Puerta de la Carne: The Gate and the Cemetery
Why is it significant?
Here the old street suddenly opens onto traffic, buses and a wide avenue. Pause at this edge, because you are standing roughly where Seville's wall once had a gate, and where the Judería touched the open country. The gate had several names over the centuries.
Key Facts
| Place | Puerta de la Carne: The Gate and the Cemetery |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle Santa María la Blanca 43, 41004 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.38620, -5.98520 |
| Part of Walk | The Lost Judería of Seville: Santa Cruz, Susona and the Synagogues That Became Churches |
| Generated | Generated |
Here the old street suddenly opens onto traffic, buses and a wide avenue. Pause at this edge, because you are standing roughly where Seville's wall once had a gate, and where the Judería touched the open country.
The gate had several names over the centuries. In Moorish times it was known by an Arabic name, and later Christians called it the Puerta de Minjoar, and for a time the gate of the Judería, because it was the quarter's own door to the outside. The name that stuck, Puerta de la Carne, the Meat Gate, came from the city slaughterhouse that stood just outside it. The gate itself was pulled down in the nineteenth century, when Seville tore down most of its walls to let the city breathe.
Outside this gate lay the cemetery of Seville's Jews. In 1996 and 1997, when the city decided to build an underground car park at the corner of Calle Cano y Cueto, archaeologists were called in first. They uncovered a large, densely packed section of the medieval Jewish cemetery, hundreds of years of burials, and alongside them a group of graves of enslaved people from a later age.
Most of the remains and objects went to the city's Archaeological Museum. But one tomb was left where it was found, protected under glass, on a lower level of the car park that was built here after all. So, a few metres under drivers looking for a space, a medieval Sevillian lies exactly where his family laid him.
It is a very Sevillian solution, half respect and half pragmatism, and it raises the question every old city has to answer: how much of the past do you keep, and how much do you pave over? From here, turn right and follow the long garden that runs south beside the wall of the Alcázar, the Jardines de Murillo, to the tall monument with a ship on top.