San Luis de los Franceses: A Jesuit Jewel Box
Why is it significant?
On a narrow street of modest houses, a façade suddenly swells out at you: twin towers, a great dome rising behind them and a doorway framed in carved stone. Calle San Luis is not where you would expect one of the finest Baroque churches in Spain, which is exactly why it feels like a secret.
Key Facts
| Place | San Luis de los Franceses: A Jesuit Jewel Box |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle San Luis 37, 41003 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.39840, -5.98830 |
| Part of Walk | The Macarena and the Almohad Walls: Seville's Barrio of Faith |
| Generated | Generated |
On a narrow street of modest houses, a façade suddenly swells out at you: twin towers, a great dome rising behind them and a doorway framed in carved stone. Calle San Luis is not where you would expect one of the finest Baroque churches in Spain, which is exactly why it feels like a secret.
San Luis de los Franceses was built between 1699 and 1731 by Leonardo de Figueroa, the architect who did more than anyone to give Seville its Baroque skyline. It was the church of the Jesuit novitiate, the house where young men trained for years before joining the Society of Jesus. It is dedicated to Saint Louis, the crusader King Louis IX of France, canonised in 1297.
Inside, if you can get in, the effect is overwhelming. The plan is centralised, so you stand beneath the dome and everything wheels around you: gilded altarpieces, twisted columns, painted saints, mirrors and reliquaries crowded into every surface. It was designed as a lesson in the glory of heaven for novices who would soon be sent across the world as missionaries.
Their mission ended abruptly. In 1767 King Charles III expelled the Jesuits from all Spanish territories, and the novices vanished from this building almost overnight. The church passed through other uses and long years of neglect, and only after a lengthy restoration in recent times did it open its doors again to visitors.
Before you move on, glance up the street towards the north. That is Santa Marina, another Gothic-Mudéjar parish church, which burned in the summer of 1936 like San Gil and Omnium Sanctorum. In just a few hundred metres, Calle San Luis gives you the austere medieval brick of the reconquest and the golden theatre of the Counter-Reformation side by side. Now walk south down Calle San Luis until the street opens into a little square with a Mudéjar tower.