Plaza de Cuba: The Opera Capital Seen from the River

Why is it significant?

Walk to the riverside edge of Plaza de Cuba and take in the view. Straight across the Guadalquivir rise the Torre del Oro, the white curve of the bullring and the roofs of the Arenal, while on your left the painted houses of Calle Betis run along this bank towards Triana.

Key Facts

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Walk to the riverside edge of Plaza de Cuba and take in the view. Straight across the Guadalquivir rise the Torre del Oro, the white curve of the bullring and the roofs of the Arenal, while on your left the painted houses of Calle Betis run along this bank towards Triana. It looks like a stage set waiting for the curtain... and in a way, that is exactly what it is. Start counting and you will find more than a hundred and fifty operas set in Seville. Mozart put two of his greatest here, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. Rossini gave the world The Barber of Seville. Beethoven set his only opera, Fidelio, in a prison outside the city, and Bizet's Carmen ends right over there, outside that white bullring. Few cities on earth have been sung about so often. And here is the delicious paradox. Mozart never came to Seville. Neither did Beethoven, and Georges Bizet never set foot in Spain at all. For the composers of Vienna and Paris, Seville was not a real place with real traffic and real rent. It was a dream: the city of Don Juan, of a barber who fixes everyone's love life, of cigarette girls, toreadors and guitars beneath balconies. The further away they lived, the hotter the Seville they wrote. The dream had roots. For two centuries the royal monopoly of trade with the Americas sat in Seville, and the treasure fleets came up this very river. Silver, gold, tobacco and adventurers landed on the far bank, and Europe imagined the city as a marketplace of passion and fortune. What the librettos leave out is the price of that fortune: conquest, forced labour in the mines, and enslaved Africans shipped across the ocean under licences issued in this city. So today we walk through the real places behind the imaginary ones: a mint full of Figaro's beloved gold, a hospital founded by a man mistaken for Don Juan, an opera house, a city gate from Carmen's song and, at the very end, the bullring where her story ends. Cross the Puente de San Telmo to the far bank and make for the long baroque palace ahead of you.