The joy of travel lies in the way it invites the unexpected, a surefire antidote to the monotony that retirement can bring, especially during the winter months. Sometimes though you need the reassurance of the familiar, especially when life's been hard-going or a tad tricky. I think the past few years have proved less than straightforward for most of us - the divisive politics of Brexit followed by the pandemic, then a cost living crisis. All of it over-dramatised by an omnipresent feral media and overseen by a dishonest and incompetent government. I don't feel anxious, stressed or cross, just a bit weary and worn-out.
So the itinerary for this trip is shamelessly unambitious, to follow the route we planned to travel last winter but had abandon when we caught covid. It means we will get to see the carnival at Sesimbres, revisit Lisbon, do some cycling on the via Verdes of Alentejo and Andalucia and ending up in the Cabo da Gata sometime in mid March, hopefully this time without suffering a Saharan dust deluge. We'll figure our a route back to Bilbao later to catch the ferry home in early April.
So we are untroubled by the fact our two days in Seville have been an exercise in deja vu. We returned for the fourth time to the vehicle distribution place in the docks - Stockauto Sur. They run an 'area autocaravanas' as a sideline. It's not brilliant but the downsides (noise, skanky industrial area) are compensated by the fact it's only a couple of kilometres walk into the city centre. If you ignore the constant HGV traffic and admire the patch of eucalyptus woods among the abandoned railway sidings you can half convince yourself the place is acceptable..
We arrived in the early afternoon soon enough to head into the centre more or less repeating what we have always done...
...across the mighty Guadalquivir on the Puente Delicias, pausing to take exactly the same photo as last time of the Seville cathedral's tower upstream...
..then through the Jardin de la Delicias and the Parque Marie Luisa noting the fabulous palm trees full of squabbling parakeets...
...indulging our enthusiasm for ludicrous nineteenth century Hispanic equestrian statuary We agreed as mad as this one of Simon Bolivar is, it fails to reached the absurd heights of the one of El Cid and Stupid gracing a mini-roundabout in Burgos...
While Gill consulted Google maps seeking somewhere in the park to find 'dos cortados' I became intrigued by a circle of busts on pedestals on a small 'glorieta' in the Jardin de Delicias.
Whereas most of the public statuary in the two adjacent parks are somewhat turgid academic works from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the ring of small busts had a vitality that seemed almost rococo. This one in particular caught my eye -
Half joking I announced that it was the earliest representation of a ponytail in the whole of western art. The informal hairstyle certainly seemed at odds with the 'grand manner' of the other sculptures which exuded the look and feel of the late eighteenth century. Perhaps they are all some latter-day pastiche I wondered. Then interrupted Gill's search for a nearby coffee spot with a long and rambling exposition on the subject of the iconography of female hairstyling during the long eighteenth century. "Hmm.." she replied, then added, "It's really odd, there doesn't seem to be anywhere at all to get a coffee in the park."
We moved on, but the questions about the statuary niggled away at me until some hours later, back at the van, I found an article in Spanish about the Jardin de Delicias, Google translate to the rescue...
In 1864, some sculptural works that were in the Plaza del Museo and that came from the archiepiscopal palace of Umbrete after the fire suffered in 1762 were incorporated. They were works of art in the Italian Rococo style , classicist and with pagan themes, which were placed on rococo style pedestals.
See, I knew they were Rococo! No explanation of the anachronistic ponytail however.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth we wandered towards Plaza Espagna seeking an answer to another of today's burning questions, was street flamenco just a weekend thing, or might we happen across it on a Friday?
Yes! there was Friday flamenco and I recognised the dancer, I remember taking a video of her amazing footwork back in January 2020. If anything three years on her moves seemed even niftier.
Most flamenco dancers tend to be lightly built - wiry and serpentine. This dancer seems more athletic and to my inexpert eye it made the performance more energetic, an alluring mix of power and restraint. Dressed simply in black, eschewing the traditional flamboyant layered skirt her dancing felt austere, haunting almost.
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For recent escapees from the gloom of a Pennine winter, Seville's dazzling light, magnificently elaborate architecture, its parks full of exotic flora, the soundscape of flamenco, hooves echoing on cobbles from the scores of horse drawn carriages that weave through the city, it can feel almost overwhelmingly exotic.
Time for a coffee! You can buy many things in Parque Marie Luisa - brightly coloured fans, castanets, flamenco dolls, bottles of water, ice-creams, but not a cup of coffee. We crossed back over the river into the Los Remedios district.
There were lots of cafes; we found the 'dos cortados' that the park failed to provide, then headed back to the van. My newly downloaded Google fit app kindly informed me that we had walked 7.4km. The thing about cities is that you walk around a lot without realising it.
