The city of Sevilla is the colour of orange peel.  Not the bright clean colour of Tesco satsumas, but the warm earthy hue of the wincingly-tart Seville oranges that grow by the sides of the road.  The size of a softball but surprisingly light in your hand, you can tear away the quarter-inch-thick pulpy skin to reveal tempting fleshy segments which should,  however parched you find yourself after a long day’s exploring, not be tasted unless you want a look of eye-twitching disdain etched on your face for the following twenty minutes.  They make great marmalade though, apparently.  I wouldn’t know, having woken up too late for breakfast on all three mornings.  Nightlife here means morning-life according to the clock, and burning the candle at both ends is really a job for the employed.  But I digress.

 

The ubiquitous orange accent colour of the city, found on everything from porticoes to roof terraces, from the lowliest pension to the grandest hotel,  is borne of the sand of the Plaza del Torros; a 12,000 seat  oval arena by the river which was one of the first grand bullrings built in Spain.  It holds shows every Sunday through the summer… apart from today.  Of course.  The tour and museum are interesting enough though, and I now know amongst other things that (a) bullfights start on horseback, with a rider injuring the bull sufficiently with a spear  for the matador to get close, (b) an easy killing stroke to the neck is not allowed, the matador must instead reach beyond the horns to the crest of the shoulder within three attempts to win his prize, and (c) I’d have a lot more sympathy for the whole enterprise if either the bulls got a reprieve on the occasions that the matador fails (they don’t, they’re executed by other means) or if there was higher death rate among matadors.  I don’t disrespect the primal, bravura, man-vs-beast of it all… but the statistics suggest this is not a fair fight or a real risk.  I still intend to see a fight in Granada if I can, but I’m pretty sceptical now that I’ll enjoy it.

 

Day 1 was Thursday 5th June, and it was reasonably uneventful.  Taking the path through the trees, rather than along the road, from my parents’ house into Amersham, I always recall taking the same walk in the summer of 2000, to collect my GCSE results.  Of the hundreds of times I’ve taken that route, I must have been especially adrenaline-heightened that day, and I remember it vividly.  I can even tell you the song I was humming, although wild horses wouldn’t get me to admit that it was from Jagged Little Pill.  Strange to think that that was half a lifetime ago, and stranger to imagine what that 16 year old would have thought of this thirty year old: the choices and circumstances that led him to this walk to the station and to Seville and the next six months.  He’d certainly be disappointed that I couldn’t afford to be chauffeur-driven and be startled that the backpack wasn’t a matching set of Louis Vuitton suitcases… but then, he always was a bit of a dickhead, that young man.

 

It’s only a mile, and I’m about a stone lighter with the 15 kilos on my back today, than I was without it at Christmas, so walking with the pack isn’t terribly arduous.  I’ve probably packed too much – haven’t left much room for souvenirs – but it wouldn’t break my heart to dispense with a few items en route.  This route was easy: Met line then the Brighton train to Gatwick, lots of time at the airport and then Ryanair – pleasant enough, for a couple of hours – to Seville.  A taxi would have been E30 but the bus only cost 4 and got me 200yds from the hostel.  It is a point of pride for the trip that I don’t intend to take a single taxi; but we’ll see whether bad planning, exhaustion, drunkenness or just plain laziness foil that plan.

 

La Banda Rooftop Hostel, owned and run by four twenty-something Brits (Sam, Tom, Ollie, and The Other One ) is welcoming and well-run. Cold beers for a euro, and excellent dinners en famille on the rooftop for E6.  From the rooftop you can see the roof of the Cathedral, stone crenellations and spires scything into the deep blue sky as evening falls, and magnificently illuminated at night.  Dinner (tacos, paella, mediterranean chicken with rice and beans… tasty local fare, generous portions, and seconds on demand) tends to be followed by drinks in the bars of Calle Alfalfa.  I keep saying “and we’ll live off the fat’o’theland”… but no-one gets it.  Not Steinbeck fans obviously.  It’s a nondescript  sidestreet ten feet across where almost every unit on both sides  is a bar, so the drinkers spill out into the street and intermingle until 3 or 4 in the morning.  A little touristy, but it’s close, and cheap, and the company and conversation has been good.

 

Day 2 therefore didn’t get going until after 10am, but made it out in time for the walking tour.  Reviews over dinner the previous night had been extremely mixed.  If you got Juan, you got pointless anecdotes about twentieth century history, character assassination of General Franco, and sore feet.  If you got Meddi,  you got fascinating insights into the soul and history of the city, from Roman beginnings through Arabs and Moors and Reconquista, to glory days as the sole clearing post for American plunder, right up to the great exhibitions of 1929 and 1992.  And sore feet.  I asked at reception: it was Meddi today.

