Convento de Santa Inés: Bollitos Through the Torno
Why is it significant?
Push open the door into the small entrance hall of the convent and you will find no shop, no counter and no nun. Just a list of sweets on the wall, a bell, and set into the wall a wooden cylinder with a shelf in it, like a little revolving door.
Key Facts
| Place | Convento de Santa Inés: Bollitos Through the Torno |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle Doña María Coronel 5, 41003 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.39370, -5.98970 |
| Part of Walk | Seville Tapas and Convent Sweets: Hidden Nuns, Old Markets and the Oldest Bar in Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Push open the door into the small entrance hall of the convent and you will find no shop, no counter and no nun. Just a list of sweets on the wall, a bell, and set into the wall a wooden cylinder with a shelf in it, like a little revolving door. This is the torno, and it is one of the oldest ways of buying food in Seville.
The rules are simple. You ring, a voice answers from behind the wall, and you say what you want. You place your money on the shelf, the cylinder turns, and a moment later it turns back with your box of sweets. The nuns are enclosed, they live apart from the world, and the torno lets them earn a living without ever being seen.
The convent was founded in 1374 by Doña María Coronel, and her legend is not sweet at all. The story goes that King Pedro the First, who had already had her husband killed, pursued her relentlessly. To end it, she disfigured her own face with boiling oil. She then founded this convent of Poor Clares, and her body is still kept here and shown to the faithful on special days of the year.
The speciality of Santa Inés is the bollito, a small round pastry made with flour, sugar, olive oil and sesame, crisp outside and soft within, the kind of thing you eat one of and then, somehow, five. Convent sweets in Andalusia often carry flavours from the Moorish centuries: sesame, aniseed, almonds, honey. Christian nuns kept alive a pastry tradition that came, in part, from the very kitchens they had replaced.
One more surprise. The poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer set one of his most famous legends, Master Pérez the Organist, in this convent: a blind organist whose music was so heavenly that, after his death, his organ played by itself at Christmas midnight mass. Keep your box closed for now. El Rinconcillo, Seville's oldest bar, is just around the corner on Calle Gerona.