Prado de San Sebastián: The Quemadero
Why is it significant?
Look around this wide, ordinary space, with its buses, its gardens and its people walking to work. There is no plaque on the paving telling you what happened here, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of quiet. The Spanish Inquisition began its work in Seville.
Key Facts
| Place | Prado de San Sebastián: The Quemadero |
|---|---|
| Address | Prado de San Sebastián, 41004 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.37960, -5.98680 |
| Part of Walk | The Lost Judería of Seville: Santa Cruz, Susona and the Synagogues That Became Churches |
| Generated | Generated |
Look around this wide, ordinary space, with its buses, its gardens and its people walking to work. There is no plaque on the paving telling you what happened here, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of quiet.
The Spanish Inquisition began its work in Seville. The first inquisitors arrived in the autumn of 1480 and installed themselves, after a short stay in a convent, in the castle of San Jorge across the river in Triana. Their target was not Jews as such, but conversos, baptised Christians of Jewish descent suspected of secretly keeping Jewish customs. Lighting candles on a Friday evening, refusing pork, changing the linen on a Saturday... any of it could be denounced by a neighbour or a servant.
On the sixth of February 1481, Seville saw the first auto de fe: a procession, a sermon, and six men and women condemned and burned. For the executions, a permanent platform was built out here, beyond the walls, on the meadow of the Prado de San Sebastián. It was called the quemadero, the burning place, and it was decorated with four large statues of prophets. Historians place it roughly where the Teatro Lope de Vega and the statue of El Cid stand today, a short walk to the west.
It was used for generations: for conversos in the early, terrible decades, later for Protestants in the great autos of 1559 and 1560, for moriscos, and for others. Sometimes, when the accused had died or fled, their bones or an effigy were burned instead. The platform stood for more than three hundred years, and it was only dismantled in 1809, during the war against Napoleon, when its stone was wanted for fortifications.
It is hard to connect this sunny, busy place with any of that, and perhaps that is the lesson: history leaves no mark unless people choose to keep one. Take a breath, then walk back north along the Paseo de Catalina de Ribera and slip through the narrow gateway into the barrio, to the Plaza de Santa Cruz.