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Few cities in Europe carry their identity as completely as Seville does. The capital of Andalusia sits on the banks of the Guadalquivir, the only navigable river in Spain, and that geographical fact shaped everything: the city grew rich on trade with the Americas after 1492, and the architecture, the street plan, and the civic confidence of the place still reflect that extraordinary moment in history. The old city is one of the largest medieval centres in Europe, and walking through the Barrio Santa Cruz, the former Jewish quarter with its whitewashed lanes and orange trees, it is easy to understand why Seville has served as the setting for so many operas, from Carmen to The Barber of Seville, none of which were actually written by Spaniards, yet all of which captured something true about the city's theatrical temperament.

The cathedral is the obvious place to begin making sense of Seville's scale and ambition. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, built on the site of a former Almohad mosque, and the minaret of that mosque, now known as La Giralda, still stands as the cathedral's bell tower, its Moorish brickwork giving way to Renaissance additions as the eye travels upward. A priority-access guided tour of the cathedral and La Giralda is among the most consistently reviewed experiences in the city's catalogue, and the view from the top of the tower across the terracotta rooflines toward the Alcázar and the river justifies the climb entirely. The Alcázar itself, a royal palace still in official use, represents one of the finest surviving examples of Mudéjar architecture anywhere, its tiled courtyards and formal gardens a direct continuation of the Moorish aesthetic that the cathedral was built to supersede.