Puerta de Jerez: Where Carmen Was Born on Paper

Why is it significant?

You are standing at the Puerta de Jerez, a roundabout of horse carriages, trams and traffic around a fountain with a female figure representing the city, put up for the great exhibition of 1929. Of the gate that gave this place its name, nothing is left: it was pulled down in 1864.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are standing at the Puerta de Jerez, a roundabout of horse carriages, trams and traffic around a fountain with a female figure representing the city, put up for the great exhibition of 1929. Of the gate that gave this place its name, nothing is left: it was pulled down in 1864.

Now look south-east along Calle San Fernando. Behind the trees stretches the vast Royal Tobacco Factory, a building so enormous that Sevillians liked to call it the largest in Spain after El Escorial. In the nineteenth century thousands of women worked inside it, rolling cigars by hand: the famous cigarreras. And one of them, who never existed, became the most famous woman Seville ever produced. Her name was Carmen.

She began life in 1845, in a novella by the French writer Prosper Mérimée, who had travelled through Andalusia. Thirty years later Georges Bizet turned her into an opera. The first act is set in a square in Seville outside the tobacco factory: the bell rings, the cigarette girls pour out on their break, the soldiers flirt, and Carmen sings the Habanera, the song that compares love to a rebellious bird. Bizet borrowed its tune from the Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier, apparently believing it was a folk song.

The premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, in March 1875, was a lukewarm affair at best. Critics found the heroine shocking: a working woman who smokes, chooses her own lovers and refuses to be owned was too much for a theatre where respectable families went to arrange marriages. Bizet died exactly three months after the premiere, aged only thirty-six, without ever knowing that Carmen would become one of the most performed operas in the world.

The real cigarreras were tougher than any libretto. They had their own leaders, they protested when wages were cut, and foreign travellers came to peer into the hot, noisy workshops as if visiting a sight. Today the factory belongs to the University of Seville. Keep Carmen in mind: she comes back at the end of our walk. For now, cross into the quiet lanes just north-west of here, to the old royal mint.