Spain · Old Town
Seville
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Seville is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Catedral de Sevilla 1,500 points
Go in through the orange courtyard on the north flank. That was the washing yard of the mosque that held this ground first, and the trees are still in their rows. Then find the Giralda: no steps inside it, only ramps, because somebody expected to ride up. Main course.
Plaza Nueva 500 points
One building, two faces, and this is the sober one. Go round to the far side and the same city hall turns into carved surface from top to bottom. I like a house that keeps its best skin for the older square.
Puente de Isabel II 500 points
Your way over to Triana, and the only reason this level has two banks. Stop halfway and turn round: from out there the Old Town lays itself along its own edge, end to end. Nothing else I eat today will be this long.
Torre del Oro 500 points
Count the sides as you go round it. Twelve. Nobody believes that until they have made the full circle themselves. The little drum on top with the yellow glaze is centuries younger than the rest of it, and it is the part everyone photographs.
Iglesia de San Isidoro 250 points
This one hides. The lane took its name and that is all the warning you get, so most people walk right by the door. Slow down where the way narrows. Thick walls, cool air, and shade you can feel from the doorstep.
Mercado del Arenal 250 points
Get here in the morning. The quarter's name means the sand: a loose strip lying between the wall and the river, and the fleets emptied themselves onto it. The carrying still goes on. It just fits in a bag now.
Plaza de la Encarnación 250 points
A walkway runs along the roof up there, and it refuses to go straight. From it the whole flat middle of town lies open in one look. Then come down into the shade underneath. Coolest spot on the level, and I have tried every lane.
Sala San Hermenegildo 250 points
The far northern corner of this level, and the one most walkers cut. From the lane it is a flat front with a door in it. Use the door. Whatever you were expecting from the outside, the space behind it is not that.
Name origin
Why it is called Seville.
The Romans wrote Hispalis. The Goths said Spali. Under Arab rule it turned into Ixbilia, and Sevilla is that same word with a few more centuries of wear on it. The river got the plainer name of the two: Guadalquivir is Arabic for the big river, and nobody has improved on that since.
Sources: www.alcazarsevilla.org, www.sevilla.org p. 6
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Water chose this spot, and then water kept moving. The oldest harbour lay where the Plaza del Triunfo is now, and it slid west year after year until it reached the main channel of the Guadalquivir. A second arm of the river once ran straight through the middle of town, down what is now Calle Tetuán and out at Plaza Nueva, until it stopped counting as a waterway at all. It only came back when the floods came back. Power sat beside the harbour the whole time, because that is where the money was landed. And the coast is eighty-four kilometres away, which is an odd address for the busiest port in Europe and was precisely the reason it got the job.
Sources: www.alcazarsevilla.org, www.sevilla.org p. 24, www.sevilla.org p. 25
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Nobody will hand you a founding date here. What you get is a list: Turdetanians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Visigoths, then al-Andalus, then Castile, all on the same patch of ground. The oldest thing I can date that is still above the surface is a mosque begun in 829, and the people who built it set it on the remains of Roman and Visigothic public buildings. That is the local method. Everything is put on top of the last thing.
Sources: www.sevilla.org p. 6, www.catedraldesevilla.es
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 913-1248
The men in the palace on the south side. In 913 the caliph in Córdoba ordered a new seat of government built down there, the Dar al-Imara, and everything since has been added on top of it. Arab rule here was older than that already: the mosque up the hill had been standing eighty years when the order came. Then the Abbadids put a palace of their own beside it, the Almoravids pushed the government quarter out to the river, and the Almohads finished the job in the 12th century. The town wall you keep meeting the ghost of was raised on the order of their caliph, Abu Yaqub Yusuf.
Sources: www.alcazarsevilla.org, www.sevilla.org p. 40
- 1248-1503
Castile. From 1248 the same palace held two things at once: the Crown's seat and the seat of the city's own government, which is what it still is. The municipal archive starts counting from that decade and has not stopped. On the old foundations the new owners put up their own rooms, and around the middle of the 14th century Pedro I added the Mudéjar palace, which is Arab building done for a Castilian king. Nobody here throws anything away.
