Seville - walking tour

I won't bore you with yesterdays frustrations of campsite mud (after rain) and hours spent booking the Alcazar and Cathedral tour for Monday!

But today we're off to Seville old town centre, ready to undertake the first of our tours - a “Monumental Seville Highlights walking tour”.
First off is to find the bus stop, which proves easy because a French couple walk out of the campground ahead of us going there as well and they have done this before. After chatting about the darkening sky (and no we didn’t bring our rain jackets, nor umbrellas today) we board the bus. Alas we are 2 minutes up the road and it’s raining quite heavily. The weather reports suggested cloudy but fine all day, 0mm of rain and 0% chance throughout the day - perhaps they are using the BOM systems? Its stops when we arrive in town and stays away for the rest of the day - phew 😮‍💨

The French couple tell us to come back to this exact spot to catch the bus home (not the other side of the road which you would expect if you are going the other way), and blow me down, when we arrive back later in the day, we know we are in the right spot because they are also there waiting for the bus home! (that takes away the usual anxiety of have you got it right ‘cos sometimes it’s a long wait for the next bus).
We scoot off to Plaza de San Francisco where we will meet our guide, knowing we will be 30 minutes early but wanting to ensure we get time to have our coffee and bikkies before the 1pm start time. Which we do in the adjacent Plaza Nueva.

Carlos our excellent guide (history buff) started the tour by explaining that Plaza Nueva was so named because they put a new entrance at the back of the Casa Consistorial or City Hall which opened onto a “new square” where a convent had been demolished. The City Hall facade on the Plaza de San Francisco side is very ornate recognising both the importance of the building to commercial activities when it was built in the 16th century and the enormous wealth that was pouring into Sevilla at that time from the plundering of the West Indies (you know, Columbus went looking for India, ran into a continent, saw the islands and went, hhhmmm, I know we will call it West Indies). Unfortunately they are digging up the square for new lighting that spoils the aspect a bit.

Our guide for the walking tour - Carlos

Town Hall

Anyhow, our group is a maximum of 10 people so that ensures personal attention, and Carlos makes a point of remembering our names and addressing us individually at times through the tour. This was an excellent intro to Sevilla, and while not designed to go into any of the main attractions we went past the main ones (Catedral, Alcázar, etc. and other modern buildings where they mimicked the earlier styles), and decided on some things to come back to.

Christian influence inside Muslim entrance

Glorious Alcazar and Cathedral

Close up of metal entrance door

Huge intricate metal entrance door to entrance of Cathedral - with Arabic features

Curved Muslim courtyard

Curved Muslim courtyard again

Christian influence inside Muslim entrance

Man in the street with his puppets playing music

One particular point that Carlos explained to Bob is that the Catedral (which of course is built over the top of the 12th century Mosque) had a Christian bell tower added to the top of the Muslim minaret which you can clearly see the delineation in the pictures (and also a poster at an adjacent restaurant shows the minaret, the first addition and the current bell tower for size comparison. The first Christian bell tower was added around 1400 and then a bigger and better one was added in 16th century).

Bell Tower - with Muslim levels and then Christian on top

Different iterations of the Bell Tower of the Cathedral

We are taken past sections of the old town wall and we see where old towers have been integrated into more modern day buildings and learn that the larger ones changed from hexagonal to octagonal to decagonal to dodecagonal the closer to the river they are (where the marauding pirates come from) because they are stronger, more rounded and able to survive an attack.

Water Tower and naval museum

Beautiful buildings around Seville streets

We go to the old shipyards which have been restored and just opened I think and we can look for free until Sunday, so we will go back. Then the university buildings which once was a factory where the Tobacco from the West Indies was turned into cigars by hundreds of tiny handed women, and the moat which was wide enough to stop purloined tobacco from being tossed to an accomplice on the outside and the smaller attached jail house where you went if you were caught in the act.

University

Finally we finished off at the Plaza de España which is just magnificent but will have to wait for tomorrow to look around as it’s past 3pm and we need lunch! (Fortunately the bus stop is around the corner so we will be able to come straight back here when we get off the bus).
Carlos recommends a favorite Paella restaurant nearby, so we head there for a Paella with Pork,patata, artichokes and Iberian ham - it’s truly delicious and so is the ‘small’ dry white wine that we order to go with it. And we leave full as a goog.

Well earned lunch/dinner of Paella

We go back to the bus stop, chat to the French couple, follow their lead, and arrive home safely around 6.00pm, where dinner consists of an ice cream at 8.00pm ‘cos we are not at all hungry.

Adios for day one tour in Seville - great start!