🇪🇸 Spain · Andalusia
Sevilla is pure enchantment. Capital of Andalusia, stretched along the Guadalquivir under a sun that gilds everything, it is one of the most thrilling and sensual cities in Spain: the city of flamenco and Semana Santa, of tiled patios with flowerpots, of the orange blossom that scents the streets in spring, and of a dazzling history that made it, during the centuries of American gold, one of the richest and most populous cities in the world.
Its heritage is first-rate. Three of its monuments — the cathedral with the Giralda, the Real Alcázar and the Archivo de Indias — form a group listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Gothic cathedral is the largest of its kind in the world and holds the tomb of Christopher Columbus; the Giralda, its tower, was the minaret of the Almohad mosque; and the Real Alcázar, a royal palace still in use, is a jewel of Mudéjar art set among dreamlike gardens. To those add the monumental Plaza de España, the labyrinthine Santa Cruz quarter, the flamenco of Triana and the modern Setas de Sevilla.
This guide walks through the essentials of Sevilla with a practical and warm eye: how to book the Real Alcázar in advance (essential if you do not want to be left outside), when to use the free entry slots at the cathedral and the Alcázar, how to get around by tram and on foot, where to see real flamenco, when Semana Santa and the Feria de Abril fall, and — very importantly — how to cope with the extreme summer heat. Sevilla is lived slowly, among orange trees, tapas and flamenco rhythms: one of the great journeys Spain has to offer.
Sevilla began as a settlement beside the Guadalquivir that the Romans, after the conquest of 206 BC, turned into the city of Hispalis, an important river port (a few kilometres away was Itálica, birthplace of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian). Taken by the Muslims in 711, under the name Isbiliya it had its great period of splendour under the Almohads in the twelfth century, when it was the capital and the Giralda and the Torre del Oro were built. On 23 November 1248, the Castilian king Ferdinand III the Saint conquered the city after breaking the pontoon bridge linking it to Triana. The great leap came after 1492: with the discovery of the Americas, Sevilla obtained the monopoly on trade with the New World through the Casa de Contratación (created in 1503), becoming the gateway to the Indies and one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe during its Golden Age. The loss of the monopoly to Cádiz in the eighteenth century began its decline. In the twentieth century, two great international expositions transformed it: the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929 (which left the Plaza de España and the Parque de María Luisa) and the Universal Exposition of 1992 (Expo 92, on La Cartuja island), which modernised the city and brought the AVE. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The luminous south: the land of Tartessos and Roman Baetica, of the Caliphate of Córdoba and the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, of the American gold that passed through Sevilla and of flamenco with its Roma roots.
Read the history of Andalusia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before there was Sevilla there was the river. The Guadalquivir — from the Arabic 'al-wadi al-kabir', 'the great river' — is the city's reason for being: navigable from the Atlantic, it allowed a trading settlement called Spal or Ispal to grow on its bank as far back as Tartessian and Phoenician times. When the Romans conquered the area, after the Second Punic War and the defeat of Carthage (around 206 BC), they Latinised the name to Hispalis and turned the place into a prosperous river port from which the oil, wine and grain of the fertile Baetican valley shipped out across the Empire.
Julius Caesar played a part in its story: around 45 BC he gave it the rank of colony, under the name Colonia Iulia Romula Hispalis. But the great Roman centre of the district was not exactly Hispalis; it was neighbouring Itálica, founded in 206 BC a few kilometres away (in present-day Santiponce) as a settlement for wounded soldiers. Itálica grew enormously important and went down in history for an exceptional reason: it was the homeland of two of Rome's greatest emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, as well as the home of the family of a third, Theodosius. Today its impressive ruins — an amphitheatre for 25.000 spectators, mosaics, streets and villas — are one of the essential visits around Sevilla.
With the crisis of the Empire, Hispalis passed to the Vandals and then to the Visigoths, who kept it as an important city and the seat of a celebrated bishopric: Saint Isidore of Sevilla lived and wrote here (sixth and seventh centuries), author of the 'Etymologies', a monumental encyclopaedia that gathered all the learning of antiquity and made him one of the great scholars of the Middle Ages. The city was still alive and prestigious when, at the start of the eighth century, it changed hands and changed its name.
In the year 711, the Muslim armies that had landed on the peninsula took Hispalis, which came to be called Isbiliya, the name from which today's Sevilla derives. For more than five centuries the city was part of al-Ándalus, and although it went through different phases, its great moment of glory came in the twelfth century under the Almohad dynasty, a North African Berber empire that made Sevilla one of its capitals.
Under the Almohads, Isbiliya lived its Islamic golden age. The city filled with palaces, gardens, mosques and public works, and the two monuments that are still symbols of Sevilla were raised. The first is the Giralda, built as the minaret (the tower) of the great congregational mosque; with its brickwork decoration of sebka panels, it is one of the crowning works of Almohad art, sister to the Kutubiyya in Marrakesh and the Hassan tower in Rabat. The second is the Torre del Oro, a twelve-sided outlying tower built on the banks of the Guadalquivir around 1220 to control and defend access to the port from the river.
Also from that period come the layout of narrow winding lanes that still characterises the old town, much of the walls and the overhaul of the water supply system. The Andalusi imprint is so deep that it still permeates today's Sevilla: in its urban fabric, in its taste for patios and water, in its craftwork and even in many of its words. But the advance of the northern Christian kingdoms, unstoppable through the thirteenth century, had rich and coveted Isbiliya in its sights.
