Sevilla, Spain - July 28

carved walls

32 degrees, blazing sun, a bit breezy

The main attraction of Sevilla is the Alcazar royal palace. It is very close to our hotel which is always our goal in choosing a hotel. In fact, as we were waiting for our tour to start today, we decided to pop back to the hotel to use the loo. This morning, we found a tour to book on line, and this afternoon we were on the go with it – very slick, this was our system in Munich as well, and so far it is working just as well.

carved walls

This tour was only about an hour, but that was all it took to see and hear about the Alcazar palace, with about 10 other people, the tours in Munich were way bigger crowds at 25-30, so Sevilla is winning in this department. I don’t think the tour has fewer people because there aren’t very many tourists

carved walls

here…there are…everywhere. We decided against the extra 30 minutes add on to this tour that could have been

taken to hear about parts of the palace where a bit of Game of Thrones was filmed. This palace was built for a Christian king by

tiled walls are everywhere

Muslims who stayed in the area after it was conquered by Christians and were not forced to convert. This style is called Mudéjar – basically the workers were Muslim and their style was not what we’d think of as Christian, but Muslim, although the building was never Muslim, only made by Muslim workers. We’ve visited a few other buildings in this

garden pool

style, actually Muslim or not and they are stunning. Very different from what we would typically think of as a palace. Almost 100% of the walls are covered with tiles or carved design, not all depicting a scene or message, but for much decoration. There all some large paintings here depicting the Spanish royalty of the time and explorers…Christopher Columbus.

garden fountain

After the tour we had a snack and a beer and toured the massive gardens surrounding the Palace. It was very hot today, so we didn’t explore all of the gardens. One of the benefits of taking a tour is that we can skip the line up to get in, today the line up was long – the amount of visitors seems to be quite controlled and once inside there aren’t too many people.

At this point we were tired hot, so as the guide suggested…went

back to the hotel for a siesta during the hottest part of the day.

Spain’s selection of potato chips isn’t particularly blog-worthy, but I still have to make the effort. This bag of ‘receta Cammpesina’ was the best I could find. There was ham and cheese (almost everything here needs to have ham), but I decided

more tiled walls

against those…maybe tomorrow. The ‘receta Cammpesina’ were pretty plain tasting…apparently the name means ‘peasant recipe’…tomato, onion, and garlic…and thankfully no gluten…I guess the Spaniards resist the gluten too…not sure chips ever HAD gluten, but that’s a whole other blog.