — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Alcázar is a royal palace that the Spanish royal family still uses when it visits Seville. Much of it was rebuilt by Pedro I in the 1360s in an ornate Mudéjar style, and a Latin inscription on the palace façade includes the year 1364. In 1503 the Casa de Contratación set up its rooms here, and merchants made contracts in them during the boom in trade between Seville and Spanish America and the Philippines.
Photo: لا روسا — CC BY-SA 3.0 The Giralda was built as the minaret of Seville's great Almohad mosque, finished on 10 March 1198 and made to resemble the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh. After the Christian conquest it became the cathedral's bell tower, and the Renaissance belfry was added later. The bronze weather vane on top since 1568, a four-metre figure of a woman carrying a flagpole, is the Giraldillo, which gave the tower its name.
Photo: Alberto-g-rovi — CC BY 4.0 City leaders decided in July 1401 to replace the old mosque with a new cathedral, and work began in 1402 and ran for more than a century. When it was finished in the early 16th century it took over from Hagia Sophia as the largest cathedral in the world, a title the Byzantine church had held for a thousand years. Christopher Columbus and his son Diego are buried inside, and the orange-tree courtyard beside it, the Patio de los Naranjos, was the mosque's courtyard for ritual washing.
Photo: Alberto-g-rovi — CC BY 4.0 Since 1893 this street has carried the name of Francisco Mateos Gago, a Seville priest and professor who was a canon of the cathedral and founded the city's Academy of Archaeological Studies. It is the way into the Santa Cruz quarter from the cathedral, widened in the 1920s for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition, and from it you get a fine view of the Giralda. At number 21 a plaque marks the birthplace of the historian Santiago Montoto de Sedas.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo lived in this house on Calle Santa Teresa in his last years; he was born in 1617 and died in 1682. A house museum set out to recreate a 17th-century home opened here in 1982, the tricentenary of his death. His paintings run through this walk, from the Hospital de la Caridad near its start to the Hospital de los Venerables where it ends.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 Murillo was buried in 1682 in the Santa Cruz church that stood on this spot, and when the French authorities ordered it demolished in 1810 the square was opened up in its place. A plaque put up by the Academy of Fine Arts in 1858 still records that he was buried here. The wrought-iron cross at the centre, made by Sebastián Conde in 1692, stood on Calle Sierpes until 1840 and was set up here in 1921; it is considered a masterpiece of 17th-century Seville ironwork.
Photo: Felicia, Yu-Jyun Fan — CC BY-SA 4.0 These gardens carry Murillo's name because José Laguillo, the director of the newspaper El Liberal, proposed it in honour of the painter. King Alfonso XIII gave the land to the city in the early 20th century, and in 1911 stretches of old wall and an orchard wall were pulled down to make a green link between the Santa Cruz quarter and the old ring road. The architect Juan Talavera y Heredia dressed the paths with Roman and Visigothic capitals from the city's archaeological collection, though almost all of them have since been stolen.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 This narrow lane keeps to the foot of the old wall beside the Alcázar gardens. Seville's official tourism site says it was used to carry water from the Caños de Carmona to the Reales Alcázares, which is where the name comes from. It runs from the Plaza de Alfaro to Calle Vida.
Photo: Anual — CC BY-SA 4.0 This lane was once called the Street of Death, after a Seville legend. Susona, the beautiful daughter of the converso Diego Susón, is said to have told her Christian lover about a conspiracy her father led, and the plotters were arrested and condemned. Overcome by guilt, the story goes, she asked for her skull to be shown over her door to remind people of her betrayal, and tiles at number 10 now recall the tale.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 Canon Justino de Neve founded this baroque hospital in 1675 as a home for elderly and poor priests, and the architect Leonardo de Figueroa finished it in 1697. Murillo, a friend of Neve, painted one of his most famous works for it, the Immaculate Conception known as the Inmaculada de Soult, which now hangs in the Prado. Today the building houses the Velázquez Center, and the square outside has carried the priests' name since 1868.
Photo: Anual — CC BY 3.0
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