I have a friend who will soon be fulfilling a life-long dream of visiting Europe with his family. So we're setting aside, for the moment, our own travels. This Special Edition blog is presented as a letter to Glenn and his family, with some tips on Seville!
Dear
Glenn—
Welcome to Seville! I’m so pleased you can be here and experience this elegant, amazing city. To better appreciate it—or maybe, to faster appreciate it—I’d like to give you some tips.
The first is a bit of history.
The
story of early Spain, and particularly of Andalusia, southern Spain, is the
story of the Moors. The Moors came from Northern African, from what is today
Morocco and Algeria. They were Arabs and Berber and several other cultures, but
they were all followers of Mohammad. They arrived on the Iberian Peninsula in
711AD, displacing the Visigoths. There was, of course, a lot of back and forth,
but the Moors dominated in this region, which they called al‑Andalus, from
which we get today’s Andalusia. Over a period of several hundred years the
Christian Europeans slowly pushed them out, in what was called the Reconquista. In 1288 King Ferdinando III
drove them from Seville. (The last Muslims in Spain were defeated by Ferdinand
and Isabella in 1492.)
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| Interior of the Alcazar: Pool of the Maidens |
The Moors left behind many buildings
including mosques, tile works (apparently the banks of the Guadalquivir River
are good for making tile and brick, and have been used for that for… well,
forever), and their distinctive, geometric
art. The Christian and Islamic styles combined in Seville in a form
known as Mudajar. A prime example of that style is the Real Alcazar (Real
meaning Royal), built by Pedro I after the departure of the Moors. Another,
more modern building is the Museo
de Artes y Costumbres, the Museum of Popular
Arts and Traditions, at the southern end of the Maria Louisa Park. But elements
of the style can be seen in many buildings throughout Seville.
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| A view od the Museo de Artes y Costumbre. |
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| A detail of the front of the Museo. |
(And what are those traditional elements? Stone, brick, tile, wood, and iron. Look for them in the buildings around town. And while you’re looking, note the pointed arches and the distinctive Moorish doorways)
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| One of our (many) favorites, an apartment building. See the stone, brick, tile, wood, and iron? |
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| Another striking building, a commercial building near the cathedral. |
Churches!
So many churches! Every neighborhood in the central part of town has a church.
While it’s true that the Catholic Church dominated life in medieval Europe,
there’s another reason for the plethora of churches here in Seville. Once the
Moors where driven out the Christians were quick to eradicate the traces of
Islam, which included converting every mosque into a church. (And in many, the
conversion is obvious: look for the blocky, square tower that was the minaret,
now transformed to a belfry.)
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| Once a minaret, now a bell tower! |
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| While the façade has been altered, there's no hiding the former minaret. |
So why so many mosques? In the Islamic religion, the faithful pray five times a day, and are called to prayer from the minaret by a muezzin. Because the faithful must be able to hear the muezzin, the mosques can’t be too far apart. So, one in every neighborhood.
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| And another former mosque, now a Catholic church. |
Now,
another historic fact that makes Seville special: back in the day the
Guadalquivir River was navigable, and Seville was a major seaport. (Being
inland, it avoided the very significant problem of pirates.) It was such a major seaport that all
the treasure ships returning from the New World with gold, silver, and tobacco
unloaded here, before having their treasures transported overland to Madrid
(then as now the capitol of Spain). This role brought enormous wealth to the
city, a wealth that can still be seen in the elaborate palaces, and in the
elegance of its everyday buildings.
Food
A
favorite subject of mine! Traditionally in Spain (I’m told, I haven’t really travelled
much elsewhere in Spain) bars would give out little snacks with each drink.
These snacks, called tapas, were
typically something like a slice of bread with cheese, or tomatoes, or ham (of
course!).
(The story is, one day the king was riding and stopped to rest and have a snack. The wind blew dust in his wine; his courtiers were quick to cover the goblet with what came to hand, bread. The bread that topped the goblet became known as a tapa; the name spread to include any small snack.)
