Hooray for the sunshine!

It was a very comfortable trip on the bus to Seville. I have noticed that the bus drivers in Spain are some of the most disagreeable people on the face of the planet. They moan, they yell at you despite the fact that you clearly don't understand what they are saying and they treat you like an idiot because you clearly don't know the protocol for Spanish buses. It seems that here you are quite entitled to just shove your stuff into one of the underneath sections without actually disturbing the driver at all. They don't appear to be locked and there doesn't appear to be any particular order as to where you put your bags. And don't dare come anywhere near the doors with your bag or there will be yelling!

That said the bus was almost empty and I didn't have to sit near any heavy smokers or alcoholics for the whole trip. The countryside on this side of Cordoba is very different looking to the other. The hills are more rolling and it is slightly less brown. There are still olive trees as far as the eye can see though.

I got into the bus station at about 1.20 and headed to the hostel which is just up the road (maybe 5 minutes walk if you know where you are going). I dropped everything off and headed into town as the weather was so lovely, I didn't want to waste it. I managed to get lost almost straight away. I had a map and I couldn't even find myself on it.  I knew where I should have been but couldn't find the name of the street that I was on anywhere. I'm not the only one though as I did pass another couple peering at their map and he was saying 'I know that way must be west'. So I gave up on the map for a little while and followed the periodic signs to the cathedral because I knew where that was on my map (it has a big picture).

I didn't go in as I am doing that today and I just walked around the outside. It is huge and has obviously been built in several stages though all are in the gothic style. It has the full works with flying buttresses and large windows and multiarched gates and everything. There are several squares around the cathedral that seem to be the meeting places for the town's teenagers. They were strewn all over the fountains and statues.

I left the cathedral behind and headed down towards the river. There are some pretty flash buildings in this area with tiling and patterned brick work. I headed past part of the University and a whole lot of buildings named after the former South American colonies (I'm not sure what they were built for but they appear to be part of the Uni now). There is also a large theatre in this area with a yellow dome and purple porcelain urns.

Across one of the major streets is Maria's Park which is one of the largest expanses of green in the city. I headed to the far side of it where there is the Plaza de Espana. It was built for the 1929 expo and is a huge square with a large curved building full of exhibition halls. It has huge numbers of decorative tiles with paintings of cities from all over Spain as well as lots with just geometric patterns on them. In the forecourt are lots of bridges, canals (which are currently empty except for all the garbage that is thrown into them) and a large fountain. It is really a quite spectacular building with all its columns and colour.

From there I headed into the park which was also laid out for the expo and has several buildings in one end of it. There are lots of different trees and birds as well. The buildings at the far end now house a couple of museums but were originally part of the expo halls. It must have cost them an absolute fortune to build all this stuff. I walked the full length of the park and ended up back near the bus station where I had arrived a few hours before. I walked past more of the university and into another park which has a monument to Christopher Columbus. It is a strange monument in that it just has a boat and a lion on it but it is quite nice. If it didn't have his name on it, I probably wouldn't have guessed that it was for him.

I came back to the hostel for an hour or so while I waited for the supermarket up the street to reopen after siesta. I then grabbed some stuff for dinner and made a nice salad. The hostel has an oven that doesn't really crisp stuff but it was nice to have some baked vegies and I had sweet potato for the first time since leaving home. I had a quiet night as I have a lot planned for today. You however are going to have to wait until tomorrow to find out about it.

I didn't see everything that I intended to yesterday but I did see some stuff that I hadn't. I headed out into town at about 9am (when everything was of course still shut) and headed in the direction of Plaza San Salvador. It has a large church which unfortunately is closed for work. It was closed for work when the LP people were here nearly three years ago so they must be doing some major stuff. They have put the scaffolding so that you can't see most of the outside either except for a small patch at the top which is very lovely. So I headed onto the nearby church of San Jose which is in a little side street in the shopping district. The facade is fairly ordinary but inside is like a baroque cave. It's dark and gloomy with lots of shadowy paintings. It also has some more of the creepy dolls all dressed up in lace, including a baby Jesus.

