LegendWe shall be thought mad
When the canons voted in 1401, one of them said: let us build a church so great that those who see it finished will think we were mad.
Source: Cathedral tradition; the minutes of the meeting do not survive
The story
In 1172 the Almohad caliph, who ruled from Morocco, ordered a new great mosque for his Spanish capital. It took twenty-six years. Fifty years after it was finished the Christians took the city and used the mosque as their cathedral, as it stood, for a century and a half.
By 1401 it was falling down. The canons voted to replace it. They kept the tower and the courtyard and filled the prayer hall's rectangle with a church. That is why it is so wide and so square, unlike any cathedral in France. In China the building years run from the Xuande to the Zhengde reigns of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
Close by, with a page of its own: Alcázar of Seville, Mezquita, Córdoba, Notre-Dame de Paris.
What is here
The ticket covers the church, the treasury, the tower and the courtyard, and also a second church ten minutes away, El Salvador. Walks on the roof are a separate guided ticket.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The church and the tomb of Columbus | Cathedral ticket |
| The high altar and the royal chapel | Cathedral ticket; the chapel is closed during services |
| The treasury | Cathedral ticket |
| The Giralda | Cathedral ticket |
| The courtyard of the orange trees | Cathedral ticket; you leave through it |
| The roof | Separate guided ticket |
If you have one minute
At the foot of the tower
Look up the Giralda in three parts. The lower two thirds, of brick with panels of woven pattern, are the minaret of 1198. The stone at the very bottom is older still: Roman blocks reused, some with Latin on them.
The top third, with the bells, was added in 1568. On the very tip a bronze woman four metres high holds a shield and a palm. She is a weathervane and turns with the wind. Her nickname, the Giraldillo, "the one that turns", gave the whole tower its name.
There are no stairs inside. Thirty-five ramps wind up round a core, wide enough for the man who gave the call to prayer to ride up on a horse five times a day. You walk up the same ramps.
Things people often get wrong
"The tower is a church tower in Moorish style." It is a real minaret. Its two sisters, built by the same rulers in the same years, still stand in Marrakesh and Rabat.
"It is the biggest church in the world." It is the biggest Gothic one, and the biggest cathedral by volume. Saint Peter's in Rome and one in Brazil are larger churches.
"Columbus is certainly buried here." See the fourth stop below. The Dominican Republic says it has him too. Both may be right.
"The gold is from America." The great altarpiece was begun in 1482, ten years before Columbus sailed. Its later parts may well be gilded with American gold.
People who stood here
- Abu Yaqub Yusuf (Almohad caliph, reigned 1163–1184)He ordered the mosque in 1172 and the minaret in 1184, and was killed in battle in Portugal that same summer. His son finished both.
- Ferdinand III of Castile (king, 1199–1252; made a saint in 1671)He took Seville in 1248 after a siege of sixteen months and died here four years later. He lies in a silver casket behind the high altar. His first tomb carried his epitaph in four languages: Latin, Castilian, Arabic and Hebrew.
- Christopher Columbus (Genoese navigator, 1451–1506)He sailed four times from this region and died believing he had reached Asia. His bones have crossed the Atlantic twice since his death: to Santo Domingo, to Havana, and back to Seville in 1899.
- Hernando Colón (Columbus's son, 1488–1539)He sailed with his father at thirteen and spent the rest of his life trying to collect a copy of every book in the world. He reached about fifteen thousand. What is left of the library belongs to the cathedral. His gravestone is in the floor of the nave, with his ships on it.
- Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish writer, author of Don Quixote)In 1598 the city built a monument of painted wood for the dead king inside the cathedral, as tall as the vaults. Cervantes, who was living in Seville and had just come out of its jail, wrote a mocking sonnet about it.
- Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (painter of Seville, 1617–1682)He was baptised a few streets away and painted for this church all his life. In 1874 a thief cut the kneeling saint out of his largest canvas here. It turned up in New York two months later and was sewn back in. You can see the seam.
- Stanford White (American architect, 1853–1906)In 1890 he put a copy of the Giralda on top of Madison Square Garden in New York, with a naked goddess for a weathervane. Copies of the tower also stand in Kansas City and elsewhere.
Go deeper: eight stops, from the orange trees to the top of the tower
One ticket covers all eight stops. The visit starts at the south door and ends in the courtyard.
1. The courtyard of the orange trees
This was where the faithful washed before prayer. The channels cut in the paving between the trees carried the water. The fountain in the middle has a basin that is older than the mosque: it is Visigothic, from before 711.
The gate to the street keeps its horseshoe arch and its bronze doors from the 1100s. Under the arcade by it hang a wooden crocodile, an elephant's tusk and a horse's bit.
2. The width
Inside, the first thing is the width. There are five aisles, and the side ones are nearly as high as the middle. A French cathedral pulls you forward to the altar. This one spreads sideways, like the hall of columns it replaced.
Look up where the two arms cross. The stone lace of that vault is the third on the spot. The first fell in 1511 and the second in 1888.
3. The wall of gold
Behind the iron screen is the largest altarpiece in the Christian world: twenty metres high, with forty-four scenes from the lives of Christ and Mary and more than two hundred figures, all of carved wood covered in gold. A Flemish carver began it in 1482. He and his successors worked on it for eighty years.
The figures at the top are larger than those at the bottom, so that from the floor they all look one size.
4. Columbus
Just inside the south door four bronze heralds, larger than life, carry a coffin on their shoulders. They wear the arms of the four kingdoms of Spain. The monument was made for the cathedral of Havana. When Spain lost Cuba in 1898 it was shipped here with the bones.
Look at the spear of one of the heralds at the front. Its point goes through a pomegranate. In Spanish the fruit is "granada": the conquest of Granada in 1492 freed the money for the voyage.
In 2006 scientists compared the DNA of the bones in the coffin with that of Columbus's brother, buried nearby. They matched. But the coffin holds only about a fifth of a skeleton.
5. The king in silver
At the east end a domed chapel holds the conqueror of the city, Ferdinand III, in a casket of silver. It is opened on a few days each year and his body is shown. Above the altar sits a small figure of the Virgin with jointed arms and real hair. She is the patron of Seville.
6. The treasury
The great sacristy is a room of the 1530s under a dome carved with the Last Judgement. In the middle stands a silver tower nearly four metres high, made in the 1580s to carry the consecrated bread through the streets once a year. It takes a team of men under it.
¡Voto a Dios que me espanta esta grandeza y que diera un doblón por describilla!
I swear to God this grandeur frightens me, and I'd give a gold doubloon to describe it!
Miguel de Cervantes, the opening of his sonnet on the king's monument in Seville Cathedral, 1598. It ends with a swaggering soldier who looks, puts on his hat and walks off: "and there was nothing"; our translation
7. The ramps
The climb is easy: thirty-five ramps and then seventeen steps. Windows on the way show you the roof of the church from above, a forest of stone spikes and flying arches.
From the bell floor you look down on the palace and its gardens to the south, the bullring by the river to the west, and one glass tower of 2015, the first building in eight hundred years to be taller than this one.
The bells are rung by swinging them right over. If one starts while you are beside it, cover your ears.
8. The same shot
The same shot: the picture of the tower and the east end together is taken from the far side of the small square behind the cathedral, beside the fountain with the lamp, at dusk when the floodlights come on. For the tower framed by orange trees, stand in the lane called Mateos Gago, two hundred metres to the east.
By the south door stands a copy of the weathervane, so you can see how big she is.