Our plan for the next day was equally unambitious, lunch at at our favourite tapas place - Cervecería Giralda. As ever it served us delicious, authentic tapas at an affordable price. Given the place is a short stroll from the Alcazar and next door to the cathedral's famous tower - 'La Giralda' it is surprising the place has not become a tourist trap, but the clientele remains Spanish in the main despite the street outside milling with American and Chinese visitors.
When we ate here in 2016 the interior walls were covered in traditional tiles, probably dating from the late nineteenth century. We returned in 2020, the place was a building site, we enjoyed our tapas serenaded by an angle grinder, the tiles had been removed to about shoulder height and the plastered vaulting stripped back to the bare stonework. It all looked a bit of a mess
Last year it became clear why the alterations had been done. The building originally was an Arabic bath house and some of the original decoration still remained beneath the modern plaster.
Given that Seville fell to Christian forces in the mid thirteenth century, it means the building now occupied by Cervecería Giralda must be well over 800 years old, a meeting place for thirty generations or more. It's a somewhat humbling thought.
The tapas on offer are rooted in tradition too, but reinvented with a bit of contemporary pizzazz. We ordered four, ham croquettes, pork cheeks, potato tortilla with cumin sauce and fried camembert cubes with prawns.
The prawn dish looked stylish and was delicious. The potato tortilla with cumin looked a tad beige, I didn't take a picture, but it probably was the tastiest of the four. We opted wine from the Cadiz region. Table wine from the 'sherry triangle' rarely escapes its homeland, probably because most of the local production goes into the area's famous fortified wines. However the still wine is very good too, so whenever we find it on offer we go for it. Gill chose red, me white, then we could pinch a sip of each others and appreciate both. These wines are not particularly expensive or special, but they are quite rare. I don't remember ever seeing wine from Cadiz on a supermarket shelf.
Neither of us have a particularly sweet tooth so generally we opt to have an extra tapas rather than a dessert. However our waitress was very friendly and persuasive so we ended up with a mousse each. We chose a pistachio and a lemon one. The latter was the yummier, as Gill remarked, "you can't better a classic.
The total bill - €32 - by way of comparison I totted up afterwards how much a similar lunch would have cost at the tapas place that opened last year in Buxton - around £52 I reckoned. Little wonder we avoid eating out back at home preferring to wait until we are on our travels to visit a restaurant or a café now and again. One reason for the difference is to do with the tax regime, the IVA/VAT rate on food eaten in a restaurant is 10% in Spain, half of what it is in the UK. I think this signals a cultural as well as an economic difference. 'Eating out' in the UK is regarded as something of a luxury, in Spain, as in most of southern Europe it is part of the social fabric that holds families and communities together.
We walked back through the park and Plaza Espagna. A different flamenco group had taken the usual spot, entertaining a mixed crowd of locals and tourists. Todays performance was especially dramatic.
Clearly the dancer was acting out whatever story the singer was telling. It all seemed to involve a lot of anguish and inner pain, interspersed with moments of fury. It would be great to be able to understand the language, nonetheless we got the point!
The rest of the park was also in weekend mode, the glades and lawns dotted with families and groups of friends having picnics. Parque Marie Luisa is built on a grand scale, with some beautiful Arabic inspired water features, but it feels lived-in, there's not a 'keep off the grass' sign to be seen.
In particular Jardin de la Delicias seems to be really popular place to have a children's party. The place epitomises conviviality.
Even Plaza Espagna itself, the huge semicircular pavillion built as the centrepiece of the 1928 'Pan-hispanic' exhibition, built on such a scale that it is grandiose rather than merely magnificent, it too gets taken over as a public space at weekends.
Running below the curving arcade are 44 tile decorated niches with seats, each dedicated to one of Spain's provinces and decorated with a scene from locality's history. Quite a few celebrate violent moments when Christian forces expelled the incumbent Arabic population or sent murderous conquistadors off to Americas to plunder its riches.
On sunny weekends most of the niches are occupied by locals having a chat or footsore tourists. Most seems entirely oblivious to the carnage pictured behind them.
Undoubtedly Seville has a dark imperialist past. It got me thinking which city doesn't? I began to run through a list of the world's great cities - London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Istanbul, Moscow... all of them, and dozens more, founded on imperial power and economic heft backed by military might. It's a tad dispiriting. Maybe, like the people sitting in the sun this afternoon, turning your back on the miseries of the past and making the most of moment is the only way to stay sane, especially when we all tote around handsized devices that constantly bombard us with disaster, mayhem, and mindless gossip.
Perhaps the big picture is always going to be a gloomy one, and the only small is beautiful or joyful. Take Seville, it has a conflicted murderous history, but undoubtedly the city brims with small delights.
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