Advertisement
The Plaza de Espana
The plaza at night. Breakfast included freshly squeezed orange juice, which I suppose you could expect in Seville. In fact, a lot of the trees were still covered in oranges, although, sadly, it was the wrong time of year for the famous orange blossom, which is supposed to create a lovely fragrance all over the city.
We now got to see Seville in daylight and we were not disappointed. It’s a stunning city. We decided to start with a walk to the Parque Maria Luisa, the highlight of which is the Plaza de Espana.
What we didn’t know is that today Seville is hosting Spain’s annual Armed Forces Day and there was going to be a huge parade through the centre of the city. Whilst it did make some parts of the city inaccessible, it did pull all the crowds away from anywhere not on the route of the parade.
We seem to pick dates to go places when there are major national events going on that we know nothing about. This year is Spain’s Armed Forces Day. Last year in Rome was the Italian National Day (see
An Audience With the Pope from 448 Feet). We’ve also had Chinese National Day in Hong Kong and a Spanish royal
Toledo
I’ve been there. wedding in Madrid.
The plaza was amazing. Along with the park, this was built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition. Definitely better than, for example, a dome consisting of a giant piece of canvas hanging from some metal spires.
Around the building are a number of tiled benches representing each region of Spain, with images that, I assume, represent key historical events from each region. You could tell where the Spanish visitors were from as they were, of course, taking photos of themselves on the bench for their home region.
The building is shaped in an arc, which apparently represents an “eternal hug” of all the regions.
The police were everywhere, but, again, like Rome last year, so were the military. We thought they were taking security a little too seriously, as tanks and surface-to-air missiles seem over-the-top for crowd control, but we realised of course that it is all part of the military parade.
There was then an amazing fly-past of all different types of planes and helicopters. My wife commented that it was missing the Red Arrows, but then seconds later, the Spanish equivalent flew overhead with red, yellow and red smoke behind them.
Fly Past
The colours are obviously different from the Red Arrows. I then walked up to see the Metropol Parasol, which is an amazing, modern wooden sculpture. It’s massive - a lot bigger than I had expected from the photographs. You could pay to walk on the top, but I thought I would leave that until night-time as I had read that it looks even more spectacular, as does the view.
We saw a list of the things to do when in Seville and one was to see some Flamenco dancing, which apparently originated from the surrounding Andalucia region. Well we saw a man dancing in the street, so that is something that we can tick of that list.
They have Boris bikes here, so there’s one for the list of things not to do in Seville.
We went out for something to eat in the evening, at what we thought was a reasonable time. We turned right this time, towards the river where it had been some bustling when I walked there yesterday, but it was dead. Everywhere was either closed or only serving drinks. We had to wait until after 8.00pm and even then we were the only people in the restaurant.
Something else
Armed Forces Day
Crowd control? But it is Military Day. on the above-mentioned to do list was to eat Tapas. We will, but tonight was Paella, which was excellent, although I really don’t like prawns that are looking at me from the plate.
Come 11.00pm, everywhere was busy and noisy again - helped in part by the Tottenham Liverpool match, which was on in a lot of the bars.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.241s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 17; qc: 78; dbt: 0.1516s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb