Seville

• 1. Introduction

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  Seville holds a distinction that no other city in Europe can claim: it is the warmest major metropolitan area on the continent, sitting in a river valley locals call "the frying pan of Spain". But temperature is just the beginning of what makes this place extraordinary. Founded by the Romans as Hispalis, conquered by Vikings, ruled by caliphs and inquisitors, and once the wealthiest port in the Western world, Seville has been reshaped by nearly every great power of the last two thousand years. It now sits on the lower reaches of the River Guadalquivir in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, home to roughly 686,000 people within the city and about 1.5 million in its wider metropolitan area. Its old town packs a UNESCO World Heritage Site into just four square kilometres. How did a city this far inland become the gateway to an entire empire? Why did its riches eventually slip away to a rival port? And what does a place do with that much history piled on top of itself? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A Name Built in Layers

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  According to the scholar Manuel Pellicer Catalán, the word "Sevilla" traces back to an ancient Phoenician name, Spal, meaning "lowland". The Phoenicians had arrived in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula during the colonisation of the Tartessian culture, and the city they knew as Hisbaal sat on an island in the Guadalquivir as far back as the 8th century BC. When the Romans took hold, the name became first Hispal and then Hispalis. After the Umayyad invasion, the Arabic-speaking population kept a version of that Latin name, adapting it as Išbīliya. The adaptation required small but telling adjustments: Arabic has no /p/ phoneme, so it became /b/; the Latin suffix -is was Arabised as -iya. The city also carried a second, official Arabic name during this period: Ḥimṣ al-Andalus, a reference to the Syrian city of Homs, because Seville had been assigned to the same administrative jund as that region upon the Umayyad conquest. That affectionate nickname appeared in the great 13th-century geographic encyclopedia of Yaqut al-Hamawi and in Abu al-Baqa ar-Rundi's elegy for Andalusia, the Ritha' al-Andalus. Today, the city's official motto is NO8DO, a rebus that spells out the Spanish phrase No me ha dejado, meaning "She has not abandoned me". Legend gives credit to King Alfonso X, who sheltered in the city's Alcázar while his son, later Sancho IV of Castile, moved to take the throne from him. The emblem appears on manhole covers, on the municipal flag, and on Christopher Columbus's tomb inside the cathedral.

• 3. Conquest Upon Conquest

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  Seville changed hands with a regularity that would exhaust most cities. After the Germanic Vandals, Suebi, and Visigoths moved through in the 5th and 6th centuries, Islamic forces under Musa ibn Nusayr reached Seville in the late summer of 712. The Visigothic population fled, then returned, and the city had to be retaken in July 713 by troops led by Musa's son Abd al-Aziz ibn Musa. The seat of the Wali of Al-Andalus was established there until 716, when the administrative capital shifted to Córdoba. In September 844, Vikings arrived by river. The city fell to them on the 1st of October and remained in their hands for forty days before they withdrew. After the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in the early 11th century, a powerful taifa kingdom based in Seville emerged after 1023 under the Abbadid dynasty. That era made the city an important scholarly and literary centre. The Almoravids ended it, conquering Seville in 1091 after months of siege. The city then fell to the Almohads on the 17th of January 1147. Under Almohad rule, which brought large-scale urban renewal, the walled enclosure may have held around 80,000 inhabitants by the end of the 12th century. Ferdinand III of Castile laid siege in 1247. A naval blockade cut off any relief, and the city surrendered on the 23rd of November 1248, after fifteen months. Contemporary sources suggest that the entire population was evicted following capitulation, a mass movement out of Seville that reshaped the city's human geography entirely.

• 4. Gateway to the New World

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  In 1503, Seville was chosen as the headquarters of the Casa de Contratación, the institution that controlled all trade with the Spanish Americas. Reaching the port required sailing roughly 80 kilometres up the River Guadalquivir from the Atlantic, a significant navigational challenge. The choice of Seville was made despite those difficulties, partly because Seville had become the largest demographic, economic, and financial centre of Christian Andalusia in the late Middle Ages. Other factors favoured it too: the Andalusian coastline was largely under the seigneurial control of the House of Medina Sidonia, and the city's inland location gave it military security and made tax enforcement easier. A golden age followed. Merchants from across Europe came to Seville because it was the only port holding the royal monopoly for trade with the Spanish Americas. The city's population grew to more than a hundred thousand people. That monopoly began to erode in the early 17th century as silting of the Guadalquivir in the 1620s made the river harder to navigate. The fleets of the Indies transferred to Cádiz in 1680, and the Casa de Contratación itself followed in 1717. The Great Plague of 1649, worsened by severe flooding of the Guadalquivir, cut the population by almost half, and the city did not recover those numbers until the early 19th century. The building that once housed the merchants' guild did not go to waste: during the reign of Charles III, it became the Archive of the Indies, consolidating documents from Spain's overseas empire that had been scattered across repositories including Simancas and the old House of Trade.

