The town felt wildly disconnected, like one of those vivid but illogical dreams that recur often, yet never in quite the same form. As a result, Seville disrupted my mental filing system. I limit the memory of each great city I visit to a single image that can uncap a gusher of memories: the Golden Gate, Central Park, the Seine, Trevi Fountain… There are too many such icons in Seville, forcing a state of beautiful confusion.
In an old part of town–one of many–I strolled through a maze of narrow alleys overshadowed by a jumble of architectural styles: Moorish, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and–best of all–Neighborhood Sidewalk Tapas Bar.
Deep inside that particular barrio, Santa Cruz, I would forget the newer parts of Seville and feel immersed in the past life of a small Spanish village, where Carmen would run into Don Juan on her way to her job in the cigarette factory.
And when I visited the city’s newer precincts–the leafy parks, the open plazas, the generic European-Union traffic–old Santa Cruz slipped my mind for a moment, and I was rudely jerked back to the present, into a metropolis of 715,000 crowded souls, the Seville of demographers and bureaucrats.
But the people do crowd the sidewalks with a certain elan; their din does have the rhythm of castanets.
On the west side of Rio Guadalquivir, where an open landscape provides the apron for another Seville–one of ancient neighborhoods barnacled by new ones–I entered an almost frighteningly quiet compound, the Monastery of Santa Maria de las Cuevas. That is, it was a monastery in the 15th Century, and then it became a ceramics factory beginning in the 19th.
Now the buildings and the garden are a historic site. Christopher Columbus planned some of his voyages while immersed in the solitude of Santa Maria de las Cuevas. The river, where it flowed outside his monastery window, was less than 80 miles from the Atlantic–and the unknown.
Some buildings erected for Expo ’92 can be seen from the monastery, a swathe of ultra-modernity scattered through 2 miles of requisitioned farmland. The 500-plus Expo acres cover a part of Isla de la Cartuja, which is not an island at all, more of a peninsula protruding between Rio Guadalquivir and a canal. Just another aspect of Seville that isn’t quite what it seems to be.
Yes, Seville held a world’s fair five years ago, one that Chicago at first planned to share and then rejected. Many Chicago business leaders wanted the event; a lot of grassroots community organizers didn’t see how their people would benefit.
Looking back on it now, Gerardo Quintana, a former Expo ’92 executive, chalks up Chicago’s withdrawal to lack of funds: “There were some problems with the authorities. The municipal government refused to give any economical support to the private initiative.”
Originally, so went the thinking in the mid-’80s, Seville would host an intimate cultural exposition. Chicago’s assignment, as anyone might have guessed, involved the brawny part: industrial progress, technical innovation, futuristic science and all that.
The occasion: 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus bumped into what is now the American side of the Atlantic and claimed it for Spain. Columbus, an Italian from Genoa, plotted expeditions in Seville and found his royal sponsors here. Chicago evidently suited the equation because its famous World’s Columbian Exposition marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery.” That fair occurred in 1893–a year late, but certainly not a dollar short. It ranks among the best-remembered of all time.
After Chicago dropped out of the 1992 extravaganza, Seville scrambled to make its fair all-encompassing. Evidence of that still can be seen, sprawled along the banks of Rio Guadalquivir. Icy, boldly conceived, mechanistic buildings face Seville’s ancient neighborhoods from across the water, dramatizing cultural schisms. Seville’s leadership wants the city to become a vital part of the world’s economic network, a recognized food-processing and manufacturing center, straddling the country’s only navigable river. Others have been equally determined to preserve signs of Seville’s rich past–the narrow streets, old churches, the bullfight arena, the silolike riverside repository that once held the riches of the Americas.
Seville’s civic boosters still crow about the benefits the city derived from Expo ’92, even though attendance fell about 3 million short of an anticipated 18 million and Spaniards on tight budgets were the typical attendees, far outnumbering rich Americans or other Europeans.
Quintana currently directs the Seville Congress and Convention Bureau from an office in the Alcazar. His windows look out on a courtyard in the ornate, Muslim-built fortress and palace still used by Spanish royalty for ceremonial purposes. Quintana remembers the period of Expo ’92–which began on April 20 and extended through Columbus Day–as an ordeal, the preparations a trial.
Quintana was charged with promoting the fair, so during the years immediately leading up to it, he spent weeks on the road, trying to persuade other countries to participate. It was a tough sell. A growing body of opinion regards World’s Fairs as an anachronism in this age of satellites and fiber optics. Sensitive people find it hard to celebrate “discoveries” of lands that already were peopled.
“I didn’t enjoy the Expo,” Quintana told me. “I suffered the Expo.”
