Palacio de las Dueñas: Machado's Lemon Tree

Why is it significant?

Through the gateway you glimpse a long garden path, palms, bougainvillea and, if you are lucky with the season, the glint of lemons among dark leaves. Behind them waits a palace of white arcades and carved plaster: the Palacio de las Dueñas.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Through the gateway you glimpse a long garden path, palms, bougainvillea and, if you are lucky with the season, the glint of lemons among dark leaves. Behind them waits a palace of white arcades and carved plaster: the Palacio de las Dueñas.

The house was built at the end of the fifteenth century, mixing Gothic, Mudéjar and Renaissance features in the way only Seville seemed to manage. It passed to the Enríquez de Ribera family, the same family that founded the hospital you saw at the start of this walk, and through marriages it came to the Dukes of Alba, who still own it. The odd name comes from a convent of nuns, the dueñas, that stood next door until it was demolished in the nineteenth century.

On 26 July 1875 a boy was born in rented rooms inside this complex. His name was Antonio Machado, and he would become one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language. Decades later he opened a famous self-portrait with this line: "Mi infancia son recuerdos de un patio de Sevilla"... my childhood is memories of a courtyard in Seville, and of a bright orchard where the lemon tree ripens. That orchard, that lemon tree, are here.

Machado's life ended far from this garden. He supported the Republic during the Civil War, and in early 1939 he crossed the Pyrenees on foot among half a million refugees, old and ill, with his mother. He died a few weeks later in Collioure, in France, and is buried there. In his coat pocket, it is said, was a scrap of paper with a last line about the days of blue and the sun of childhood.

The palace has its own modern legend too. Cayetana, the eighteenth Duchess of Alba, adored it, and died here in 2014. It opened to visitors soon afterwards. And so the walk ends where it should: Roman columns, a weeping Virgin, Almohad walls, a martyred prince, cloistered nuns... and finally a poet remembering a Seville courtyard. Calle Dueñas leads you back towards the centre whenever you are ready.