From Baroque Domes to Las Setas: Seville's Architecture Between Sierpes and Casa de Pilatos

A walk through five centuries of building in the heart of Seville: a convent turned museum, a Plateresque town hall, the street where Cervantes sat in prison, a church on a ninth-century mosque, the House of Pilate and the giant timber parasol of Las Setas

Seville · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Museo de Bellas Artes: A Convent Built Around Its Courtyards

   Plaza del Museo 9, 41001 Sevilla, Spain

   Face the long, sober façade on the far side of this leafy square, with its brick, its pale stone and its single grand doorway. In the middle of the square, a bronze Murillo looks on, brush in hand, as if waiting for you to go in and check his work.

   This was the convent of La Merced Calzada, the house of the Mercedarian friars, an order founded in the thirteenth century for one very specific purpose: to ransom Christians held captive across the Mediterranean. The friars settled here soon after the Christian conquest of Seville in 1248, and in the early 1600s the architect Juan de Oviedo rebuilt their convent in the form you see now.

   The genius of the building is inside, and it is all about air and light. The rooms wrap around three courtyards, each with arcades, tiles and orange trees, linked by a grand staircase under a decorated dome. In a city where summer can pass forty degrees, a courtyard is not decoration, it is engineering: shade, cross-draughts and the cool sound of water, all designed around the sun.

   In 1835 the Spanish state confiscated the property of most religious orders, and the friars were gone. The empty convent became a museum, filled with paintings rescued from closed monasteries all over the province. That is why the old church now hangs with canvases that Murillo painted for the Capuchin friars of Seville, while Zurbarán and Valdés Leal fill the rooms around the courtyards. Many Sevillians will tell you it is the finest collection of Spanish Golden Age painting after the Prado.

   On Sunday mornings painters set up their easels in this square and sell their work under the trees, so art spills out of the convent and onto the pavement. Now leave the square and walk south-east for a few minutes, until a church with a big, bright dome rises above the rooftops.

2. 2. Iglesia de la Magdalena: Figueroa's Baroque Dome

   Calle San Pablo 10, 41001 Sevilla, Spain

   Stop on the pavement and look up at the dome: ribbed, lantern-topped, and decorated so lavishly that it seems to be dressed for a party. The church beneath it is Santa María Magdalena, and it is one of the great Baroque buildings of Seville.

   It was not always the Magdalena. This was the church of San Pablo, the main convent of the Dominican friars in the city, rebuilt between 1691 and 1709 by Leonardo de Figueroa, the architect whose domes, towers and twisted columns define Baroque Seville. Inside, the walls and vaults are covered in painted saints, angels and architecture that does not exist, a trompe l'oeil heaven designed to make you forget you are standing in a box of brick.

   The Dominicans' story here has a darker side. When the Spanish Inquisition began work in 1481, Seville was its first great stage, and its first inquisitors were Dominican friars. In the decades that followed, hundreds of people, most of them converts from Judaism accused of secretly keeping their old faith, were tried and many were burned. And yet, in this same church in 1544, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican who denounced the abuse of the native peoples of the Americas, was consecrated bishop.

   So how did the church get its new name? In 1810, during the French occupation, the old parish church of the Magdalena, a few streets away, was demolished, and after the convents were closed the parish moved into the Dominicans' church. It brought with it, the parish proudly says, the font in which, on New Year's Day of 1618, a baby called Bartolomé Esteban Murillo had been baptised. The painter whose statue you just saw outside the museum began his life in that basin.

   Take a moment at the side of the church to notice how tightly it is wrapped by houses, like a ship squeezed into a narrow harbour. From here, head east through the side streets towards Plaza Nueva, where the city's government has been housed for nearly five hundred years.

3. 3. Ayuntamiento: A Town Hall with Two Faces

   Plaza Nueva 1, 41001 Sevilla, Spain

   Begin in the wide, palm-lined Plaza Nueva, facing the long, columned front of the city hall, then walk around the building to the smaller square on the other side. You will feel as if you have walked around a building and through three hundred years.