• 5. Inquisition and Pogrom

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  Seville was the starting point of the anti-Jewish massacres of 1391, a wave of violence that spread rapidly across Castile and Aragon. Four thousand Jews were killed in the pogrom, and many others were forced to convert. All of Seville's synagogues were seized and converted into churches, renamed Santa María la Blanca, San Bartolomé, Santa Cruz, and Convento Madre de Dios. The land and shops of the Jewish quarter, in what is now the Santa Cruz neighbourhood, were appropriated by the church, and many Jewish homes were burned. The first tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition was instituted in Seville in 1478. Its initial charge was to investigate whether nominal Christians in the dioceses of Seville and Córdoba were still secretly practicing Judaism; the Dominican friar Alonso de Ojeda had detected converso activity there. The first Auto de Fé took place in Seville on the 6th of February 1481, when six people were burned alive. Ojeda himself delivered the sermon. The Plaza de San Francisco served as the regular site for these public proceedings. The Inquisition's institutional footprint spread quickly: by 1492, tribunals operated in eight Castilian cities, including Ávila, Córdoba, Toledo, and Valladolid. That same year, the Alhambra Decree required all Jews in Spain to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion. The last building to serve as the seat of the Spanish Inquisition in Seville was the Castillo de San Jorge, near the Triana market by the Isabel II bridge, which today houses a museum on that history.

• 6. Stone, Music, and Flame

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  The Seville Cathedral, officially the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See, is considered the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Construction of the main Gothic structure began after 1401, incorporating parts of the Almohad mosque that had stood on the site, and the building was finished in 1506, with further reconstruction between 1511 and 1519. The cathedral's bell tower, the Giralda, began as the minaret of that Almohad mosque; its main shaft stands a little over 50 metres tall. A Renaissance-style belfry was added in the 16th century, bringing the total height to around 95 or 96 metres. The tower is topped by the Giraldillo, a cast-bronze weather vane from which the name Giralda is derived. Nearby, the Alcázar palace complex traces its origins to a governor's palace founded in the 10th century. A major campaign under Pedro I in the 1360s produced richly decorated chambers in Mudéjar style, including the Patio de las Doncellas and the Salón de Embajadores, built with the help of craftsmen from Granada. The Royal Tobacco Factory, built between 1728 and 1771 and designed by Sebastian van der Borcht, was at completion the largest industrial building in the world; it included its own chapel and its own prison and operated under its own laws. Since the 1950s it has housed the administration of the University of Seville. Seville's relationship with opera is without parallel: a study of experts concluded in 2012 that 153 operas have been set in the city, more than in any other city in Europe. Among the composers drawn to it are Beethoven with Fidelio, Mozart with The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Rossini with The Barber of Seville, and Bizet with Carmen.

• 7. Civil War and Modern Revival

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  Seville fell very quickly at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. General Queipo de Llano carried out a coup inside the city, capturing the centre rapidly. Radio Seville initially opposed the uprising and broadcast calls for peasants to come to the city for arms. Queipo then seized the station and used it to spread Francoist propaganda. Resistance held out for some time in working-class neighbourhoods before a series of fierce reprisals ended it. Under Francisco Franco, Spain remained officially neutral in the Second World War while collaborating with the Axis powers, and Seville, like the rest of the country, stayed largely isolated from the outside world. The city hosted the Ibero-American Exposition in 1929, which created the Parque de María Luisa and the adjoining Plaza de España. Then in 1992, coinciding with the fifth centenary of the Discovery of the Americas, Seville hosted the Universal Exposition for six months. Under a planning framework launched in 1987 by Mayor Manuel del Valle, the SE-30 ring road was completed, the new Seville-Santa Justa railway station had opened in 1991, and the Alta Velocidad Española high-speed rail line began operating between Madrid and Seville. The Seville Airport gained a new terminal designed by architect Rafael Moneo. On the 5th of November 1982, Pope John Paul II arrived in Seville to officiate at a Mass before more than half a million people at the fairgrounds, and he returned on the 13th of June 1993 for the International Eucharistic Congress. On the 19th of November 2023, Seville hosted the 24th Annual Latin Grammy Awards at the FIBES Conference and Exhibition Centre, becoming the first city outside the United States to hold the ceremony.

• 8. The City That Remains

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  Seville is the warmest city in continental Europe, with an annual average temperature of 19.6 degrees Celsius and summer daily highs that routinely exceed 36 degrees in July and August. It became the first city in the world to formally name a heat wave, assigning it the name "Zoe". The city averages around 3,250 to 3,300 hours of sunshine per year; since the year 1500, only ten snowfalls have been recorded there, and the last one in the 20th century fell on the 2nd of February 1954. The Port of Seville, located about 80 kilometres from the Atlantic, remains the only river harbour in Spain. Flamenco, which traces one of its origins to the Triana district, grew from an expression of the poor and marginalised, shaped by Seville's Romani population, before becoming a national heritage symbol of Spain. Bitter Seville oranges line the city's streets in such numbers that in 2021 the municipal water company Emasesa began a pilot scheme using the methane produced as the fruit ferments to generate clean electricity, with plans to process 35 tonnes of fruit to power one of the city's water purification plants. The Metropol Parasol, completed in March 2011 at a cost of just over 102 million euros, is said to be the largest timber-framed structure in the world. Seville's University, founded in 1505, enrolled 72,000 students as of 2019, a population that gathers inside the walls of what was once the world's largest industrial building.