The Almohad Walls of Calle Muñoz León

Why is it significant?

Walk slowly along this rust-coloured rampart and let your hand hover over the surface. It looks like stone, but it is not.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk slowly along this rust-coloured rampart and let your hand hover over the surface. It looks like stone, but it is not. It is rammed earth, lime, sand and gravel pounded layer by layer into wooden moulds, and if you look carefully you can still see the horizontal lines where each mould was lifted and refilled.

This is the longest surviving stretch of the walls that once wrapped the whole of medieval Seville, a circuit of roughly seven kilometres with well over a hundred towers. They were raised and strengthened in the twelfth century under the Almoravids and then the Almohads, the Berber dynasties from North Africa who made Seville the capital of their Iberian empire and also built the great mosque whose minaret became the Giralda.

Notice that the defence is double. In front of the main wall runs a lower outer wall, the barbican, with a corridor between them. An attacker who scaled the first line found himself trapped in a narrow killing ground, under the arrows of defenders on the tall square towers. It was state-of-the-art engineering for its age.

And yet in 1247 the armies of Ferdinand III of Castile surrounded Seville and simply waited. The siege lasted more than a year. The fleet cut the bridge of boats to Triana, food ran out, and in November 1248 the city surrendered. Most of its Muslim inhabitants were forced to leave, and the conquerors divided their houses among themselves. These towers watched the whole tragedy from where you stand.

For centuries afterwards the walls kept out floods and plague rather than armies, until the nineteenth century, when Seville tore most of them down to let in light, air and traffic. This stretch survived because the Macarena barrio had grown up against it. Keep following the wall to its far end, where it meets a small church built right into an old gate.