Seville, Spain

We continued our travels in Spain, this time stopping at the port of Cadiz. Our excursion took us to Seville for a tour of the palaces – a worthy way to spend mum's birthday! The drive into Seville was lovely and the city was covered in beautiful flowering shrubs and trees. Most impressive were the jacaranda trees which lined many streets and were magnificent with their gorgeous purple blooms. Our guide told us that they'd been having miserable weather but we got lucky yet again and the sun was shining brightly for our walking tour. We left the bus and traveled a short distance to the Casa de Pilatos, an Andalusian palace that was completed in 1540 and is said to be a copy of the Palace of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. The owner, a 92 year old countess, still lives in a set of rooms upstairs. Once inside we entered a large courtyard with a fountain in the middle and surrounded by statues and busts of Spanish kings and Roman emperors. The many rooms in the palace have fine frescoes, paintings and beautiful ceramic tile, and we took a walk through two very peaceful and lovely gardens in full bloom. Our next stop on the tour was at the Lebrija Palace and to get there we had to traverse many narrow streets, past stores and cafes, dodging traffic of both the vehicular and pedestrian variety. There were so many beautiful and colourful buildings to look at – the architecture in Seville is wonderful! About 100 years ago the Countess of Lebrija decided to restore her family's mansion and redecorated the palace with mosaics and other archaeological items that were found in the ruins of the Roman town Italica. Nearly every room in the palace had these wonderful mosaics on the floor, and the many rooms were jammed full of various treasures. Quite a sight to behold! We next made our way to the the old Jewish area of Seville where we had lunch tapas style at one of the many restaurants in the area – delicious! Once everybody was completely stuffed our group slowly made its way back to the bus and we drove to the Plaza de Espana which was built in 1928 for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929. The square is crossed by a water canal and the walls of the Plaza have lovely tiled alcoves, each representing a different province of Spain. Mum was done in by this point and stayed on the bus, but despite a less than attractive exterior, the interior of the plaza was well worth the extra steps!