Sevilla, ES

We are now back in Spain, exploring the southern-ish part of the country in the Andalucia region. Sevilla isn’t the type of city that you would consider beautiful by simply looking at it from a vantage point.

You really need to see it up close to appreciate the architecture, the people and the history. In order to get to Sevilla from Lagos, we opted in for the much shorter bus ride, rather than the roundabout train ride, which would have taken us back north to Lisbon, across the border and back down south. We had arrived on a Sunday afternoon with nearly 90% of the storefronts locked up, but we were used to seeing a huge difference between the Sunday and the rest of the week.

On the morning of our first full day we had gone down a narrow street, which was no different than the many hundreds of narrow streets but for the sweet smell of baking.

I had thought the wonderful smell was wafting from one of the nearby apartments, but Dan noticed an open door and a discrete sign, “Monasterio Santa Maria de Jesus Hermanias Clarisas”.  We stepped in and the smell of baking got stronger. we were greeted by a nun, who did not speak any English, but showed us several pasteries that her and the other sisters were selling. It was difficult to choose from the many tempting sweets, but we settled on a bag of a dozen small cakes, which tasted simlilar to a lemon loaf. We enjoyed about half of the bag in a nearby plaza and later on gave the other half away to a homeless man that was sitting outside one of our favorite buildings in Sevilla, the Cathedral. The other favorite of ours was at La Plaza de España. The building’s outer fence was made of painted cermaic and along the exterior walls were about 3 dozen tiled murals.

Also for the first time, we witnessed a good implementation of modern sculpture within an old city. Not too far from our hostal, was the Metropol Parasol, which was not only an art sculpture, but also housed an archealogical site. Not only that, it was also open to the public to climb to the top to (what I would assume) is a pretty nice lookout, which was free for locals, but of course at a cost for tourists.

One builiding that we saw, but did not actually visit was the Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza. Dan was hoping to see a bullfight in Spain and had attempted to find one that would coincide with our schedule, but as it were, the next fight would fall in September. He was pretty disappointed when he realized that he wouldn’t be able to experience something that was ‘very Spanish’, but he was somewhat pacified with another ‘very Spanish’ tradition. On our last night we headed out for dinner around 9pm and then walked over to Tableau de Arenal, to enjoy a drink and watch flamenco dancing. We unfortunately were not allowed to take photos of the performers, this allowed us to really take in the show,which completely wowed us.

We had never seen anything like it before; between the three guitarists, three singers and the dancers, each clapped or foot-tapped their own beat that together made a single, complex rhythm. It was also amazing to see this one male dancer that, despite having similar movements as the ladies, had extremely strong stances and he looked like a proud matador. Another great was a woman who danced with her shawl as a prop and she showed such grace and control, it was completely memsmerizing. We had so much fun, that we talked about the show most of the way home and well after we were tucked in bed.

We are now en route to Barcelona via the fast speed train, it will take us about 6 hours. We’re enjoying the Spanish landscape much more, since its hillier and greener, a stark opposite to the Portuguese landscape which was brown, dry and rocky.