   The side facing Plaza Nueva is the newer one, finished in the second half of the nineteenth century in a calm, classical style. The square itself is newer still than it looks: until 1840 it was occupied by the enormous convent of San Francisco, which was demolished after the friars were expelled. The bronze horseman in the middle is King Ferdinand III, who took Seville in 1248.

   Now the other side, on Plaza de San Francisco. Here the stone erupts into carved candelabra, shields, medallions, mythical creatures and tiny faces, the work of the architect Diego de Riaño from 1527. Spaniards call this style Plateresque, from platero, a silversmith, because the stone is worked as finely as a silver plate. Get close to the corner and look at the detail; it was meant to show that Seville, newly rich from the Americas, could match any city in Italy.

   The square in front of it was the city's stage for six centuries. Bullfights, tournaments and royal celebrations took place here, but so did executions and the great public ceremonies of the Inquisition, the autos de fe, when the condemned were paraded and their sentences read before the crowds and the city's dignitaries. The balconies of these buildings were the best seats in town.

   Today the square has a gentler role. In Holy Week the processions pass through it on their official route towards the cathedral, under the eyes of the authorities seated on special stands. From the northern side of Plaza de San Francisco, a narrow pedestrian street leads away to the north. Its name means serpents, and it is the most famous shopping street in Seville.

4. 4. Calle Sierpes: Cervantes in the Royal Prison

   Calle Sierpes, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Let the crowd carry you a few steps into this narrow, gently curving street, lined with shop windows, old pharmacies and, in summer, great canvas awnings stretched from roof to roof for shade. This is Calle Sierpes, and it is the main artery of Seville's old centre.

   Nobody quite agrees on where the name came from. It may have come from an old inn sign, or simply from the way the street twists like a snake. What is certain is that at its southern end, near Plaza de San Francisco, stood the Real Cárcel, the Royal Prison of Seville, a crowded, corrupt and notorious place where thieves, debtors and nobles' sons were thrown together.

   In 1597 one of its inmates was a tax collector in his fifties, a veteran of the battle of Lepanto with a crippled left hand, jailed over irregularities in his accounts. His name was Miguel de Cervantes. Years later, in the prologue to Don Quixote, he wrote that his book had been conceived in a prison, where every discomfort has its seat. Most scholars believe he meant this one. A plaque on a bank building near the bottom of the street remembers him.

   Take a short detour into Calle Jovellanos, off to one side, to see the little Capilla de San José, the chapel of the carpenters' guild. From the outside it is modest. Inside, it is a cave of gold: an altarpiece so dense with carved and gilded wood that it seems to have grown rather than been built. It is Seville's late Baroque at full volume, hidden among the shoe shops.

   During Holy Week, Sierpes becomes part of the official route of the processions, and the great floats inch along it between walls of people, sometimes with only centimetres to spare. At its northern end stands Confitería La Campana, a pastry shop that has been selling sweets since 1885. But first we turn east: take Calle Sagasta and follow your nose towards the large church on Plaza del Salvador.

5. 5. Iglesia del Salvador: A Church on the First Great Mosque

   Plaza del Salvador 3, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Step back towards the far side of Plaza del Salvador, between the café tables, and take in the huge pink-and-cream Baroque front of the church. After the cathedral, this is the largest church in Seville, and it stands on one of the oldest sacred sites in the city.

   In the ninth century, a judge named Ibn Adabbas built the first great mosque of Seville right here. For three hundred years it was the heart of the Muslim city, until the Almohads built a bigger mosque near the river, the one whose minaret became the Giralda. After 1248 the old mosque became a church dedicated to the Saviour, El Salvador, and it kept much of its Islamic structure for centuries.

   By the late seventeenth century it was falling down, and Seville decided to start again. Building began in 1674, there were collapses and changes of architect, and Leonardo de Figueroa finally saw it through, completing it early in the next century. Inside, the space is vast and bright, and the high altar is a gilded mountain of carved wood, angels and clouds, one of the most spectacular altarpieces in Spain.

   But the mosque never quite left. Walk around to the courtyard on the north side, the old ablutions court, and you will see arches resting on ancient columns, some with Roman and Visigothic capitals reused by the mosque builders. The lower part of the bell tower is the base of the old minaret. Roman, Visigothic, Islamic and Christian Seville, all in one patio.

