Southern Spain, Painted by Trevor Haddon, Described by A. F. Calvert

by Albert Frederick Calvert

It was not till 1568 that the upper stage of the fabric, a graceful Renaissance superstructure, was added by Fernando Ruiz. In the same year Morel's great statue of Faith, cast in bronze, was placed on the apex to symbolize the triumph of Christianity over the creed of Islam. It is a clever piece of workmanship, for though it weighs twenty-five hundredweights and measures fourteen feet in height, it sways and turns with every wind. Hence the name applied to the Tower—Giralda, from que gira, "which turns."

The first thing you will be asked to do by the guides at Seville is to mount the Giralda, which you do by means of thirty-five inclined planes, up which a horse might be ridden with ease to the very top. Each stage of the ascent is named: "El Cuerpo de Campañas," after its fine peal of bells, one of which weighs eighteen tons; "El Cuerpo del Reloj," after the clock first set up in 1400—the earliest tower-clock in Spain. Then there are the prettily-named floors of the Lilies and the Stars. Some of the rooms are inhabited by the bell-ringers, who may at times be heard practising not only the chimes but the peculiar guitar-playing of Andalusia.

The view from the summit of the tower I think, on the whole, disappointing. The principal buildings of the city are too closely grouped below the spectator to give a very fine effect to the panorama, and the country round is not beautiful. Looking across the arid region beyond the river, it is hard to believe that in Moorish times it was renowned for its beauty and fertility and compared by Arabic writers to the Garden of Eden. Looking down we scan the white city, a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, only here and there a plaza opening like a lake among the closely-set roofs. Far away to the north the Sierra Morena limits the prospect. How often, when from this tower the muezzin proclaimed the Islamic profession of faith, his eyes must have lingered apprehensively on those mountains from whose crests the Christian seemed to hurl back defiance and repudiation.

For the Giralda was the minaret of the great mosque begun by Yusuf, the son of Abd-ur-Rahman, in 1171, and completed by his son and successor, Yakub al Mansûr. The earlier mosque on the same site had been destroyed by the Normans, but some portions of it seem to appear in the horseshoe arches of the Puerta del Lagarto and the northern wall of the Patio de los Naranjos. This latter court, which shuts in the Cathedral on the north side, contains the fountain at which the devout Moslems performed their ablutions. The picturesque Puerta del Perdon, through which you pass on your way into the town, is a Mudejar, not a Moorish, horseshoe arch, erected by Alfonso XI. to commemorate the victory at the Salado in the year 1340. The doors with bronze plates, despite their Arabic inscriptions, also date from that time. The gate was restored in the sixteenth century and adorned with sculptures. The terra-cotta statues of St. Peter and St Paul on the outer side are the work of Miguel Florentin, one of the earliest of the apostles of Renaissance sculpture to settle in Spain. The relief over the arch, representing the expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple, is also by him, and commemorates the substitution of the Lonja or Bourse for this gate as a rendezvous for merchants. The belfry storey is modern. At the little shrine just inside, to the left on entering, may be seen a "Christ bearing the Cross," by Luis de Vargas. The money-changers and brokers have gone, but this gate remains a favourite haunt of the gossips and loungers of Seville, and in the cool of the evening is occupied by some pleasant little family groups from the adjoining houses. The southern side of the patio is occupied by the Cathedral, the western by the church or chapel of the Sagrario. The house on the north side inside the old Moorish wall, to the right of the Giralda gate (on entering), is occupied by the Biblioteca Colombina, bequeathed by the son of Columbus. The pulpit from which St. Vincent Ferrer, the "Angel of the Judgment," thundered forth his terrific fulminations against sinners, Jews, and heretics, I omitted to notice.

Everyone who reaches the Patio de los Naranjos for the first time is sure to enter the Cathedral, which he should not do until the Alcazar at least has been visited. Not that the two great buildings of Seville exhibit any transition of style from the one to the other, but because, having begun the consideration of Moorish architectural work, we ought naturally to pass on immediately to the Mauresque work of the first century of Castilian rule.

The group of buildings which for greater clearness we will call, with the Spaniards themselves, the Alcazares lie to the south of the Cathedral, and are surrounded by an embattled wall built by the Arabs. This enclosure, it should be understood, includes a great many private houses and open spaces besides the Alcazar proper. Immediately inside the wall are two squares called the Patio de las Banderas and Patio de la Monteria. At the far end of the former is the office of the governor of the palace, and to the right of this is an entrance whence a colonnaded passage called the Apeadero leads straight through to the gardens, or, by turning to the right, to the Patio del Leon. On one side this latter square communicates with the Patio de la Monteria; on the other side is the Palace of the Alcazar itself. I hope this will make the rather puzzling topography of the place a little more intelligible.

Whether or not the Roman "Arx" stood on this spot, as tradition avers, I cannot pretend to say. But there is no room for doubt that a palace stood here in the days of the Abbadite amirs, and that this building was restored and remodelled by the Almohades. To outward seeming the Alcazar is as Moorish a monument as the Alhambra. In reality, few traces remain of the palace raised by the Moslem rulers of either dynasty, and the present building was mainly the work of the Castilian kings—especially of Pedro the Cruel. But though built under and for a Christian monarch, it is practically certain that the architects were Moors and good Moslems, and that their instructions and intentions were to build a Moorish palace. Historically, you may say, the Alcazar is a Christian work; artistically, Mohammedan.

The actual palace occupies only a small part of the site of the older structures, and incorporates but a few fragments of their fabrics. Since Pedro the Cruel's day, so many sovereigns have restored, remodelled, and added to the building, that it is far from being homogeneous, though we can hardly agree with Contreras that it is "far from being a monument of Oriental art."