Triana, Seville's sailors' and potters' quarter: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Triana: sailors, potters, flamenco, the castle
Triana was traditionally a quarter of sailors and potters, with bullfighters and flamenco singers among its people. The walk follows those threads, from the sailors' chapel and the riverside street to the glazed spire of Santa Ana, the potters' street and the old kilns.
The stops
Completed in 1852, this iron arch bridge was the first solid bridge in Seville, joining the city centre to Triana across the Canal de Alfonso XIII, an arm of the Guadalquivir that makes Triana an almost-island. It replaced a pontoon bridge of boats that the Moors first built in the twelfth century and that repairs kept in use for seven centuries. Spanish Wikipedia calls it the oldest iron bridge still standing in Spain.
Photo: Alberto-g-rovi — CC BY 4.0 A tiny chapel stands at the Triana end of the bridge. Widening the bridge deck in 1918 destroyed the older chapel here, and the neighbours' devotion to the Virgen del Carmen led the city to commission this one from the architect Aníbal González in the 1920s. It is built of exposed brick and Triana ceramics, with the emblem of the Carmelite order on its tiled dome, and a small temple above the dome holds figures of Saints Justa and Rufina, known as potters.
Photo: Anual — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Altozano is the traditional heart of Triana: travellers from the villages to the west gathered here before crossing the old pontoon bridge to Seville, and the name is first recorded in 1533. Two monuments stand in the square, a statue of the bullfighter Juan Belmonte, who was closely linked to Triana, unveiled in 1972 and made by Venancio Blanco, and one to flamenco that was commissioned from Jesús Gavira Alba in 1994. Among the buildings around it is the Farmacia Murillo, built between 1912 and 1914.
Photo: Anual — CC BY-SA 4.0 This chapel is the home of the Hermandad de la Esperanza de Triana, whose Virgin is popularly known as the Queen of Triana. The brotherhood was founded in 1418 by members of the ceramists' guild in the church of Santa Ana, and in the sixteenth century its members included sailors and wealthy merchants in overseas trade. The chapel was finished in 1815, and over its door sits a terracotta Immaculate Conception made in 1962.
Photo: Frobles — CC BY-SA 4.0 This large baroque house was built in 1780 and was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in 1990. Some accounts say it housed the Universidad de Mareantes, the guild of ship owners, pilots and masters that was set up in 1556 and had its seat on this street, then called Calle Larga, from 1573. The historian Francisco Ollero has argued that neither the building nor the plot matches the present house, so that link is best taken with caution.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 Named in 1859 after Betis, the Roman name for the Guadalquivir, this street runs along the river and gives views across the water to the Giralda, the Torre del Oro and the bullring. A flood wall begun in 1787 gave it its present height above the river. The writer Prosper Mérimée places the home of Carmen, the gypsy cigarrera, on this street, and each July the Velá de Santiago y Santa Ana, which may date from the thirteenth century, fills the stretch near the Altozano with riverside stalls.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 Triana's people call this fortress-like Gothic church the cathedral of Triana. Tradition says Alfonso X founded it in 1266 to thank Saint Anne for curing an eye ailment, but the Spanish page on the church notes that the king was neither in Seville nor ill that year and dates the start of work to around 1279 or 1280. In floods, the neighbourhood's people took refuge here and in the castle, and the blue-and-white glazed spire on the tower was added from 1629.
Photo: Anual — CC BY 3.0 This baroque church belonged to a Dominican convent that moved here in 1651, taking over the hermitage and hospital of Our Lady of Candelaria. The church built in the 1600s collapsed on 30 May 1730, and its replacement was inaugurated on 29 January 1775. In 1810, during the French occupation, the convent was used as a stable, and the street that carries the saint's name was long the main road from Seville to the Aljarafe.
Photo: Anual — CC BY-SA 4.0 The name means pottery, and the Nuestra Señora de la O art ceramics factory stood on this street. Its owner, Manuel García-Montalván, supplied tilework for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition and made the Fuente de las Ranas in Seville's María Luisa Park. The street also keeps two of Triana's corrales, courtyard homes of neighbours: a nineteenth-century one at number 85 and another at numbers 8 and 10, built in 1913 and 1914.
Photo: Anual — CC BY 3.0 This church grew from a medieval hermitage and hospital of Saint Bridget of Ireland, where people began to contemplate the mystery of the Expectation of Our Lady, popularly known as the O. Work on the present church began in 1697, and it was inaugurated in February 1702. Inside, it is described as the first eighteenth-century church supported on columns, slender Tuscan ones in red jasper on black jasper bases.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 Triana's clay soils are why pottery, tiles and bricks became its main industry, and at the start of the twentieth century it had 24 factories making tiles and similar goods. This museum occupies the old Santa Ana pottery, whose roots go back to 1870, when the clay manufacturer Antonio Gómez bought kilns from García-Montalván for pottery production in Triana. Seven kilns stayed in use until the end of the twentieth century, and the restored kilns are part of the centre, which opened on 29 July 2014 for exhibitions and cultural workshops.
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo — CC BY-SA 4.0 In the twelfth century the Almohads chained their pontoon bridge to a fortress on this spot, then called the Castle of Gabir. In 1481 it was given to the new Inquisition as its headquarters and prison, and the Inquisition left in 1626. The Mercado de Triana was built on its site in 1823, and the ruins beneath it are now an interpretation centre, opened in 2009, on the castle and the religious repression of the Inquisition; the narrow Callejón de la Inquisición beside the market was part of the fortifications.
Photo: Gzzz — CC BY-SA 4.0
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