History of Seville: a city built in layers

The origins: Tartessos and the Phoenicians

Long before Seville existed, the lower Guadalquivir was a land rich in metals, livestock and farming. Here flourished the culture the Greeks called Tartessos, famous in antiquity for its wealth. The Phoenicians, the great traders of the Mediterranean, came for the region’s silver and copper and left their mark on objects, temples and customs.

The symbol of that era is the El Carambolo treasure, a set of gold jewellery found in 1958 on a hill in Camas, next to Seville. It is displayed in the city’s Archaeological Museum and sums up what this land was: a crossroads between the local and what arrived by sea. That idea — Seville as a port and a meeting place — runs through its whole history.

Hispalis and Itálica: Roman Seville

The Romans arrived in the middle of the war against Carthage. In 206 BC Scipio founded Itálica to settle his wounded soldiers, a few kilometres from the city. Itálica would be the birthplace of two emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, and today it is one of Spain’s great archaeological sites.

Meanwhile, the settlement by the river grew as Hispalis, a river port granted colony status in the first century BC. Remains of that city lie underground, like those displayed beneath the Setas, and two columns from a Roman temple were moved to the Alameda de Hércules in the sixteenth century. Hispalis already played the role Seville would repeat for centuries: the valley’s outlet to the sea.

Isbiliya: five centuries of Andalusi Seville

In 712 the city passed into Muslim hands and became Isbiliya, one of the great cities of al-Andalus. For more than five centuries it was the capital of a taifa kingdom with poet-kings such as al-Mutamid, a seat of the Almoravids and, above all, the capital of the Almohads, who transformed it.

We owe the Almohads much of what we now associate with Seville: the great mosque, whose Courtyard of the Orange Trees survives, and its minaret, today’s Giralda; the enlarged city walls; the palaces at the origin of the Alcázar; and the Torre del Oro, which guarded the port. We also inherited from them the narrow, winding streets of the centre, designed to provide shade.

If the people of this era interest you, some of their stories — such as that of al-Mutamid and the poet Itimad — are told on the Seville stories and legends tour.

1248: Castilian Seville

In November 1248, after a long siege, Fernando III of Castile entered Seville. The city was resettled with people from the north and organised into parishes, many built on former mosques: the origin of so many churches and squares in the centre. The great mosque was consecrated as a cathedral and remained in use until, in the early fifteenth century, the chapter decided to build a new church.

That new Gothic Cathedral, completed in 1506, is one of the largest in the world and keeps the Giralda as its bell tower. Earlier, around 1364, King Pedro I had built a palace in the Alcázar with Mudéjar craftsmen, blending the Andalusi tradition with the power of a Christian king. That blend — Islamic art in the service of Castile — is one of the keys to understanding the city.

Port of the Indies: Seville’s golden age

After Columbus’s voyages, the Crown chose Seville as the sole gateway for trade with the Americas. In 1503 the House of Trade was created, housed in the Alcázar, controlling ships, goods, passengers and the silver arriving from the Indies. The city became one of the richest and most populous in Europe, full of bankers, merchants, artists and adventurers from all over the continent.

In 1519 Magellan’s expedition set out from here, and in 1522 Juan Sebastián Elcano returned after completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also gave Seville many of its Baroque churches, its palace-houses and the great painting of Murillo, Zurbarán and Velázquez, who was born here. Cervantes lived in the city and portrayed it in his novels. To grasp the scale of that trade, visit the Archive of the Indies, which holds its written memory.

1929 and 1992: two Expos that changed the city

In the twentieth century Seville reinvented itself twice with two world fairs. The 1929 Ibero-American Exposition transformed the south of the city: María Luisa Park, Aníbal González’s Plaza de España, Plaza de América and dozens of pavilions that are now museums, consulates or university faculties. Its regionalist style, in brick and ceramics, defined the image of modern Seville.

The 1992 World Expo was held on the island of La Cartuja, next to the monastery where Columbus stayed. It brought new bridges over the Guadalquivir, Santa Justa station, the high-speed train to Madrid and a leap in infrastructure that is still felt today.

Seville today

In 1987 UNESCO declared the Cathedral, the Alcázar and the Archive of the Indies a World Heritage Site. In 2011 the Setas de la Encarnación opened, the symbol of a city that blends heritage and contemporary architecture. Today Seville is the capital of Andalusia, a university city and one of the most visited destinations in Spain.

The fascinating thing is that all these layers coexist on a single walk: a Roman column, an Almohad minaret, a Mudéjar palace, a Gothic cathedral, a Baroque church, a nineteenth-century square and a twenty-first-century structure. Knowing how to read them is what turns a walk into a visit.