 

A slight,bird-boned Morroccan of about thirty five, Meddi has the poise of a dancer and an encyclopaedic knowledge of his adopted city.  Take his tour, if you pass this way.  It’s mainly a tour of minor sights.  We saw the dodecahedral Moorish watchtower, the  Torre del Oro, so called because (1) it was painted in such a way that it shone like gold, or (2) it was there that the ruler kept his concubines, more precious to him than gold, or (3) because in the sixteenth century all the gold of the Aztecs and Incas entered Spain through Sevilla, past this tower on the Guadalquivir.  The historians tend to plump for version 3, rather disappointingy.  We saw the statue of Ferdinand III, father of the Reconquista, and learned about his son, Alfonso X (“the wise”), whose statue stands among the 23 greatest lawmakers in history in the US Capitol Building, and who is remembered for a farsighted inclusivity which sought to treat Christians Muslims and Jews equally and even-handedly, and laid the foundations of the intermingling of cultures which defines that era of Southern Spanish history.  We walked in the grand marble halls of the university, a building which for the first two hundred and fifty years of its existence was a tobacco factory staffed almost exclusively by women (the opera Carmen is set here.  In fact over 100 operas are set in or reference Seville, more than for any other city).  The “moat” around the university isn’t for keeping water in, it’s for keeping water out: Seville is built on a floodplain and although it rains very infrequently here floods are not uncommon because when it does rain, it really rains.  Under threat of inundation, the tobacco in the factory would be kept dry as floodwaters filled the moat rather than the building.  Finally we walked among the rotundas and plazas of the Great Exhibition of 1929, culminating in the impressive Plaza de Espania.  It would have been a vast grand circular building enclosing a courtyard perhaps 150 yards in diameter… if they hadn’t buggered up the budget and run out of money half way round.  So it’s a semi-circle, but no less impressive for that, with homage paid to each of Spain’s fifty provinces under each of its archways, and central fountains and a little waterway big enough to take the rowboats you can rent if you’re foolish enough.

 

I wasn’t, I needed lunch, so I walked with French-Canadian Jade and Swiss Raphael to the city on the other side of the river, Triana, (named for Emperor Trajan, native of the area and first provincial ruler of Rome) for some tapas.  We ate in a little restaurant in a covered market by the Queen Isabella bridge, where the sangria was good and inexpensive, and the food was tasty.  Refreshed and refuelled we decided to head to the Alcazar, stopping for photos outside the cathedral on the way.

 

The Real Alcazar (that’s rhe-all al-KA-tha) is a thirteenth century Christian expansion of a tenth-century Muslim fortress, and it is big.  The decorative style is predominantly geometrical Muslim mosaics, with water features and detailed plasterwork in keeping with that Islamic influence, but there are also biblical inscriptions in Old Gothic script, enormous tapestries depicting scenes from the discovery of the New World, and ceramic masterpieces from neighbouring Triana, long-famous for its potters and potteries.  The gardens with their fountains and peacocks are fragrant and peaceful, fit for the royal court of Castille-Lyon, who lived here, and even as a residence for Emperor Charles V when he visited.  I spent the better part of two hours at the Alcazar, rarely with any idea of which room I was in or which I hadn’t seen; with every corner revealing some new courtyard, or elaborate archway, or stateroom.  Or sometimes, this being me, a dead end.  It is a remarkable building, and the mixture of architectural styles and cultural influences should create confusion and discord but on the contrary, just like medieval Spain itself, they are brought together – for the most part – with great serenity and harmony.

 

Limping back to the hostel after seven hours of exploration, my feet were of course ready to take their leave of me, so I went for a swim.  To reach the city’s 25m pool was a further twenty minute trek, but it did take me to the Alameda de Hercules, where at either end of a long slim plaza four pillars stand in two pairs looking… well rather un-Herculean, actually.  Twenty feet tall and perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, the name rather flatters to deceive.  But the pool was cool and although busy was peopled with fit Spaniards with excellent lane discipline, so I have no complaints.  A couple of kilometres later my feet thanked me and my shoulders were done with me, so back to the hostel for paella, and later some Jack Daniel’s on Alfalfa.

 

Rather a lot of Jack Daniel’s actually.  But by lunchtime on Saturday I was alive and well-briefed by Tripadvisor as to the Roman ruins of Italica which lie half an hour away from the city, on the other side of Triana in Santiponce.   Lunch was constructed from supermarket bargains on the walk to the bus station at Plaza des Armas, and after being charmingly informed while waiting for the bus that I looked twenty not thirty (I was cleanshaven, and she was eighty-five…) the bus drove smoothly (take note please, Rio bus drivers) to Italica.

