After traversing the oleander fringed motorways of southern Spain our bus lurched to a halt and vomited its contents onto the streets of Seville. Groaning and slightly dizzy from inadvertent oleander inhalation we took stock of one of the most famous cities in Spain.
Seville is hot, very hot. We thought it was hot in Grenada but we were wrong. The balmy, nay chilly temperatures of Pomegranate City were behind us. In Seville it was so hot that it is almost impossible to convey how hot it was without resorting to a list of expletives ending in the word “hot”. Fortunately our hotel had air conditioning.
The air conditioning was the only normal thing about our hotel. A huge iron gate barred entrance and we had to buzz the reception staff to let us in. Once in the same iron gate effectively prevented us from leaving unless the same reception staff were inclined to let us go. One gets the impression that the building was originally designed to be a sex dungeon and was converted to a hotel part way through construction.
With our bags offloaded and the air conditioning relished in it was time to beg permission from the staff to leave so we could get some lunch (food being something the hotel didn’t provide). A five minute walk brought us to the closest place that served food and since we were all suffering from heat exhaustion it was decided that this was an excellent spot to stop.
This cafe was also convenient for a large wooden mushroom which was on our list of things to do in Seville. The Setas de Sevilla is a large wooden structure which looms over part of the city near our hotel. It is described as a “cultural landmark” which is code for “we paid a lot of money for this now stop asking us what the hell it is”. What it is is a purely wooden structure which sprawls over a block and somewhat inadequately provides shade for the citizenry beneath.
Shade for the population of Seville is an excellent idea but there are better ways of providing it than building a roughly mushroom shaped wooden lattice work which has the disadvantage of letting the sun through. Apparently the population of Seville aren’t crazy about the thing as they feel it doesn’t really complement the current skyline of the city. To be fair there aren’t too many cities where a giant wooden mushroom type thingy would blend seamlessly with the surrounding architecture and I’m pretty sure most of those cities where it would blend in are not on earth.
Underneath this towering monument to modernity is a collection of Roman ruins which were unearthed while excavating the foundations for the wooden mushroom type thingy. I popped in there to remind myself of a time when structures were sensibly made out of stone and needed a vaguely rational reason for existence. Then I fled back to the sex dungeon/hotel for some air conditioning.
Our lovely guide had put off our orientation walk until the cool of the evening on the grounds that doing it at midday would kill us. Evening rolled around and was hotter than midday. Not wanting to end the tour with a bunch of corpses on her hands she re rescheduled for the next morning something that we her charges agreed to largely on the promise of breakfast.
That evening we had tickets to actually climb the Setas (we’ll go up in a lift actually). There is a curving walkway which allows visitors to look out over the Seville skyline. Coloured lights within the structure illuminate various parts of it in different colours. It has to be said that nighttime is when the Setas comes into its own. The light show and the views combine for a beautiful display which almost makes you forget that it’s 10.30pm and still 35 degrees. Almost but not quite, we fled back to air conditioning. I have never been so happy to hear a dungeon door slam behind me.
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