By the time Expo ’92 opened, Quintana had joined Seville’s Congress and Convention Bureau, traveling the world again, this time to drum up business for the city as a whole.
“In 1992, on the 12th of October, Expo ’92 was closed,” Quintana said. “On the 13th of October, Seville was absolutely empty. I was in Chicago. I called my wife that day and she said, `You would not believe it! I could get a taxi this morning without any problem.’
“The city was empty, absolutely empty, and it remained empty for the whole of 1993. Economically speaking, it was a severe disaster.”
It was a disaster for those who hoped Expo ’92 would entice the world to visit Seville again and again. Some Expo patrons, though, probably felt that it would be like returning to the scene of a mugging. Adults had to pay $40 just to set foot on the grounds (although senior citizens did get a $25 discount). Hotel rates had soared toward the ridiculous, typically $350 to $450 a night near the Expo site.
Empty as it might have been in ’93, the city did enjoy a few lasting improvements that Expo inspired: the high-speed train (AVE) to Madrid, airport expansion, new highways, a diversion of the river (making it a showpiece again after years of hiding behind railroad tracks). But it took a couple of years before tourists were willing to give Seville another chance.
“The magic number is 1,700,000 visitors this year, which is a record,” says Manuel Marchena Gomez, manager of the Seville Tourist Promotion Board. He notes that surplus hotel space has been pared back. Some hotels converted into apartments. Others reduced units in favor of conference facilities. All charge reasonable rates for some of the newest lodging facilities in Europe. Of course, the “magic number” is the record for an ordinary year, not an Expo year. But it sure beats ’93, when tourism all but vanished. Hospitality professionals are betting that visitors will appreciate the new transportation system, the new hotel units and the old, old city.
I surely did. Seville carries its centuries well, preserving a historic district that ranks among the largest in Europe. A romantic who sees only the dapples of sunlight that filter through the grim shadows of Spanish history would delight in Seville. It is a city of bullfights, strumming guitars, costumes, festivals, night life. …
One night, tourists filled a tiny hall in Plaza Santa Cruz for performances of Los Gallos, one of Seville’s best flamenco troupes. The men in the troupe, those singing and playing guitar, wore white shirts and tight black pants. Male dancers added a black jacket and fancier boots. The women came out in swishy, colorful, ankle-length gowns.
The evening flashed by in passionate fervor. Flamenco music draws its fire from centuries of folk singing and dancing mixed together by the many cultures that have passed through southern Spain–Islamic, Jewish, Catholic, African. … Gypsies introduced the once strictly family entertainment into the commercial dance halls.
Voices throb with anguish, and singers plead for compassion from dancers who twist and stomp and stare down their noses. Spectators must whistle and yell. They must. They may never again see performers working so hard, using voices and strings and clicking heels to transport everyone–even themselves–into a lather of passion.
I would see dancers again during walks through Santa Cruz. One afternoon, the performance came from four young women with lacquered hair and long pink, scarlet or purple frocks. A boom box supplied the piteous flamenco refrains as the women danced at the base of a fountain outside Seville’s gigantic Cathedral. A cardboard box silently asked for coins, but the women seemed to feel that the dancing was its own reward. Otherwise it all seemed delightfully spontaneous. None of them bothered to coax loose change from the crowd that had gathered in the intense sunlight, and a few of the spectators joined in–elbows bent, fingers snapping.
Cajoling did come from carriage drivers parked around the plaza. “Rides! Rides! Here!” When they did get clients, their horses pranced delicately out of the line, hooves flashing in a showy prance, snouts held proudly aloft, coats gleaming.
It was a Spanish street scene straight from the book of travel cliches, not a skateboard in sight. And perhaps all of it was artifice. So what?
The Cathedral serves as more than a backdrop. A mosque originally stood on the site. After Christians took over the town in 1248, they worshiped in the same building for more than a century.
Starting in 1401, church elders decided to replace the crumbling edifice with something far more imposing. Local lore has it that one of them said, “Let us create such a building that future generations will think we were lunatics.”
The Cathedral is five football fields wide and nearly as long. Only St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London boast more square footage. I could have spent hours examining the riches inside: delicate tracery, exquisite carving, magnificent paintings, soaring vaulted ceilings, cascades of precious metal and the imposing tomb reputed to hold the remains of Christopher Columbus. The strange beauty of the immense Cathedral, the obvious attempt to put every conceivable form of religious artifact under one roof and inter the dust of Columbus in the gaudiest vault atop the most ornate catafalque, left me thinking the Cathedral creators possibly were a bit daft.
I climbed to the top of the adjoining Islamic minaret, La Giralda, a part of the original mosque that basically has remained the same. The ascent involves walking up ramped switchbacks 30 stories to the top. From there, I had a magnificent view of the city–but which city it was, I couldn’t tell.
