To me and for many people, travel is about discovery….a new hotel, a new restaurant…something uniquely cultural…things to travel great distances to experience. Seville offered all of that for me as I planned my trip there….great cuisine, beautiful architecture, an intriguing and convoluted history and a unique cultural tradition personified by Flamenco.
As I rolled into Seville in my taxi from the small city airport after a flight from Marrakesh, it took no time to see that it is an exceptionally beautiful city with incredible “bones”….a beautifully unique amalgam of Moorish and later influences. The Seville Cathedral, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and constructed in the 1400s, incorporating structures from a previous Mosque on the site, awes and inspires and is a massive and yet, delicate shrine to Gothic architecture with a unique Moorish influence….you can spend a day here alone with ease. The Real Alcázar, once a Moorish fortress and later Christian, was begun in the 1300s and is strongly Islamic in its architecture, especially in its arabesque arches…and because of it’s otherworldly feel, it was used in the filming of the Game of Thrones as the Water Gardens of Dorne. The Plaza de España, built in 1928 for an International Exposition, is grand in it’s scale and quite beautiful to stroll along its colonnaded, arching verandas…I was surprised how much I liked it. The majestic buildings that once made up the royal quarter of the city are well scrubbed and await your admiration. Quaint, winding, narrow, cobbled streets are what you would expect from a medieval gem of a city and restaurant and bar after restaurant and bar are ready to serve the hoards of tourists that descend on the city and they do. The home of Flamenco offers a dose of that around every corner within the central city and the one I visited was quite good I was told, and to this amateur eye, it was certainly vivid and entertaining and worth an evening, easily.
Still, you get the feeling that something is off with this impressive and historically significant town. The initial impression, as described above, is that this is a beautiful, enticing city…and it is….but the longer you stay, the more you realize that the Barrio Santa Cruz, which is essentially the tourist district, is a little too cleaned up….the local cuisine, a little too mundane and altered to fit a foreign palate…the crush of tourists too great for this provincial, blue collar town to bear. It ends up feeling as though the locals have ceded the central part of the city over to the incoming turista wave and they only venture in to take their tribune from the daily onslaught. I don’t blame them really….this part of the city is their Ace.
What specifically would I do to change my experience? I do believe that Seville is well worth a visit but be prepared to look a little harder to find the real Seville. Treat this as a longer term stay….that seems counter-intuitive but I say this because I think taking the time to make relationships with bar owners and cafe workers, restaurateurs and shop owners will make this stay a more real one…a richer one. Even better, find an antique store or a local clothing store or a jewelry artist or an outdoor market or in this city of music, an artisan guitar shop and find a local guitar maker and understand what makes this city what it is…a musical delight. Hail a taxi around lunch time and see if the driver will take you to where he or she eats lunch. You may be surprised what incredibly great things you can find. They will literally and figuratively reveal to you the pulse of the city. I know that vacations are for escaping but that’s just being a tourist….be a traveler and dig deeper. When you do, you will find a richer experience.
I think staying in a hotel or Airbnb across the Guadalquivir River from the center of the tourist area would help immensely. I loved my hotel, Casa del Poeta (recommended in my Eat/Drink/Sleep section) and it offered some shelter from the tourist choked, overly well scrubbed atmosphere that I felt in Barrio Santa Cruz, but there are properties across the Guadalquivir that are relatively modestly priced, with great views of the ancient city and offer a respite from the crush of the crowds….they aren’t crowd-free but do give you a break from it and they are minutes away from the crowds if you desire. There are restaurants along the Guadalquivir that allow for beautiful sight lines and moving around the city area on the “other side of the river” puts you in another world….an authentic one. If you add that aspect, “the other side of the river”, I think your experience in this great city will be a grander one.