Wednesday 20 October
A busy day today. We started at the magnificent Seville Cathedral. It is the fourth largest church in the world apparently and quite hard to take it all in! The Gothic section alone spans 126 x 76 metres. Like most cathedrals in this area, it's built on the site of a 12th Century mosque and it was taken over as a Christian building in the 13th Century. From the 15th Century a new cathedral was built to the Gothic style of the day.
It has a major bling factor. Catholic gothic style is certainly not subtle, some would call it gaudy, and there is a lot of gold, highly decorative styling happening here. The gold image on the left, below, is the main alter. Around the edges of the cathedral are over 80 chapels (below, right) each dedicated to a particular Saint and styled in a unique, ornate decor.
I much prefer the more muted tones of the Renaissance valt.
This was exciting - the tomb of Christopher Columbus.
We climbed up the Giralda, the 104 m bell tower and enjoyed the wonderful views on the way.
Seville has a strong maritime heritage as it used to be a major port. I'd spotted the Torro del Oro (Gold Tower) on the map and discovered this once-watch tower was now a maritime museum. Yippee! So of course we had to go and visit. I won't get too geeky on this blog but it was a very Ruth-interesting place full of charts and other maritime artefacts.
The Nao Victoria was the first ship to sail around the world and a replica has been moored at the port from where Elcano set off for this amazing feat. It's tiny!
Not content with bagging the cathedral, maritime museum and sailing ship, we crossed the river to explore the Triana. Our guide book had lots of short exploratory walks detailed for various areas of Seville and, I was determined to do as many of them as we could in our stay. We wandered up and down small, quaint streets full of beautiful house fronts, tiles and paintings.
And I found a cow.
Once back at our flat JC wanted to capture sunset again. Although his position looks quite precarious, the worst that would have happened was he would fallen onto the adjoining roof terrace of next door!
It was on days like today that I wished I had a fitbit/step counter. Except when we were eating or drinking we never sat down. Fantastic.
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