To Seville

In the evening yesterday, we went out into Cordoba to have a look at the Juderia. The Synagogue, the other thing, apart from the mosque, that we really wanted to see, is closed until August. So it was really a case of pottering about staring, and finding a bar for some tapas. It is really lovely, and very peaceful, much less of the busy young people vibe that there was in Granada. But that may not be a true impression, because it kept trying to rain, big but infrequent drops, and there were frequent rolls of thunder. So maybe everyone else had the sense to stay inside.

Patio in Cordoba

Statue of Maimonides, the Cordoban
Jewish philosopher and jurist

Eventually, we decided we had pushed our luck for long enough, and it would be really unpleasant to walk across the Roman Bridge in a serious thunderstorm, and returned to the hotel. Cordoba is the European city of culture in 2016, so we’ll aim to return then.

Today we drove to Seville. It was a pleasant drive, over rolling hills, with wheat, mostly already harvested, fields of deep yellow sunflowers, olives, and great masses of oleander in bloom in the motorway verges and central reservation. It all seemed much more fertile that from Granada to Cordoba, which had much steeper hills and was quite desolate in places. The only agricultural enterprise seemed to be olives. 

Grand doorway of the museum.

We stopped at Ecija, a really lovely town, which in Roman times was extremely rich, on the olive oil trade. The municipal museum, in a beautiful old palace, was surprisingly interesting.

The patio of the municipal museum, Ecija

 

Some years ago, the whole of the large main square was excavated, and some really high class statuary was found, piled into a pool behind the main temple. I don’t know who put them there; I would suspect the Moors, objecting to the representation of the human form, in particular the scantily clad human form, but the dates didn’t seem right.

Dying Amazon - Roman copy of a Greek original

There were also some very impressive mosaic floors. This one shows Bacchus teaching humans how to make wine.

The museum explained that the olive oil trade used large numbers of slaves. I don’t know who picks all those olives today. I’ve done olive picking and it is very labour intensive, and not at all simple to mechanise. Ecija apparently had an amphitheatre and a hippodrome, so the trade certainly paid.

Then we stopped at Carmona, also a nice town, high on a ridge, with a very ruined alcazar. The views across the plain are tremendous. There is a parador in part of the alcazar, I think in the stables.

Street in Carmona. The "sails" are surprisingly effective
at keeping the street cooler.

We visited a couple of churches, which have enormous and truly hideous gilded altarpieces for each chapel, and ghastly objects on biers to be carried through the city, all in silver. No wonder Spain declined; Britain spent the profits of empire on railways and establishing tea plantations in India, coffee in Kenya, rubber in Malaya etc etc., and Spain spent them on building churches with shockingly awful decorations.

We had an excellent menu del dia late lunch, and then continued to Seville. The traffic was quite challenging and Phil decided he knew better than the satnav, goodness knows why, but we got here and it’s a little apartment. So then we went to the nearby supermarket, for food for our breakfast, and then had a decent cup of tea.

Later we walked the short distance to the river. There were people fishing, sculling, and canoeing, so there was plenty to see. Also there are lots of bars, so eating should not be a problem