Again, Seville had altered my perceptions. The view from Giralda shows countless terra cotta rooftops, whitewashed facades, tufts of trees and only a partial solution to the maze that is Santa Cruz. The buildings are so close together that they hide the walkways. Seville, from above, appeared so densely layered that no stranger could hope to dig through it all.
Although I couldn’t see it from Giralda, the Expo site was out there too. A few of the buildings house technical research centers, a national charity for the blind and classrooms given to the University of Seville. The rest remain deserted on quiet thoroughfares of Space Age skyline, surrounded by chain link fence.
A theme park called Isla Magica–the theme is exploration and discovery, of course–fronts the white cube of the former Spanish pavilion and circles a lake. Miniature caricatures of the Americas and 16th Century Seville line the shore: Puerto Rico and its fort over here, Mexico’s Mayan City of Gold over there, flume rides and roller coasters everywhere.
Parts of the Expo site look forlorn, however–even the high-rise buildings arrayed around sprightly Isla Magica. Those steel and glass structures once held exhibits sponsored by Spain’s autonomous regions. Now they stand empty, and if Isla Magica expands, they will be destroyed.
Except for the amusement park, the site of Expo ’92 is not the most entertaining former exposition grounds to see right now. Back across the river, I wandered through the area where Seville held the Latin American Exposition of 1929. Little boats cruise through the canals that weave around Plaza de Espana, an imposing, columned, brick facade in the pleasant Maria Luisa Park. Nearby, Carmen’s cigarette factory still looks the way Bizet saw it, although that, too, has become a university building. Other structures, housing museums and offices, are delightful exercises in fanciful Roaring Twenties-Moorish-Art Nouveau design, linked by paths that crisscross past fountains, circle statuary and meander through gardens, all shaded by a plenitude of trees.
I found the Hotel Alfonso XIII there–another fantasy domain, studded with colorful tiles, a sampler of Sevillian architecture put together in the 1920s and surrounding a courtyard redolent of genteel elegance. The Alfonso looks intimidating at first, but it contains so many whimsical touches that it charms instead. The carvings and the marble slabs push the hotel overboard to where 20th Century lunatics dream their dreams.
I took a seat at one of the lobby tables and ordered a beer. Once again, I found myself in another Seville, different from the rest, deliciously unfamiliar. I decided that the city was just going to persist in disorienting me. So I would cling to what I knew for sure: a chair and a table at Alfonso XIII, a glass of beer and Spain. Yes, Seville is definitely Spain.
DETAILS ON OLD AND NEW SEVILLE
Getting there: There are no direct flights from Chicago to Seville. United and Delta Airlines route passengers through Frankfurt, Germany, and connect with Iberia–Spain’s airline–from Frankfurt to Seville. Iberia flies to Seville out of New York City (JFK) and includes a Chicago-New York domestic flight (usually on TWA or Delta) as part of the price. Fares range from about $780 to $925, plus tax, at this time of year. In the high summer season, the same flights would start at about $1,200. Also, look for consolidator fares advertised in newspapers and for package deals that include the hotel. Those may lower the cost considerably.
Getting around: Taxis are relatively cheap, and much of the city is walkable. Tour buses make the rounds of the main sights with on-and-off privileges for about $8 a day for adults and $5 for children, seniors and students.
Lodging: I stayed at the two-star Hosteria del Laurel in the Santa Cruz section. In 1844, the cute little inn supposedly inspired one guest, Don Jose Zorrilla, to create the famous character Don Juan Tenorio. Its 20 rooms sit above a pleasant bar/restaurant on Plaza de los Venerables. All units, save one, lack views, but rooms were clean and newly modernized. Expect to pay about $90, double.
At the five-star, 149-room Alfonso XIII, rates start at about $230 and top off at $450 or so.
Dining: It’s fun to make the rounds of Seville’s tapas bars, many of which offer a surprising variety of snacks to go with the sherry and beer. A lot of restaurants serve up fine Andalucian food and traditional dishes from other regions of Spain. Lunches tend to be leisurely and late. Dinners usually start no sooner than 10 p.m., and restaurants will be virtually deserted before that time. The Pizzeria San Marcos, a highly popular Italian restaurant in the Santa Cruz district, serves excellent pasta dishes in an interesting, multilevel space that once served as a Muslim bathhouse.
Accessibility: Some of the older buildings do offer ramps for wheelchairs, but as a rule, only the newest hotels and offices have such facilities. Check with the tourism office (see below) for details.
Information: The Tourist Office of Spain, 845 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 915E, Chicago, Ill. 60611; 312-642-1992, fax 312-642-9817.
