Sevilla, parte dos

Part two.

As “promised”… another church and bell tower!

As the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, Seville’s cathedral was very hard to try and get into one picture.

The bell tower, La Giralda, is 318 ft tall -

… and was built as the minaret for the Great Mosque of Sevilla between 1184 - 1198. The Renaissance top was added by the Catholics in 1568.

On our visit to the cathedral, we found ourselves immediately in the line to climb the bell tower, so of course we did! Interestingly, there are not stairs inside, but rather 35 ramps. This is so that a donkey or a horse carrying either a bell ringer or the Sultan could climb more easily. (the beast of burden depends on the story you’re hearing)

You can get a slight sense of the size of the cathedral here (vantage points are from opposite sides of the bell tower)-

(the city’s bullring is in the upper right corner)

… while the maze of narrow streets can be appreciated in this shot:

As you can imagine, the inside has soaring spaces…

… a gorgeous pipe organ…

… unbelievably sumptuous side chapels…

… not to mention the enormous and intricately decorated main altarpiece (completed in 1564, after taking 80 years of work) -

It is carved wood, gilded with real gold.

And we can’t leave without visiting Christopher Columbus’ tomb -

Now I want to share some scenes of every day life… narrow streets -

… that just barely fit cars:

(that wall was just a couple of inches away from the side mirror, and was identically spaced on the opposite side; luckily, this was the taxi taking us to get our rental car, and we hadn’t had to negotiate these streets except on foot)

…red and yellow buildings were common -

… tiles with addresses, and HUGE doors…

… and a gorgeous Saturday in the park (we truly have never seen so many horse and carriages in one area before! -

Another pretty neat thing we stumbled into was a procession complete with band, incense and platform with a statue being carried -

(remember to open this email in a browser to be able to see these videos)

I’ll leave you with a representation of the golden light in Sevilla -