Seville: The Heat and the Cathedral

The Seville Cathedral is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world by volume and the third largest church in the world overall. The numbers don't convey what it's like to stand inside it: the nave is so high and so long that the far end disappears into shadow, and the sunlight coming through the stained glass falls on stone floors the size of plazas. The building was begun in 1402 on the site of a mosque — the minaret of which, the Giralda, was incorporated as the bell tower and remains the defining silhouette of the city — and completed more than a century later. Christopher Columbus is buried here, if you believe the Dominican Republic and Spain (both have claimed the honour and both have some of the remains).

I went in the morning, early, before the tour groups arrived. The interior at nine in the morning has a quality of stillness that is genuinely unusual in a monument of this size and fame. The Giralda — the bell tower — can be climbed via a series of ramps built for horses (so the muezzin could ascend on horseback), and the view from the top across the city's rooftops is exceptional. The cathedral roof, the Alcázar walls, the Triana neighbourhood across the Guadalquivir, the hills of the Sierra Norte to the north. Seville lays itself out from up there.

The Real Alcázar

The Real Alcázar — the royal palace adjacent to the cathedral — is the oldest royal palace in continuous use in Europe. It has been continuously inhabited and continuously rebuilt since the tenth century, and the current structure is a layering of Moorish, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements that somehow hold together. The Mudéjar palace built by Pedro I in the fourteenth century — the most Moorish part of the complex — is the reason to visit: the carved stucco, the tilework, the garden views through arched windows are the equivalent of the Alhambra, built a generation later, by Christian rulers who employed Moorish craftsmen.

The gardens of the Alcázar extend behind the palace in a series of rooms — hedged enclosures, fountains, orange groves — and they are where you want to be in the middle of the day. The shade is real, the water sounds are real, the heat outside is forty degrees and inside the hedged garden rooms it is tolerable. The Alcázar has been managing the Seville summer for a thousand years and its design reflects this.

Triana and the Tapas

Triana — the neighbourhood across the Guadalquivir from the old centre — is where the gitano community has lived since at least the fifteenth century and where Seville's flamenco tradition is most rooted. It is also the neighbourhood with the best ceramic shops (Triana has been the ceramics district of Seville since the Moorish period), the best fish market (Mercado de Triana, in a beautiful building by the bridge), and the best sense of what the city is like without the cathedral and the Alcázar looming over everything.

Tapas in Seville are free — a tapa comes with every drink, the tradition is stronger here than anywhere else in Spain. The standard sequence: a cold beer or manzanilla, a plate of jamón ibérico or gambas al ajillo, move to the next bar. The tapas bar route in the centre and in Triana runs naturally from about seven in the evening until midnight without any particular planning required. Follow the people who look like they know what they're doing.