La Anunciación & the Pantheon of Illustrious Sevillians
Why is it significant?
On the busy Calle Laraña, beside the old university buildings, you will find a sober Renaissance church front, all straight lines and restraint. After the riot of the Baroque, it feels almost severe... and that severity is a clue to who built it.
Key Facts
| Place | La Anunciación & the Pantheon of Illustrious Sevillians |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle Laraña, 41003 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.39260, -5.99250 |
| Part of Walk | From Baroque Domes to Las Setas: Seville's Architecture Between Sierpes and Casa de Pilatos |
| Generated | Generated |
On the busy Calle Laraña, beside the old university buildings, you will find a sober Renaissance church front, all straight lines and restraint. After the riot of the Baroque, it feels almost severe... and that severity is a clue to who built it.
The church of the Anunciación was built in the second half of the sixteenth century for the Jesuits, then a new and ambitious order. Their style was disciplined, clear and modern, a Renaissance answer to the medieval clutter around it. When Charles III expelled the Jesuits in 1767, their buildings here passed to the University of Seville, and the Anunciación became the university church.
Beneath it lies a crypt that Seville turned, in the nineteenth century, into the Panteón de Sevillanos Ilustres, the Pantheon of Illustrious Sevillians. Scholars, artists and writers of the city rest there, but the names most visitors look for are those of two brothers: the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and the painter Valeriano Bécquer.
Both died young in Madrid in 1870, within three months of each other, poor and largely unrecognised. Gustavo Adolfo's Rimas, his short, aching love poems, were published only after his death, by friends who gathered up his manuscripts. Today they are among the most read poems in the Spanish language, and generations of Spanish schoolchildren have learned them by heart. In 1913, Seville brought the two brothers home and laid them here, side by side.
Bécquer loved the hidden corners of his city: the convents, the gardens, the half-ruined cloisters. One of his Leyendas, Maese Pérez the organist, is set at midnight Mass in the Sevillian convent of Santa Inés, where a dead man's music fills the church once more. There is a fine symmetry in finding him in a crypt under a busy shopping street, a few steps from the most modern structure in old Seville. Before you head to it, turn into Calle Cuna, just opposite, to visit a palace whose floors are paved with Rome.