Seville: An Historical and Descriptive Account of The Pearl of Andalusia

Seville is the most Spanish of the cities of Spain. On her white walls the sunlight plays perpetually, the air is laden with the scent of the orange, the sound of the guitar and castanets is heard continually in the narrow streets. This is the South of romance, the South of which northerners dream and towards which so many of them are drawn by an irresistible fascination. The cities of Leon and Castile are grim and Gothic. Cordova is Moorish; but Seville is not essentially one nor the other, but presents that blending of both styles which makes her typical, which stands for all that Spain means to the average foreigner.

Seville lives. Cordova is dead, and Granada broods over her past. These are cemeteries of a vanished civilisation. Alone among the ancient seats of Moorish dominion, Seville has maintained her prosperity. Her wharves, as in the days of Al Mansûr, are still the resort of sailors from many lands. There is still wealth in her palaces and genius in her schools. To-day she holds the first place in native art, and Garcia y Ramos, Sanchez Perrier, Jimenez Aranda, and Bilbao not unworthily continue the traditions of Murillo and Zurbarán.

The city is Moorish, but informed throughout with the spirit of Spain. In Cordova the Spaniard seems a stranger; in Seville he has assimilated and adapted all that was bequeathed by his onetime rulers till you might think the place had always been his. It is as though the glowing metal of Andalusian life and temper had been poured into a mould made expressly by other hands to receive it. Thus Seville has not died nor decayed like her rivals. Her vitality intoxicates the northerner. Valdés says, “Seville has ever been for me the symbol of light, the city of love and joy.”

In my book, “Moorish Remains in Spain,” I have sketched the history of the city and briefly referred to its importance under the Roman sway. With the few monuments remaining from that time I do not purpose dealing separately—incorporated as they have been, for the most part, with works of more recent construction. Nor has Roman influence left very profound traces in Seville, any more than in the rest of Spain. Señor Rafael Contreras justly remarks that Roman civilisation made no deep impression on the country or the people. “We have in Spain,” he continues, “aqueducts, bridges, circuses, baths, roads, vases, urns, milliaria, statues, and jewellery. Specimens are still found, but, strictly speaking, art with us has never been either Roman or Greek.” And Seville, in particular, even during the Roman occupation, was rather a Punic than a Latin town. As to the successors of the Cæsars—the Visigoths—to them can only be ascribed a few capitals and stone ornaments, roughly executed in the Byzantine style. These, like the Roman remains, were used by the Moors in the construction of those buildings that have determined the physiognomy of Seville.