Hospital de la Caridad: The Man Mistaken for Don Juan

Why is it significant?

In front of you rises a white church front decorated with five large panels of blue and white tiles: Faith, Hope and Charity, and two saints on horseback, Saint George and Saint James. The designs are attributed to Murillo.

Key Facts

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In front of you rises a white church front decorated with five large panels of blue and white tiles: Faith, Hope and Charity, and two saints on horseback, Saint George and Saint James. The designs are attributed to Murillo. In the little garden opposite, a bronze nobleman carries a sick beggar in his arms. That is Miguel de Mañara.

Mañara was born in 1627 into a rich merchant family of Corsican origin that had made its fortune in the Indies trade. He lived the life of a young Sevillian aristocrat, until his wife died in 1661. The following year he joined the Brotherhood of the Holy Charity, whose grim duty was to bury the drowned and the executed, and soon became its head. He turned it into a hospital for the poorest of the poor, built inside the medieval royal shipyards next door.

Then the Romantics got hold of him. In 1834 Prosper Mérimée wrote a story in which Mañara is a libertine who repents after witnessing his own funeral, and Alexandre Dumas followed with a play. Ever since, Seville whispers that Mañara was the real Don Juan. The dates say otherwise: the first Don Juan play, El burlador de Sevilla, was printed in 1630, when Mañara was three years old.

Inside the church hang two of the most frightening paintings in Spain, by Juan de Valdés Leal. In one, a skeleton snuffs out a candle above the crowns and books of human glory: In ictu oculi, in the blink of an eye. In the other, a bishop and a knight rot in their coffins. Mañara commissioned them as a sermon for his brothers. He asked to be buried under the church doorstep so that everyone would tread on him, and his epitaph calls him the worst man who ever lived.

So Seville has two Don Juans. Mozart's Don Giovanni, whose libretto says only that the story happens in a city in Spain, is dragged down to hell by a statue without a word of regret. Mañara is the opposite ending: the sinner, real or imagined, who turns round. Now walk up Calle Dos de Mayo, past the long brick walls of the medieval royal shipyards, to a gate in the old city wall.