Sources: www.alcazarsevilla.org, icas.sevilla.org
- 1503-1717
For two centuries the thing that actually ran this town was an office. The Casa de la Contratación was set up here in 1503, and with it the city became the port and the door of America and the economic capital of the country. Everything followed the paperwork: the merchants, the money, the streets full of people from everywhere. Then in 1717 the shipping registry moved to Cádiz, and the whole arrangement walked out the way it had walked in.
Sources: www.sevilla.org p. 40, www.sevilla.org p. 91
- 1717-
The council, in its own building, which is the only ruler on this list still answering the door. From the 1830s the old configuration came apart on purpose: street shrines, convent yards, gates, walls, all of it cleared for a different kind of city. The council answered by giving itself a second front, a sober one, facing the new square. That is the face it shows today, and it is the plainer of the two by a wide margin.
Sources: www.sevilla.org p. 57, www.sevilla.org p. 82
The emblem
What the shield means.
Seville's real arms are a crowd scene: a king on a throne with a bishop standing on either side of him, and beside that a knot-shaped rebus the council cut into the wall of its own chamber in the 1530s. None of that survives being shrunk to the size of a thumbnail. So the icon is the tower on the water instead. Three storeys: the lower two have twelve flat sides each, and the round cap was added in 1760 and roofed in gilded tiles. Its Arabic name was about the golden light the river threw back up at it.
Sources: www.sevilla.org, armada.defensa.gob.es
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
By 1525 a third of this city had been paved. Somebody wrote that down as an achievement, which tells you what the other two thirds were like, and I have thought about the sentence more than is healthy. Growth inside the walls finished in 1598. After that the town could only rebuild itself in place, which it has been doing ever since, on the same surface.
Sources: www.sevilla.org p. 88, www.sevilla.org p. 91
One plot on this level has been in continuous use for about twelve hundred years. A congregational mosque went up on it between 829 and 830, on the remains of Roman and Visigothic public buildings. In 1248 it was made over into a church by the simple move of turning the axis: mosques run north to south, churches run east to west. Around eleven metres of the original minaret is still standing inside the bell tower, square, five point eight eight metres to a side.
Sources: www.catedraldesevilla.es
The lanes are narrow on purpose, not by accident of terrain. A few main streets carried the whole working life of the town, and off them ran narrower ones, and off those ran short blind ones that belonged to the houses on them and went nowhere. Many lanes are named for the guild that worked in them, others for the people who settled in them. So the map is a trade directory that nobody has got round to updating in five hundred years.
Sources: www.sevilla.org p. 77, www.sevilla.org p. 78
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Calle
- The plain word for a street, and here it is nearly the only one. Almost every name on this level begins with it: Calle Sierpes, Calle Francos, Calle Arenal, Calle Betis. No small words for small lanes. A lane is a street and that is the end of it.
- Plaza
- A square, and there are a lot of them. Plaza de la Alfalfa, Plaza del Salvador, Plaza del Cabildo, Plaza de la Magdalena, Plaza del Triunfo. The old ones were markets: fowl on the Alfalfa, melons and greens on the Salvador. A square named after what it sold is a square I trust.
- -eros
- The people who made the thing. Toneleros made barrels, Cedaceros made sieves, Chapineros made the tall cork shoes, Lineros dealt in linen, and Boteros, Conteros and Odreros each had a trade of their own. A whole street of one craft, all day, every day.
- Alemanes
- Some lanes are named for whoever moved in. Calle Alemanes for the Germans, Calle Francos for the French, Calle Placentines for the people from Plasencia, all of them trading in the same few blocks by the cathedral. You could find your countrymen by reading the corners.
- Pasaje
- A passage, cut through a block because somebody was tired of walking round it. Pasaje de los Seises, Pasaje del Ateneo, Pasaje Francisco Molina, Pasaje Cristóbal Morales. Narrow, shaded, and they have dots on them like anything else.
- San
- A saint, and the fastest way to guess what used to stand there. Calle San Eloy, Calle San Isidoro, Calle San Juan, Calle Santas Patronas, Plaza de San Francisco. Half of them are named for a church or a convent that has since gone somewhere else, or nowhere.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 210streets
- 1,720dots
- 27.7km of street
- 35.8km on foot
- 10.2hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.