I wandered around the shopping streets for a little while but nothing was open yet. The people were all just mopping the floors and getting organised for a 10am opening. They seem to be big on mopping here. They do it for the floors inside and the pavement outside the entrance to the shop as well (which strikes me as just a little bit obsessive). The shopping in Seville is much better than in Cordoba or Granada with a much bigger range of shops. I then set out to find one of the palaces that is open for people to go and see inside. I had a bit of trouble here because the tourist map that I have marks it on a totally different street to where it actually is. I did turn out that while I was looking for it, I had actually walked past it but didn't notice because I was too busy trying to avoid getting run over by a car (Spain is not the most pedestrian friendly place!).

Anyway, I finally found the place and realised that it didn't open for another half an hour. I tried to kill some time by going to look at a nearby church but it wasn't open either so I headed off into the shops and towards the cathedral. I stopped at the H&M which incredibly is still selling bootleg jeans this season and left with a pair that aren't perfect but are pretty close (and I imagine as close as I will get until skinny jeans are out of fashion again). I then continued on down to the cathedral. I walked through San Francisco Square which has lots of lovely buildings in it and at the moment a large market selling nativity scenes and their pieces. You can even get one which has clouds that really rain if you want. It is a serious industry in Spain.

I had a quick bit to eat in one of the squares next to the cathedral before going in. I was having a pleasant sit in the sun (it is quite cold here at the moment but nice if you are in the sunshine) until a truck came and parked a foot away from me and blocked it all completely. I was tempted to write on his truck (that sun came millions of miles to be cut short by three feet!) but didn't have any lipstick with me. So instead, I got up and headed into the cathedral.

It is €7.50 to get into the cathedral including the tower and €3 for an audioguide to the entire building. You probably don't need an audioguide if you speak Spanish or English as  there are some explanatory notes for most of the chapels on the outside of them. It doesn't cover all of the information on the audioguide though and some of the major sites aren't signposted at all (like the tomb of Colombus). It takes at least 90 minutes to do the full cathedral including climbing the tower and it took me nearly 2 hours. I imagine that it is even slower in the tourist season because there weren't that many people there yesterday. The large tour groups move through pretty quickly because they just look at the highlights and don't climb the tower at all.

You start off in a room with a small collection of the cathedral's religious art. It has some particularly nice pieces in it with some by famous (in Spain at least) artists of the renaissance. The next visit is a very important one and is to the toilets. Luckily there are two sets within the complex and they are both clean and free. The set on the entrance side have some of the smallest cubicles I have been in this trip. I struggled to get the door closed while wearing my small backpack and had to sit with my knees against the door (and I am not a tall person!). It was all very difficult while juggling my audioguide (they don't have a wrist or neck tie), camera and backpack. Anyway, back to the cathedral itself.

The cathedral was built in the second half of the 15th century on the site of an old mosque that was built in the 10th century. All that remains of the mosque is the orange tree courtyard through which you exit and the lower two thirds of the Giralda (bell tower) which is the remains of the minaret. The mosque was consecrated as a church in the 13th century when the Spaniards reconquered the city and there are a couple of pieces of artwork remaining from this time in the cathedral. It is the world's largest gothic cathedral at 126m by 83 m but has continued to have work done over the centuries so there are renaissance sections to the building and lots of baroque decoration in the side chapels.

The sides of the cathedral are lined with side chapels from various eras. It starts off with the more basic gothic and then moves quite rapidly to baroque (and do the spanish know how to baroque!). Many of the baroque decorated ones have simple gothic lines to the vaults and the archways though. The baptistry has a font big enough for me to lie down in (seriously it is as big as a wading pool). You could baptise 15 babies at once, no trouble at all. It is carved in stone and decorated with angels and flowers. Lots of the chapels have lovely stained glass windows. Many are from the 16th century (replacements for the originals damaged in the early 16th century earthquake) but some are from as recently as 100 years ago.

