Giralda

The Giralda, the bell tower of Seville Cathedral, is two buildings in one. Its lower, larger part is the minaret of the Almohad great mosque of Seville, raised in the 1180s and 1190s and one of the finest works of Almohad architecture anywhere; its top is a Renaissance belfry added some four centuries later by the city's Christian rulers. The join is almost seamless, and the result — roughly 95 m of rose-coloured brick with a bronze figure turning at the summit — has been the emblem of Seville since the Middle Ages.

The minaret was ordered by the caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf in 1184 and finished under his son al-Mansur on 10 March 1198, when four metal spheres were placed on its tip to celebrate the victory over Alfonso VIII of Castile. Its architects were Ahmad ibn Baso, who began the stone base, the Maghrebi builder 'Ali al-Ghumari, who raised the brick shaft and did most of its decoration, and Abu Layth al-Siqilli, who built the small upper shaft. Look at the facades: each is divided into three vertical bands, with windows in the centre stepping up with the internal ramps, and on either side large panels of sebka, a net of interlaced lobed arches spreading out of blind arcades. Nearly a hundred recycled marble capitals from Umayyad buildings of the 9th and 10th centuries are set into its windows and arcades.

Inside there are no stairs. Instead, 35 ramps wind around a core of seven vaulted chambers, wide and high enough, as a chronicler of the time noted, for pack animals to climb. After Seville fell to Castile in 1248, the mosque became the cathedral and the minaret its bell tower; the spheres fell in an earthquake in 1356. Between 1558 and 1568 Hernán Ruiz the Younger added the belfry, and on its summit was placed the Giraldillo, a four-metre bronze female figure holding a banner that turns in the wind — the weather vane that gave the tower its name. The original, restored between 1999 and 2005, is back on top.

The Giralda's silhouette travelled the world: towers modelled on it include the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower, the Freedom Tower in Miami and the Wrigley Building in Chicago. Since 1987 the tower, the cathedral, the Alcázar and the Archive of the Indies together form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The Giralda rises from the cathedral in the historic centre of Seville, about 1.7 km from the city's central point. Seville Airport (SVQ) is about 10 km away.