   Behind the church lies a tiny square long known as Plaza del Pan, the bread square, where bakers sold loaves from little shops built right into the church walls. Inside, in a side chapel, waits Jesús de la Pasión, carved by the great sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés in the early seventeenth century. From the Plaza del Pan, follow Calle Alcaicería and the lanes east for a minute or two, to a quiet Gothic church named after a saint of Seville.

6. 6. San Isidoro & Plaza de la Alfalfa

   Calle Luchana 3, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   In this tight knot of lanes, the church of San Isidoro rises almost without warning: brick walls, a Gothic doorway and a tower peering over the rooftops. You can easily pass it by, which is a pity, because it is dedicated to the most brilliant mind Seville ever produced.

   Isidore was bishop of Seville in the early seventh century, the younger brother of Bishop Leander. He wrote the Etymologies, a vast encyclopaedia that tried to gather everything known about the world, from grammar and medicine to animals, ships and stones. For nearly a thousand years, monks across Europe copied it, and much of what medieval scholars knew about antiquity reached them through his pages. He also wrote a history of the Goths and presided over church councils that shaped Visigothic Spain.

   So it is perhaps not surprising that, in our own time, Isidore has been proposed as the patron saint of the internet... unofficially, it must be said. A man who tried to put all human knowledge into one place would probably have understood search engines very well.

   The building itself is a fine example of the Gothic-Mudéjar parish churches raised after 1248, much altered over the centuries. Inside, over the high altar, hangs a celebrated painting by Juan de Roelas from 1613, showing the death of Saint Isidore, surrounded by clergy in a scene so crowded and alive that you can almost hear the murmur of prayers.

   Now step into the Plaza de la Alfalfa, just to the north. Its name recalls the fodder once sold here, and archaeologists believe this area lay close to the heart of Roman Hispalis. Today it is one of the liveliest squares in the old town, full of tapas bars and young Sevillians at night. From the Alfalfa, take Calle Águilas eastwards; at its end, a great ducal palace is waiting behind a marble gate.

7. 7. Casa de Pilatos: Mudéjar, Gothic and Renaissance in One Palace

   Plaza de Pilatos 1, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   Stand in front of the white marble gateway, carved in Italy and set into a plain wall, and notice how little it tells you about what lies behind. That is the Seville way: a quiet street front, and inside, a world.

   This is the Casa de Pilatos, the palace of the Enríquez de Ribera family. It was begun at the end of the fifteenth century by Pedro Enríquez and his wife Catalina de Ribera, and completed by their son Fadrique, the Marquis of Tarifa. In 1518 Fadrique set out on a long journey through Italy to Jerusalem, and came back two years later with his head full of Renaissance palaces and holy places.

   Here is where the name comes from. After his return, Fadrique established a Way of the Cross that started from his house and ended at a shrine outside the city called the Cruz del Campo. Legend soon claimed the distance matched the walk from Pontius Pilate's palace to Calvary, and that the house copied Pilate's own. There is no evidence for either, but Sevillians have called it the House of Pilate ever since.

   Inside, the main courtyard is a marvel of fusion. Mudéjar plaster lace runs over the arches, Gothic balustrades line the gallery, a Renaissance fountain splashes in the middle, and Roman statues stand in the corners. And the walls are covered in sixteenth-century glazed tiles, with patterns so varied that the palace holds one of the largest collections of its kind anywhere. Upstairs, the painter Francisco Pacheco, teacher of Velázquez, decorated a ceiling with the apotheosis of Hercules in 1603.

   It still belongs to the Dukes of Medinaceli, heirs of the Enríquez de Ribera, and it keeps an atmosphere museums rarely have, of a family home that happens to be five hundred years old. When you are ready, walk north through the lanes to a church that spent years hidden behind scaffolding.

8. 8. Santa Catalina: The Church That Came Back

   Calle Alhóndiga, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   Stand on the little square in front of Santa Catalina and look at its brick bulk, its stubby tower and its carved stone doorway. For years, Sevillians walked past this corner without seeing the church at all, because it was wrapped in scaffolding and closed.