So a tapa is a snack, generally eaten with wine or beer. Then, so I’ve been told, during the economic downturn of 2008—which hit Spain hard—many of the traditional bars went out of business. Investors from Madrid came to Seville and hired top chefs to create gastronomic tapas, kicking off a competition for best of the year. Not every bar participated, but it certainly raised the, er, bar for a higher quality of tapas in Seville. (During a recent trip to Granada we found that bars serve a free tapa with each drink. Generally these are decent, satisfying snacks, although there may not be much choice—take what they’ve got, or not!)
We’ve
found that in Seville two of us can order three tapas and two drinks and have a
very fine lunch for around €20. And while of course every place has their
specialty, and some are better than others, pretty much any bar will serve a
decent tapa.
Notice that I am refraining from
specific recommendations. There are many fine restaurants, of which I know only
a few. And restaurants come and go. But there are a couple of areas where I
know I’ll always find something I like. One is Plaza Alfalfa; another is Alameda
de Hércules. They are both interesting places to explore, with numerous
restaurants. If nothing else, you’ll see a good part of the city on your way there!
France
holds to some pretty rigid eating hours: noon to 2PM is a semi-scared time for
lunch, with offices and shops closed, and oftentimes it’s hard to get anything
done then. But if you’re not sitting down to lunch at a restaurant by 1:30, you
may not find a meal until the dinner serving at 7PM. (It’s happened to us!)
In
Seville, though… don’t even try to find lunch before 2, when things are just
getting started. By 3 restaurants are in full swing, and calm down around 5.
Dinner is generally served at 10PM.
Yeah, but you can find filling tapas at
pretty much any time!
Ham.
OMG, there’s ham everywhere! And by ham I mean prepared, aged pig legs. You see
them all over the place, hanging in every café, bar, and restaurant. Available
in every supermarket. And, I expect, in almost every home.
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| Hams for sale on display. Similar displays are seen in every supermarket, and many bars. |
These pig legs—hams—don’t come from just any pigs. There are various grades. The best come from 100% pure bred pigs that have spent their lives rooting up and eating acorns in the cork oak forests between Portugal and Spain.
Lesser grades spend only a few weeks in the forests. Further down the quality slope are pigs that live in barns but get to eat a few acorns. And they’re not pure bred. But apparently, the acorn part is important, as it imparts a particular taste to the meat. After aging, the leg, er, ham is placed in a special holder and expertly carved with a razor-sharp knife into paper-thin strips about the size of a tablespoon. Quite a delicacy!
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| Ham ready for cutting into the thin slices so appreciated by aficionados. |
Why this obsession with ham? Well, I figure it comes from the days when Ferdinand and Isabella were “cleansing” the county of non-Catholics. Jews and Muslims were allowed to leave, then asked to leave, then forced to leave. Or killed. Now, both these religions have strict prohibitions against the eating of pork, so apparently REAL Spanish—Catholics all—ate pig meat, proof that they were loyal. No one is checking religion today, of course (although there still aren’t many Jews or Muslims in Spain), but eating this particular delicacy is firmly established in the culture.
Beer. Every region in Spain has its own. There’s Estrella Galicia, from the north-west, and Alhambra, from around the city of Granada. But my favorite is the local Cruzcampo. Nothing finer than taking a seat at a local café after a long walk through the crowded city, ordering a caña, and feeling that cold, cold brew bubble down my throat! The glasses are small and tend to be inexpensive. Depending, though, on where: outside the center things are simple and generally inexpensive, but at the foot of the Giralda, in the main tourist areas, it’s fancier and pricier. Of course!
There’s more, of course. Much more! But there are guidebooks, and free walking tours of Seville (and many other major cities), and Rick Steve’s audio-guided walking tours (download them for free from his web site—check out his videos, too!)..And then it comes down to your own explorations.
So get out and start walking!
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