After the decisive Almohad defeat at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), Muslim power in the south crumbled and the Christian kingdoms pushed hard into Andalusia. The king of Castile and León, Ferdinand III — later canonised by the Church as Saint Ferdinand — took the great cities of the Guadalquivir valley one after another: Córdoba in 1236 and, after it, the jewel of the south, Sevilla.
The siege of Sevilla was long and hard, and it was decided on the water. The city was supplied from and connected to the suburb of Triana, on the far bank, by a pontoon bridge across the Guadalquivir. Admiral Ramón de Bonifaz sailed a fleet up the river and, in a famous manoeuvre, broke the pontoon bridge, cutting supplies and isolating the city. Unable to hold out any longer, Sevilla capitulated, and on 22 or 23 November 1248 Ferdinand III entered the city. The great mosque was consecrated as a Christian cathedral (the present one would be built centuries later on that site), and the Giralda, which the Muslims had come close to demolishing before surrendering, was saved and became its bell tower.
Ferdinand III died in Sevilla in 1252 and wished to be buried there; his remains rest in the cathedral, in the Capilla Real, and he is venerated there every year. His son, Alfonso X the Wise, made Sevilla one of his favourite cities and a great cultural centre. Under Castilian rule the city was resettled, its lands were shared out and a new Christian chapter began. But the event that would catapult Sevilla to the top of the world was still to come, and it would have to do, once again, with its river and with the sea that river led to.
On 3 August 1492, three caravels sailed from the port of Palos, on the Huelva coast, under the command of Christopher Columbus. His arrival in the Americas changed the world and, with it, the fate of Sevilla. Because it was a river port protected inland (safer from pirates than sea ports) and navigable from the Atlantic, Sevilla was chosen to concentrate all trade with the New World. In 1503 the Catholic Monarchs created the Casa de Contratación de las Indias there, the institution that organised, controlled and taxed absolutely everything: the ships, the goods, the passengers, the cartography and, above all, the gold and silver arriving from the Americas.
Sevilla thus became the only legal gateway to an empire that spanned half the planet, and through the sixteenth century and much of the seventeenth it lived a dazzling period of splendour. It was one of the largest, richest and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, a swarm of Genoese, Flemish and German merchants, bankers, sailors, adventurers, officials and artists from everywhere. The wealth of the Indies came in by its river and fleets sailed out loaded with emigrants and goods. People said that 'whoever has not seen Sevilla has not seen a marvel'.
That prosperity fed an extraordinary artistic and cultural Golden Age. Sevilla was the birthplace or the setting for painting geniuses such as Diego Velázquez (born here in 1599), Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán; the myth of Don Juan is set here, and part of the imaginative world of Cervantes's 'Don Quixote' (he was imprisoned in its jail). The city filled with churches, convents and Baroque palaces. In 1598 the Casa Lonja de Mercaderes was built, which centuries later, in 1785, would become the Archivo General de Indias, where the documentary memory of that whole empire is kept today.
But the greatness carried the seed of its decline. A terrible plague epidemic in 1649 killed much of the population, and the progressive silting of the Guadalquivir made navigation harder for ever larger ships. In 1717 the Casa de Contratación and the monopoly on American trade moved to Cádiz, easier to reach by sea. Sevilla lost the engine of its wealth and entered a long period of decline.
After the decline of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sevilla sought in the twentieth century to reinvent itself and look outward again, and it did so through two great international expositions that transformed its shape. The first was the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, long in the planning and finally held between May 1929 and June 1930, which brought together Spain, Portugal and the Latin American countries at a moment of reconnection with the former colonies. That event left the city some of its best-loved spaces: the monumental Plaza de España, a masterpiece by the architect Aníbal González and a symbol of the Sevilla of the regionalist style; the leafy Parque de María Luisa; and a series of pavilions spread across the city, many now museums, consulates or university buildings. The 1929 Exposition fixed the romantic, Andalusian image of Sevilla that endures in the popular imagination.
The second was the Universal Exposition of 1992, Expo 92, held between 20 April and 12 October 1992 on La Cartuja island, a large river island in the Guadalquivir. Under the theme 'The Age of Discovery', it marked the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage and brought together more than a hundred countries before some 42 million visitors. Expo 92 was a revolution for the city: spectacular new bridges were built over the river (such as Santiago Calatrava's Alamillo bridge), ring roads, a renovated airport and, above all, high-speed rail arrived with Spain's first AVE line, Madrid-Sevilla, putting the capital little more than two hours away. The Cartuja site is today a technology and leisure park.
Those two events, along with the conservation of its incomparable historic heritage, made today's Sevilla a city that combines the memory of its glorious past with a first-rate cultural and tourist life. Its cathedral with the Giralda, the Real Alcázar and the Archivo de Indias were listed as UNESCO World Heritage in 1987. And its great living traditions — Semana Santa, with its brotherhoods and floats through the streets; the Feria de Abril, an explosion of casetas, sevillanas and flamenco dresses; and flamenco itself, of which the city and the Triana quarter are one of the cradles — make Sevilla one of the cities with the most soul and the most enchantment in all of Spain.