 

This Roman settlement originally dates to around 200BC, when some of Scipio Africanus’ legionaries needed some R&R, and some stitching up, on their way back from the Punic Wars.  But it gets exciting when local boy Trajan becomes Emperor, and in the 100s he and his son Hadrian (yes, that Hadrian) order a series of expansions and redevelopments which would make even the EU blush for sheer unjustified expenditure and pork-barrel politics.  The Forum and the centre of the Roman city now lie beneath present day Santiponce, but Italica remains almost completely untouched – at floor level at least – on the outskirts of the town.  This was the hill-town of the patrician class, with semi-public buildings which had a residential and public function: large houses with meeting rooms, large public baths, a Temple to Neptune and to Trajan himself, and a 15,000 seat amphitheatre.

 

The town and its mosaic floors can be walked and explored exactly as they were laid out nineteen hundred years ago, and to see such a large site (walking around takes well over an hour) in situ like that allows for a very special and visceral form of that mental time-travel to which any historian can relate.  Even the landscape is as much Umbria as Andaluscia, and the sight and soft earthy scent of the rows of poplars transport you to a world of togas and intrigue and bacchanals.  The amphitheatre though is simply breathtaking.  It is also, (thank you, Spanish attitude to life) mercifully unmanned, so while many areas are railed off or gated, such rails are almost seductively jumpable.  I was able to cross the floor of the theatre itself, as well as walking the entire rotation at each level, clambering to the very top and even finding an unmarked (and unlit and in places almost untraversable) passageway into the subterranean centre where equipment (and the occasional Gladiator) would have been kept until needed.  I managed not to make any mention of my murdered wife or son, nor of finding vengeance in whatever life, but the place is simply alive with the bated breath and sweat and blood of the men whose armour chinked in the dark corridors before they burst out to live or die under the blazing Spanish sun.

 

There is, rather less poetically, a Roman theatre of the non-amphi variety at the other end of the town, but it is entirely sealed behind ten foot metal fences, and even the viewing platform was closed by the time I arrived.  Both this and Italica were built by Hadrian to an unsustainable scale, and by the third century the buildings were being re-purposed, by the fourth abandoned and by the fifth, cannibalised for local buildings.  Given all that it’s a miracle they survive as well as they do, early twentieth century  excavations unearthing all this and statues of Diana the Huntress and Trajan himself which now reside in museums while replicas grace their former site.

 

My return to Sevilla brought on Saturday night and my last night in town, so in a vain attempt to see some flamenco in its spiritual home (other options being sold out or out of budget) I went on suggestion from Sam to Casa Matias, just round the corner, where the wine was as rough as the locals who were drinking it but the music was roots-deep and the singing communal.  Needless to say I couldn’t understand the words, but belted out in that hoarse-tenor of Spanish and Arabic singing, you hardly need to.  The guitarist strummed so harshly it was almost percussive, while his friend kept the complex twelve-beat rhythm with his hands, and the patrons sang while the local Mr Charisma strained at the very edge of his range to bring the song to life.   It was clearly just a standard early Saturday evening at Casa Matias, nothing special or deliberate, but it was a little slice of unadulterated Sevilla that I feel rather lucky to have seen.  This is though a bar in which tourists are endured rather than welcomed, and before long I returned to the hostel and a more Anglicised version of Spain.  Dinner at 10pm was good and the better for being needed, and the night concluded in conversation about the vicissitudes of running a hostel and the healing period of a broken heart, at around 3am in a local bar.

 

Sunday morning taught me once again that I am constitutionally unsuited to making a checkout time, but that I’m getting marginally better at packing my bag, and then it was a tour of the bullring- see above.  Shame there was no fight – and that Mass until 2.30pm ruled out a full tour of the inside of the cathedral and the Tower – but it meant I got to see and climb the Metropol Parasol, the famous “mushrooms” of Jurgen Mayer-Hermann built in 2011.  The views of the city are almost as good as can be found anywhere, and the structure is surreal… but nice.  Thence to the bus station with Jade, who was also headed for Cordoba, and I finally pulled out my Chromebook to start to write.  I’m concluding this entry sitting outside a bar in the shadow of the Mezquita-cathedral de Cordoba, drinking good Rioja and smoking a watermelon shisha, having had a charming afternoon with Jade exploring the Jewish quarter and drinking a Bedouin infusion in a local tearoom.  But that’s Cordoba, and that’s a story for another day.