Tuesday 19 May started with a three and a half hour bus trip from Granada to Seville (Spanish: Sevilla. Population 703000), the capital of Andalusia. Seville, even though it is 80 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean, was the port that Christopher Columbus (Spanish: Cristóbal Colón) set sail from for his discovery of the Americas in 1492; wealth from the new world was then imported through Seville.
After checking in to Hotel Don Pedro (which has good reviews) and eating some tapas for lunch we walked to some of the city’s landmarks including:
- Metropol Parasol (a wooden structure located at La Encarnación square, in the old quarter colloquially called Incarnación’s mushrooms)
- Royal Tobacco Factory (Spanish: Real Fabrica de Tabacos, now a university building, that was the setting for the Barber of Seville)
- Spain Square (Spanish: Plaza de Espana, built in 1928 for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929.
After dinner we watched Flamenco at Centro Cultural Flamenco (which has very good reviews).
On Wednesday 20 May most of the group bought tickets for the Alcázar, a “royal palace. . . originally developed by Moorish Muslim kings. . . regarded as one of the most outstanding examples of mudéjar architecture found on the Iberian Peninsula.
After that we kept doing the tourist thing and had a look through the Seville Cathedral (the largest Gothic cathedral and the third-largest church in the world) as well, including walking up and down the 34 storey bell tower.
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