Seville Tiles

Tiles are all over this part of the world--particularly great in Portugal--but I was struck with the number commercial and other uses in Seville...

Six different tiled portals on this touriste
shoppe 

The rest looked like this

Billboard

Beautiful entry

Farmacia

Architect's signature, under the balcony

1929

Bar Europa

Heritage use; not one of his best-sellers

Butcher

Baker

Somebody's casa

Entrance to an ordinary-looking apartment
building (it was the same in Dos Hermanas,
20 miles away, where our campground was...)

Could someone do this in tile, please?

Seville Sights

After the morning and half the afternoon at the Alcazar, we walked around much of the old town...

Sic Transit, Gloria department again: this is the cigar factory
where Carmen worked....now merely the university

Street lamps, dated 1832

Hotel Alfonso, one of Seville's emblems; we were going to
finish up there with a sherry in the garden, but took a wrong
turn and wound up at Burger King

Cathedral square, cathedral bit, and tower
(originally the minaret)

Entrance to the cathedral with replica of the
weather vane that sits atop

We got as far as the gift shoppe but decided
to skip the cathedral since we missed the
Holy Week parade pictured above; and
since we had seen it in 2010; and since it is
another of those fraudulent "Gothic"
cathedrals one sees in Spain...Gothic
trappings on the outside, thoroughly
Baroque (and dark) on the inside; I am
reminded of Nabokov's claim (contra
Pseudo-Dionysus) that the
gargoyle monsters are on the outside to
show that they have been expelled; in
these cathedrals it is the Gothic that has
been expelled!

Main square again

Some beautiful buildings

Ditto

Ditto again

Kissing alleys in the barrio

Recycling millstones

El Cid still presiding

Seville's Alcazar

I know, I posted extensively on the Alcazar in 2010. But there are just so many views one has to shoot again and share...plus, we tarried and saw quite a few things we missed in 2010.

Sic Transit, Gloria

In one of the Alcazar's many interior courtyards, the site of
Spain's first tennis court, built for the royalty in the early
1900s; now it's just pushing up roses and shrubs and a tree

Seville's Alacazar Gardens

Until we figured out the dates of the feria, we were going to Seville mainly to see the old town and the cathedral and the Alcazar, the great Moorish palace and gardens that are my favorite secular Moorish place in Spain. True, the Alcazar in Seville was built by a Christian prince, but he hired Granada builders to do the job. This was before international Gothic or other styles, and, I conjecture, Moorish was the only style anybody knew in Spain at the time, apart from Roman. In any case, the Alcazar is beautiful throughout (more so than the more "authentic" Alhambra (well, authentic to  fanciful 19th century reconstruction)). We first visited the Alcazar in the winter of 2010, not a great time for gardens. Mid-April is much better.