   Santa Catalina is one of the Gothic-Mudéjar churches built in the decades after the Christian conquest of 1248, probably over an earlier Islamic building, as so many were. Seen from the side, its brick walls with small, high windows feel almost like a fortress, a reminder that these first churches were built in a frontier city. Its tower, plain below and lighter above, follows the same pattern you can see across the old town: a solid base and a bell chamber added on top.

   Now look closely at the main doorway, because it was not born here. It came from another medieval church, Santa Lucía, and was moved to Santa Catalina in the early twentieth century, stone by stone. In those years Seville was redesigning streets and widening squares, and moving a whole portal from one church to another was a way to save it. Architecture in this city is not only built; sometimes it migrates.

   In the early 2000s, serious structural damage was discovered, and the church closed its doors. What followed was a long, painstaking restoration: foundations reinforced, walls stabilised, and hidden medieval elements uncovered. When Santa Catalina finally reopened in 2018, the whole barrio celebrated seeing it alive again. Restorations like this are invisible victories: nobody photographs a foundation.

   Inside, side chapels hold medieval vaults and Baroque images, and one of the city's Holy Week brotherhoods keeps its floats here. If the door is open, step in and look at how the light falls from the high windows on to the bare brick. Then walk west through the lanes to Plaza de San Pedro and the next church, where in 1599 a baby was baptised who would become the greatest Spanish painter of all.

9. 9. San Pedro: Where Velázquez Was Baptised

   Plaza de San Pedro 1, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   Here, on a busy corner where buses squeeze past the café tables, stands the church of San Pedro, its brick tower topped by a light, decorated Baroque belfry. Most people hurry past on their way to Las Setas. Give it a minute.

   Like Santa Catalina, San Pedro is one of the parish churches founded after the Christian conquest of 1248, built in the Gothic-Mudéjar way with brick walls, pointed arches and Islamic-inspired decoration. Over the centuries it collected Baroque additions, and the tower is a perfect lesson in Sevillian layering: a medieval base, crowned by a later, airier top that catches the evening light.

   On 6 June 1599 a baby was carried through these doors to be baptised. His name was Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, the son of a modest family in this parish. He would train in Seville under Francisco Pacheco, the painter you met at Casa de Pilatos, marry Pacheco's daughter, and then leave for Madrid to become painter to King Philip IV and, in 1656, the author of Las Meninas. A plaque on the church remembers the baptism.

   It is worth pausing on how much talent this small district produced in a single generation. Velázquez was baptised here in 1599, Murillo at the Magdalena in 1618, and Zurbarán, from Extremadura, worked for decades in Seville's convents. The city was rich from the Americas, its churches were hungry for altarpieces and paintings, and young artists were trained in workshops a few streets apart.

   Inside, notice how the pointed brick arches divide the naves, exactly as in the medieval churches of the Macarena. When you come out, walk west along Calle Imagen and Calle Laraña. The giant timber mushrooms of Las Setas will appear on your right, but resist them for a moment: first, a church that keeps the bones of Seville's favourite poet.

10. 10. La Anunciación & the Pantheon of Illustrious Sevillians

    Calle Laraña, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

    On the busy Calle Laraña, beside the old university buildings, you will find a sober Renaissance church front, all straight lines and restraint. After the riot of the Baroque, it feels almost severe... and that severity is a clue to who built it.

    The church of the Anunciación was built in the second half of the sixteenth century for the Jesuits, then a new and ambitious order. Their style was disciplined, clear and modern, a Renaissance answer to the medieval clutter around it. When Charles III expelled the Jesuits in 1767, their buildings here passed to the University of Seville, and the Anunciación became the university church.

    Beneath it lies a crypt that Seville turned, in the nineteenth century, into the Panteón de Sevillanos Ilustres, the Pantheon of Illustrious Sevillians. Scholars, artists and writers of the city rest there, but the names most visitors look for are those of two brothers: the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and the painter Valeriano Bécquer.