The chapel of Scalas has a lovely renaissance tomb for an archbishop. It is nice and simple after some of the baroque stuff. And it has no gilding! The organs are on either side of the choir and have baroque wooden cases. They are truly hideous. They could have been worse, though, as they aren't liberally doused in gold paint but left mostly in plain wood. The base section is marble in various shades of brown and then the top section over the organ is dark wood with saints and angels and the full works. It is so busy. The back of the choir stalls is also covered in carvings but in the late Spanish gothic style instead. The back of the choir has another altar on it dedicated to the patron of the cathedral, the Virgin Mary. It has a quite lovely icon of the Madonna on it but is otherwise quite unattractive.

Once you get back to the otherside of the choir, it is back to Baroque and lots of it. Opposite the choir is a little chapel with a lovely mosaic of the Madonna. It was moved into the new cathedral when the old mosque was demolished. Beside it is a lovely Renaissance tomb which is the oldest of its type in Spain. It is renaissance in style and has a lovely decorative arch over the statue of the body. There is a matching one on the other side but it is an 18th century copy.

In the main doorway is a giant paining of St Christopher with an angel and next to it is the tomb of Christopher Columbus. It turns out though that the body that they buried in there in the early 20th century is not actually that of Christopher Columbus but is most likely that of his son who died 15 years later. The tomb is very flash with a coffin being carried by four kings who represent the four regions of Spain when Christopher Columbus was alive. In the opposite doorway is an enormous (and we are talking seriously big here) silver monstrance. They are putting up a stage around it at the moment. I assume for something for Christmas.

The choir stalls are gothic  and carved of wood. It all looks really nice with the rose window behind it and the soft lighting. The altar opposite the choir is truly hideous. It's gothic too but the heavily gilded type that the Spanish love so much (I guess they had a lot of gold in the 16th century). It is the world's largest altar and took nearly as long to complete as the church itself. It has over a thousand carved figures. It does the life of various saints, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It is just so bedazzling because it's so busy.

The sacristy of the chalices is a fairly ordinary room with some lovely paintings in it. I particularly liked the one of Sts Justa and Rufina who were local potters martyred by the Romans for breaking the statue of a Roman idol. The main sacristy is much fancier and is renaissance with a large white dome. The room is very light after the dark gothic section of the building. It has a large silver thing (something to do with the Eucharist) which weighs over 450kg. I wondered why it was on such a serious looking table. Really strangely for a renaissance room it has a door that isn't square with the columns on either side of it. It wasn't mentioned on the audioguide. I wonder if it was an accident when they came to joining the room to the main cathedral.

You then head into a little courtyard which leads into the chapter house which was also built in the renaissance style. The antechapter is a lovely little room with a white and gold ceiling with carvings of the old testament and the evangelists on the walls. A curved corridor then leads around into the Chapter house which is an oval shaped room and is meant to be one of the best examples of the Spanish renaissance style. It is a pretty spectacular room with white and gold decoration. It has a lovely painting of the Immaculate Conception over the bishop's seat. It seems to have been one of the common motifs of the cathedral (I think it was about that time that the Pope agreed on the Immaculate Conception so it was probably pushed quite a bit).

The treasury has a small and fairly usual collection of golden things. It is surprisingly sedate given the altar and the giant silver monstrance.

The royal chapel is not open to the visiting tourists and is reserved for services only. You can't see any of it except for the ceiling whichi s a magnificent renaissance dome. The Giralda is the bell tower of the cathedral and was built on the top of the remains of the minaret of the mosque. The top third was added in the 16th century. It has ramps rather than steps so that they could ride horses up to the top. I'm not sure why they wanted to though unless they were just too lazy to walk, as the tower wasn't connected to fortification walls and there isn't anywhere to go once you get up there. It would also have been quite hard to turn the horses around as there isn't much space at the top next to the stairs. The views over the city from the top are great and you can really see the structure of the cathedral as well. It is very impressive. I didn't stay up there too long as the breeze was really cold once you got up that high (90 metres or so). On the way up the ramps are a series of little rooms where they have displays on the tower and the old mosque.

