Calle Mateos Gago: Along the Wall of the Judería

Why is it significant?

Turn your back on the Giralda and face the street that climbs gently away from it, with orange trees down the middle, iron balconies overhead and the clink of glasses from its bars. This is Calle Mateos Gago, and it has a secret: for more than a century its line was a wall.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Turn your back on the Giralda and face the street that climbs gently away from it, with orange trees down the middle, iron balconies overhead and the clink of glasses from its bars. This is Calle Mateos Gago, and it has a secret: for more than a century its line was a wall.

When Ferdinand the Third of Castile took Seville in 1248, the city's Jews were given their own district, the Judería, in this south-eastern corner of town, squeezed between the palace of the Alcázar and the city walls. Its own inner wall ran out from the Alcázar and followed, more or less, the street under your feet, then curved away to the east. Inside it lived one of the largest Jewish communities in Castile: physicians, tax collectors, silversmiths, cloth dealers, scholars. Chronicles say that King Alfonso the Tenth, the Wise, handed the community several former mosques to use as synagogues.

At night the gates of the Judería were closed. It was protection and enclosure at the same time, and for a while the arrangement worked. The community paid its taxes straight to the Crown, and the Crown, in return, kept the neighbours at a distance. When that protection failed, as you will hear at the next stop, it failed completely.

Notice how little of that past shows on the surface. The street is named after Francisco Mateos Gago, a nineteenth-century Sevillian priest and scholar, and today it is one of the busiest tapas strips in the city. Yet the shape of the quarter survives almost intact. Step off this street into any lane on your right and you enter a maze of bends, blind alleys and tiny squares... a street plan that was never meant for carriages, laid down by people who wanted to live close together.

So keep in mind, as you wander, that the prettiest barrio in Seville is also a place of loss. Almost every pretty corner ahead holds two stories, the one on the postcard and the one underneath it. Walk up Calle Mateos Gago and slip right into the narrow lanes, towards a tiny junction marked by three crosses.