Calle Feria: El Jueves and the Bread Riot of 1652
Why is it significant?
Stand on the pavement of Calle Feria and look along it: grocers, haberdashers, a bakery, bars with steel counters, old men reading the paper, a motorbike squeezing past. It looks like an ordinary working street. On a Thursday morning, it becomes something else.
Key Facts
| Place | Calle Feria: El Jueves and the Bread Riot of 1652 |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle Feria, 41003 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.39700, -5.99130 |
| Part of Walk | Seville Tapas and Convent Sweets: Hidden Nuns, Old Markets and the Oldest Bar in Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the pavement of Calle Feria and look along it: grocers, haberdashers, a bakery, bars with steel counters, old men reading the paper, a motorbike squeezing past. It looks like an ordinary working street. On a Thursday morning, it becomes something else.
Every Thursday of the year, except Holy Thursday, the pavements fill with blankets and folding tables: old keys, lamps, saints, coins, vinyl records, broken clocks, postcards of Seville from a century ago. Sevillians call it simply El Jueves, the Thursday, and it is the oldest street market in the city. A document of 1292 shows King Sancho the Fourth regulating a Thursday market in Seville, and tradition has always tied it to this street.
In those days it sold food. Country people came in through the northern gates with grain, oil, vegetables and animals, and the street took its name, Feria, from the fair. Over the centuries the food moved indoors, into the market hall at the far northern end of the street, which Sevillians consider the oldest documented market in the city, on its present site since 1719. Out here, El Jueves became a place for second-hand treasures and serious bargaining.
Bread, though, made this street famous for a very different reason. In May 1652 Seville was still mourning a terrible plague, taxes were crushing, and the price of bread had become unbearable. From the twenty-second to the twenty-sixth of May, the people of the Feria district rose up, seized weapons and held the city's authorities at bay. Historians call the Motín de la Feria one of the most serious revolts in Castile in more than a century, and it began, as so many revolts do, with the price of a loaf.
If you come back on a Thursday, arrive early. The dealers set up at dawn, and the best things are gone before the tourists wake up. Now walk south down Calle Feria and bear left into the quieter streets towards Calle Doña María Coronel, where a nun is waiting behind a wooden wheel.