Back down in the church there are a couple more side chapels left before the exit. Some of them appear to be being used for storage at the moment because they have some random furniture in them. The exit goes out into the Orange Garden which is the only piece of the old mosque left intact. Unfortunately the audioguide doesn't cover the garden or the facade of the church on this side both of which would have been interesting. I would also have liked an explanation of the crocodile that is hanging from the roof near the door.

I headed out of the complex and had lunch in the Plaza de Triumfos and from there I headed onto the Torre del Oro. It was closed for the afternoon but I got some nice photos from the outside. On the way there I was asked for directions by some Spanish people (glad to know that they get lost too) and actually managed to not only understand where they wanted to go but also point them in the right direction. I was very proud of myself.

I walked past the bullfighting ring but decided that I didn't really want to go and see the skins of dead bulls and lots of gross photos in the museum so headed on into the back streets to find the Almeda de Hercules. The square has four columns in it; two with lions and two with people. In between there is an exhibition of modern sculptures by Manalo Valdez. Some of them are really striking. From the square I continued roughly north and ended up at the remains of the old city wall in the north of the town. It must have been a big fortification wall at some point because I assume the palace was in the southern end of it. The nearby Macarena church is very flash looking from the outside but didn't open until 5pm so I had to give it a miss. I wandered down the main(ish) street towards the old town again, stopping to look at the outside of several churches that were also closed. The church of San Luis is now a theatre and is in much better repair than some of the others. I eventually made it back to the hostel with some twisting and turning and searching for street names. And that was the end of my day.

I headed towards the cathedral by a different route on day 2 and went through the Plaza de Santa Cruz which has a really ugly wrought iron cross in the middle of the square, though the square itself is quite pretty. I continued down through the little alleyways (what appear to be streets on the map often only turn out to be one person wide) until I ended up at the Giralda again. I was a little early for the opening of the Palace so I sat in the square and got really cold (no sun at this time in the morning) while I waited for 10 minutes. I was the first person in when it did open though. It was like a ghost town at 9.20 with only a couple of people wandering around the streets and virtually no traffic at all. It was quite surreal to come back into the same square two hours later and have it full of people and very noisy.

I decided to go with audioguide as I have found them quite good here in Spain and compared with the admission prices not that expensive either. It also helps as  I know virtually nothing about the history of some of these places. You start the tour in a series of courtyards that lead into the palace and are fairly ordinary. There is a little building off to the side which is very Islamic in appearance and has a small attached courtyard with a pond and lots of stucco decoration. It is a lovely little room and very peaceful. On the otherside of the main courtyard is an audience room with a collection of paintings of the royals and some fans from various countries. It isn't a particularly attractive room or that interesting but the little room off it is. The smaller room not only was where trade with the Americas was discussed but also has the first painting known to depict the Americas and their natives. There is a large painting of the Virgin with people sheltering under her clock including; Christopher Columbus, the King at the time (Charles I) and a group of South American Indians. The altar also has the boats that were used in the discovery of America painted on the bottom section. It is a really lovely piece. The rest of the room is decorated richly with embroidery on the walls and a golden stucco ceiling.

The front of the palace of Pedro I is covered in scaffolding at the moment but must be lovely. It is decorated in the Mudejar style which is a mixture of Christian and Islamic architecture. To one side of the entrance is a set of steps that lead to the upper palace which is where the royals stay when they come to Seville. It is an extra 4 euros to go up and you have to go on a tour. I didn't want to hang around and wait for some more people so headed on into Pedro's palace. It was built in the late 14th century and many of the artisans from the Alhumbra in Granada also worked on the building here. The writing on the walls is a mixture of Arabic and Spanish and there are many mentions of Allah. Obviously the Moors had got over the whole being thrown out of Seville thing a century or two earlier! Either that or they were paid really well.