    Both died young in Madrid in 1870, within three months of each other, poor and largely unrecognised. Gustavo Adolfo's Rimas, his short, aching love poems, were published only after his death, by friends who gathered up his manuscripts. Today they are among the most read poems in the Spanish language, and generations of Spanish schoolchildren have learned them by heart. In 1913, Seville brought the two brothers home and laid them here, side by side.

    Bécquer loved the hidden corners of his city: the convents, the gardens, the half-ruined cloisters. One of his Leyendas, Maese Pérez the organist, is set at midnight Mass in the Sevillian convent of Santa Inés, where a dead man's music fills the church once more. There is a fine symmetry in finding him in a crypt under a busy shopping street, a few steps from the most modern structure in old Seville. Before you head to it, turn into Calle Cuna, just opposite, to visit a palace whose floors are paved with Rome.

11. 11. Palacio de Lebrija: A House Paved with Roman Mosaics

    Calle Cuna 8, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

    Peer through the wrought-iron gate from Calle Cuna into the cool hallway beyond, with its tiles and its glimpse of a courtyard. From the street it is an elegant town house like many others. Inside, it is something else entirely.

    In 1901 the house was bought by Regla Manjón, Countess of Lebrija, a passionate collector with strong opinions about beauty. She set out to turn her home into a museum of everything she loved: Roman antiquity, Islamic decoration, Renaissance ceilings, Sevillian tiles. The house itself is centuries older, but over the next decades she reshaped it room by room, and today it is kept as a museum so that visitors can see it the way she left it.

    And her boldest idea is under your feet once you step into the courtyard. The floor is a vast Roman mosaic, brought from the ruins of Itálica, the Roman city just outside Seville where the emperors Trajan and Hadrian had family roots. Gods, mythical scenes and geometric borders, laid by Roman craftsmen some eighteen hundred years ago, now paved a private patio. Mosaics continue through the surrounding rooms, alongside glass cases of ancient vases, coins and sculpture.

    Today we would raise an eyebrow at a collector lifting mosaics from an archaeological site to decorate her home. Rules on heritage were very different then, and private collections were how much of Spain's past survived at all. The Countess's mosaics are intact, cared for and visible, which is more than can be said for many that stayed in the ground.

    Look up as you climb the stairs, if you go in: the staircase is crowned by a Mudéjar wooden ceiling brought from a ducal palace in Marchena, another treasure moved here to be saved. Now walk back up Calle Cuna to the Plaza de la Encarnación, where the old and the new collide in the most spectacular way in Seville.

12. 12. Metropol Parasol (Las Setas) & the Antiquarium

    Plaza de la Encarnación, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

    Walk out into Plaza de la Encarnación and let your eyes climb the giant honeycombed canopies floating above you, a forest of pale timber mushrooms rising out of a city of churches and whitewashed walls. Sevillians call it Las Setas, the mushrooms; officially, it is the Metropol Parasol.

    For decades this square was a problem. A convent stood here until it was demolished during the French occupation; then a nineteenth-century market, which was itself pulled down in the 1970s. For years the site was a car park and a hole in the heart of the city. In the 1990s, work began on an underground car park... and the diggers hit Rome.

    Beneath your feet lies the Antiquarium, where the excavations have been preserved. You can walk on raised walkways over the remains of Roman houses with mosaic floors, a fish-salting works, and streets of Hispalis, together with houses from the Islamic city built on top centuries later. The car park was abandoned, and a competition was held for something worthy of the find.

    The winner was the German architect Jürgen Mayer H., and the result opened in 2011: a structure about one hundred and fifty metres long and almost thirty metres high, made of laminated timber and often described as one of the largest wooden structures in the world. At street level, the Encarnación market came back, with its fish and vegetable stalls. Up top, a winding walkway gives you the best panorama of the old town, from the Giralda to the domes you have seen today.

    It was controversial, late and far over budget, and some still find it an alien landing among the bell towers. But that, in a way, is Seville's whole story: Romans, Visigoths, Almohads and Christian kings, each building on top of the last. So end this walk by climbing up to the walkway at sunset, look down on five centuries of rooftops... and decide for yourself who got it right.