Trip to Spain, October 29

Today, Sunday, we drove to Sevilla, and got the beginnings of our exposure to this wonderful city.

After breakfast, we met at nine sharp in the hotel lobby, and piled into an overlarge bus for the trip to Sevilla. I was fully expecting Mark to ask for a comfort stop, but he made it without difficulty into our next city and into our hotel. It’s an elegant but inconspicuous building on a side street, which has a lovely atrium lit by a skylight. In the upper picture (small image, large), a bunch of us are standing around after our arrival there, and in the lower (small image, large) you see the upward view.

Since this was still before noon, we had plenty of time before the regular late Spanish lunch hour for walking about the city. In the upper picture at the left (small image, large) we’re waiting in the street, opposite our hotel, eager to start off on our tour. Our guide was a very pleasant young woman named Virginia Vargas, who had a superb command of English, and who proved to be full of information about the city and its history.

On the way to the Alcázar Real, the royal palace, we passed the Cathedral, as we did many times in the next days. The middle picture to the right (small image, large) is one of my first shots of it. It’s a bit better displayed than the Cathedral in Granada, but I don’t think we found any big church in this part of Spain that had as nice a setting as either Notre Dame de Paris or Chartres. The crowded setting here apparently has to do with the fact that the churches were built on the site of mosques, and these were set right in the thick of the city, with no open space around them. The bottom picture at the right (small image, large) gives a fuller feeling of the crowdedness of the placement of the Cathedral.

El Alcázar, the Royal Palace, was built on a base from before the Reconquest, but there is a lot of it that was built in the Mudéjar style. That is, by Moorish craftsmen after the Reconquest who were still working in the typically Moorish style. In the upper-left picture at the left (small image, large), we’re inside listening to Srta. Vargas tell about the history of the buildings, in a space filled with royal portraits. Upper right is a general view of a lovely courtyard in Mudéjar style (small image, large) that was really a treat for the eye. The Palace is every bit as beautiful as parts of the Alhambra, but of course nowhere near as extensive as the whole of the Alhambra, and it has the advantage that it was never allowed to fall into disuse and disrepair. The lower left shot (small image, large) is a close-up taken from pretty much the same point of view as the upper right one, and the lower right shot (small image, large) shows some of the wonderful detail, with a nice side lighting that reveals a lot more than the direct lighting of the previous ones.

We spent a lot of time in the Royal Palace, and there was indeed a lot to see. The wonderful pattern in the top left shot in the group to the right (small image, large) really took my fancy, and is the one I’m using as the background on all these pages, though with much reduced contrast. Like so much in the Alcázar Real, it’s every bit as fine as anything in the Alhambra.

The top right shot shows very well the fine architectural decorative detail—there’s some of the original paint visible at the corner of the column, and I’m led to think that there has been a certain amount of restoration done here, just as in the Alhambra. (Small image; large.) The middle left picture shows Srta. Vargas explaining to us what we’re looking at. This was taken in the same part of the Palace where I took the upward-looking shot of the ornate dome that’s at the top of this page; maybe in the very next room. (Small image, large.)

We went out into the gardens of the Royal Palace after a while, and wandered around appreciating them. I didn’t see any pictures worthy of putting up here, from among the dozen or more that I took at that time. Eventually, we walked to a tapas bar where a long table was spread out for us outdoors, and had a nice meal. I think that Mark has a number of pictures of the setup for the meal on his page. The bottom left picture at the right shows Virginia Vargas after the meal (small image, large), chatting with some of us before the next part of the tour. The weather was very warm, and Mark was still feeling a little uncertain about the state of his digestive system—he had only Coke to drink at lunchtime, for instance—so we decided to beg off any further walking for the afternoon, and just go back to our room, walking back to the hotel with Ralph, who also felt like skipping the remaining part of the day’s walk. On the way, I took one more picture of the Cathedral (small image, large), a shot showing the weathervane that the Sevillanos are so proud of.

After our afternoon naps, we went down to the bar, where I had vino tinto, but Mark still played the cautious game and had just Coke. Later on, the other members of the group came down and we walked a tidy distance to a nice restaurant where an upstairs room had been set aside for us, and we had a fine meal of appetizers, paella, and dessert. The idea was for all to go to a Flamenco performance at around ten-thirty, but we were still feeling the effects of having had too little sleep the night before. So we two begged off, and walked back to the hotel for a sound sleep.