You first enter a hall with tiled and stuccoed walls with two exits. One is a small door that enters directly into the royal apartments and was built to enable the king (who doesn't seem to have been the friendliest of chaps) to make a speedy exit if need be. The other is much larger and leads into the main courtyard and was built for everyone to use when entering the palace. The walls here are much more colourful than the ones in Granada. I don't know whether it was always like that or whether the colour has just been preserved better here.

The Courtyard of the Maidens is the centre of the palace and has the typical Islamic structure with the central reflective pool and the surrounding small shrubs. The pool does need a bit of a clean though as it is a little green at the moment. The courtyard is lined with a covered walkway with decorative columns and stuccos on the archways. You can see the gothic influence in some of the shapes as well as the Moorish patterns. There are two storeys to the building but you can't get up onto the second level (despite what it says in the audioguide). The upstairs rooms were used in the winter when the downstairs became too cold and damp. There are several rooms off the courtyard and you can enter all of them.

The first room is that of the king and the initial chamber is being restored at the moment so you can only see sections of it. The room at the back is the king's summer bedroom and was shaded and private. Both rooms have lovely tiles around the bottoms of the walls and stucco work higher up. The ceilings have been carved and then painted.

Heading further around the courtyard you come to the Hall of Ambassadors (or throne room) which has several rooms coming off it. It has a round dome (hence the other name for the room which is the Half Orange Room) with golden star patterns and stunning stucco work on the walls. It has arched doorways on all four walls (though strangely they aren't centred at all). Off to the sides are various rooms; some used by officials and others part of the private suite of the Royal family. There is the Prince's room which was part of the Queen's suite and got it's name because Isabel the Catholic gave birth to her son here. It has beautiful carved wood ceilings and a patterned marble floor. There is another smaller room which opens out into a private courtyard and is known as the Felipe II room because he replaced the ceiling in the late 19th century. It has the Peacock door which enters into the Hall of Ambassadors. The door got its name from the two peacocks on the sides of the arches. There are then several other small rooms for officials that enter into the garden on the far side.

The final large room off the Courtyard of the Maidens is the Charles V room which was orginally the palace chapel but was changed to an ordinary room when the new section of the palace was built. Charles V was married to his cousin, Isabella of Portugal in this room and the party was held in the room next door several weeks later. You leave the courtyard by a set of hidden stairs that lead up half a level and into the new palace chapel. It is in the gothic section of the palace that no longer has so strong an Islamic influence. The chapel has a copy of the Madonna of Antigua on the altar but otherwise very little adornment left. You depart through the rear of the chapel and into another small courtyard with lots of orange trees. This used to be a much more extensive garden in Gothic times but had to be remodelled after an earthquake in the 18th century.

Re-entering the Gothic Palace you go into the two main rooms of the building. They are bright and airy as one of the later kings had large windows but in to lighten the place up a bit. The walls are covered in tapestries from the 18th century  depicting important events in Spanish history and lower down is some lovely tilework from the late 16th century.

From the end of the second room you enter the vast gardens of the palace which take up most of the space in the Alcazar. They are very well tended by a horde of gardeners and very lovely even in winter. You start at the Foutain of Mercury which used to be the end of an aquaduct that supplied water to the gardens. It is now an ordinary pond and home to a flock of ducks that seem very disgruntled by all the tourists coming and making noise. Beyond the pond are orange groves, a maze, palms, a little Islamic style garden house and English style gardens. I didn't walk all the way around because it was quite cold and damp once you got in amongst the trees so I stuck to the sunny paths. You  can climb the wall that splits the garden in two and it gives good views over most of the property.

Underneath the building is a grotto that used to be part of the gardens but was demolished and a series of gothic style vaults built in its place to strengthen the main building after an earthquake. There is a reflective pond under the vaults that looks incredible with the reflections in the halflight. It took nearly 2 hours to get all the way around the palace with the audioguide and I headed out into the now busy square. I had to head onto my next stop almost straight away so that I would have time to see it before siesta.

