Royal Alcázar of Seville

The Royal Alcázar of Seville is a palace built as a sequence of courtyards, each opening into the next: arcades carved with lace-like plaster, tiled walls, pools and channels of water, and beyond them a maze of gardens full of orange trees and palms. It is the finest surviving example of Mudéjar architecture, the art made by Muslim craftsmen and their heirs for Christian rulers in medieval Spain, and it is still a royal residence, used by the Spanish royal family when they stay in Seville.

The site began as a fortress around 913–914, under the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus. Later Islamic dynasties enlarged it, and the Almohads, who made Seville their capital in the twelfth century, built a whole cluster of palaces here. After the Castilian conquest of 1248, Christian kings kept building rather than tearing down: Alfonso X raised a Gothic palace in the 1250s, and in the 1360s Pedro I of Castile commissioned the palace that is now the heart of the complex. It borrows the language of Islamic palaces, with inscriptions, geometric tilework and carved stucco, to express the power of a Christian king.

The Courtyard of the Maidens is the grand centre of Pedro's palace, with a sunken garden laid out in beds divided by marble water channels. That garden had been buried beneath a raised marble pavement in the sixteenth century and was recovered only through excavations in the early 2000s. The Hall of Ambassadors, the throne room, is crowned by a gilded half-orange dome made by Diego Ruiz in 1427, the most sumptuous ceiling in the palace. Beneath the later palace, the vaulted cistern known as the Baths of María de Padilla, part of the Gothic palace of Alfonso X, holds still water under long vaults; legend connects it with Pedro's mistress. The gardens, with their pavilions, galleries and fountains, are as much a part of the monument as the rooms.

The palace was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, together with Seville's cathedral and the Archive of the Indies, and it has served as a set for films and series from Lawrence of Arabia to Game of Thrones.

Getting there

The Alcázar is in the historic centre of Seville, about 1.6 km from the city centre and next to the cathedral. The nearest airport is Seville Airport (SVQ), about 9 km away.