There is no better excuse to be a tourist in your own city than having visitors to show around. Not that Robin and I have been living in Sevilla long enough to have gotten over sight-seeing, but our focus has been more on establishing ourselves here and wandering the streets to get a general feel for the place, rather than seeing all the famous must-sees of the city, and we purposefully left the main tourist attractions here unvisited since we knew Rob’s parents would be coming in the spring. At any rate, we certainly have seen a lot cultural sites in the past couple of weeks.

We started out with Sevilla’s enormous cathedral – the largest cathedral in the world, in fact, and third largest church in the world (since the other two are not the seats of bishops, they are not considered cathedrals… or something like that). In typical Andalucian fashion, it was once a Muslim mosque, though most of the structure was rebuilt in the Gothic style in the fifteenth century. The Catholics had already been using the former-mosque for a couple of hundred years at that point, having gained control of Sevilla during the thirteenth century, but they decided to reconstruct almost everything under the pretext that the building was in much  need of repair. However, they did keep the original Moorish minaret, converting it into a bell-tower—and christened La Giralda—and the courtyard of orange trees, interspersed with fountains and irrigation channels. Local legend claims that the members of the cathedral who decided to rebuild in a purely Christian style said, “Let us build a church so beautiful and so grand that those who see it finished will think us mad.”

It certainly was awing to enter such a vast, echoing and ornate chamber, and the views from the top of the Giralda reached far across the city of white buildings and terracotta roofs. The cathedral also houses the remains of Christopher Columbus, although we read in Rob’s parents’ Lonely Planet that some of his bones may actually lie buried in the Dominican Republic as well, since DNA testing on the bones has revealed both burial sites as containing his remnants.

The cathedral was undoubtedly impressive; however, the palaces and gardens of the Real Alcázar of Sevilla impressed us all even more. Though the cathedral appealed to my imagination and evoked days of old with its hushed, dimly lit halls, it was the Alcázar that really conjured images of ancient kings and queens living long ago, moving through the same dazzling rooms and gardens as crowds of camera-clad tourists do today. The modern day Spanish royal family still uses certain floors of the Alcázar, making it Europe’s oldest royal palace still in use. The entire site lies concealed from the rest of the city by a large wall which encircles the network of palaces and gardens. They too were once a Moorish stronghold, and much of the Muslim love of geometric shapes, tile-work and water features remain. The Christians constructed another palace in the mid-1300s, and added to existing ones, so certain sections of the Alcázar are almost entirely Gothic, and the gardens are arranged in different cultural styles, ranging from traditional to modern (including a small labyrinth which I thoroughly enjoyed wandering through).

Rob’s mum and I enjoyed the Alcázar so much that we returned to visit it again before she left Sevilla.

The last event that we had saved for the visit of Rob’s parents was a professional flamenco show, which we attended on their last night in Sevilla. It was incredible. The guitarist wooed the audience with soft lulls and wild rasqueos, weaving the notes together seamlessly and leading us from crescendos to a soft tickle of the strings with amazing dexterity. The singer’s voice was rich and gritty, and his long hair and expressive face added to the atmospheric story conjured by his song. Both the female and male flamenco dancers pounded the stage, or tablao, with their high-heeled shoes and twirled, paused and clapped with such passion that you could not help but feel its effect, causing nearly overwhelming surges of emotion to bubble up in the chest at times. Its moving intensity surprised us all.

By the end of the two weeks that Rob’s mamá y papá spent in Sevilla, we all felt very satisfied with our exploration of local cultural buildings and customs, and were ready to explore Granada… a tale for next time!