Next stop was the Hospital de la Caridad which is a few streets away from the Palace near the river. It was very busy on the street outside and coming through the gates because part of the building is used for art exhibitions and there is an exhibition opening on the 14th of Baroque Spanish art. I think that it runs until the 6th of January. The hospital still serves as a home for men of limited means so there were lots of older men hanging around in the courtyard in the sunshine. It's €5 to get in and that includes a very comprehensive audioguide. If you aren't really into churches though, it is probably not worth it.

The hospital was set up in the 17th century by a rich man who had had a little too much of the good life and was a bit worried about what was going to happen to him when he died. He spent most of his money on the hospital and the group of men that ran it but still died worried. The city had fallen on hard times after two plagues had wiped out a large part of the population and the principal port had moved to Cadiz due to silting up of the river. He set up an institution that aimed to feed, clothe and house the poor of Sevilla as well as give some basic medical care. He became the head of an order of Brethren who ran the hospital.

The site was originally a shipyards and a small amount of the original buildings remain. He also was given some royal land for extensions after the first building was completed. At first there was just one large room but demand was high and they soon extended to have a two storey building with a large courtyard in the middle. The patron had many rich friends and knew lots of famous artists so the church on the site was worked on by many of the best artists in Seville. There was even a set of paintings commissioned by Murillo.

The church theme is Death and Redemption and the artwork reflects this. Under the choir are two very striking pieces of death. ' In the blink of an eye' features a skeleton with a scythe and a pile of worldly goods (swords, crowns etc) while on the other side the painting is of rotting corpses in a crypt including a knight and a bishop while the hand of Jesus holds the scales and weighs up the men's sins and virtues. Both are fairly graphic.

Murillo originally did eight canvases for the church but when they were stolen four went missing and only four were returned to the church in the early 19th century. His work is quite extraordinary with its use of light on the figures. The main altar is baroque and is supposedly one of the best examples of the genre in the whole of Spain. And it is impressive given this is a small private church. The centre piece is a large sculptural group of the burial of Christ and on either side are St Rochus and St John (I'm not sure which one). The whole thing is painted and then gilded.

The room next door to the church is the meeting room where the order meet each month. It is the room where you can see some of the original arches from the shipyard. It also has a collection of some of the belongings of the founder. You can't go into a lot of the building because it is still being used and I imagine that over the years a lot of the interior has been adapted to changing uses.

Afterwards, I was feeling hungry so I headed back to the hostel for some lunch. I then had a slack afternoon burning some photos to CD and putting some up on the web. In the evening I went out on the tapas tour with some of the others from the hostel (the hostel runs them free on Tuesday and Thursday nights). It wasn't the greatest tour but it was nice to go out with some other people for a change. We went to one place and just had drinks and then walked into the square near the cathedral to take some photos of the Giralda all lit up. We then went to another bar and had some tapas. I had squid in its own ink and ws very impressed. We then went to a free flamenco show in one of the smokiest bars I've been to in a long time. My clothes smelt for days. The show was a bit strange in that it was just in the middle of a bar and the dancer kept shooshing everyone and refusing to start until it was totally quiet. They did two sets with a guitar, flute and singer as well as the dancer. It was all very intense and the locals really got into it, singing and clapping along. There was lots of cheering and whistling at the end.

The next morning, I didn't have time to do much before having to head out to the airport to get the plane to Madrid. It is easy and cheap to get the bus out from the city (only €2 one way) so I did that. Even better the bus left from just down the street from the hostel so I didn't have to walk very far with my bags. I met an American girl at the bus stop who was surprised that I was coping travelling in Spain without speaking Spanish but I pointed out to her that at least they use the Latin alphabet and some of the words have the same route as English. I've not been in an English speaking country for over 10 months now so I've got pretty good at smiling and nodding. Stay tuned to hear about Madrid.

Stay tuned to hear more about the palace in Seville.