The Macarena and the Almohad Walls: Seville's Barrio of Faith

From the Roman columns of the Alameda to the Virgin of the Madrugá, along the last great stretch of Seville's medieval ramparts, past Mudéjar towers, cloistered nuns and the palace where Antonio Machado was born

Seville · 10 stops · 23 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Alameda de Hércules: Two Pagan Heroes on Roman Columns

Alameda de Hércules, 41002 Sevilla, Spain

Stand between the two tall marble columns at the southern end of this long, tree-lined boulevard and tilt your head back. On top of one stands Hercules, club and all. On the other, Julius Caesar. Two pagan heroes, guarding the start of the most devout walk in Seville... and that is no accident.

The shafts are genuinely Roman. They come from an ancient temple in what is now Calle Mármoles, a few streets from the cathedral, where three of its columns still rise out of a sunken courtyard below the level of the modern pavement. In 1574 the king's governor of the city, the Count of Barajas, had two of them hauled across town and raised here, and sculptors of the same years carved the figures that crown them.

Why these two? Because Seville adored its own origin myth. Legend says Hercules founded the city and Julius Caesar ringed it with walls and towers, and the boast was once inscribed in verse over one of the old city gates. Putting the two heroes here told every arriving traveller that Seville was older than Christendom and as noble as Rome itself.

And the ground under your feet was once water. This was a marshy lagoon left behind by an old arm of the Guadalquivir, a reservoir of floods and fevers. Barajas drained it, planted rows of poplars and created what Sevillians proudly call one of the oldest public promenades in Europe. It has lived several lives since: aristocratic parade ground, then a rough quarter of taverns and brothels, a cradle of flamenco, where a statue of the great singer La Niña de los Peines now stands, and today a place of terraces and children's bicycles.

At the far northern end, two more columns carry lions; those were raised in 1764 and are not Roman at all. From here, the walk turns to a very different kind of devotion: the Seville of brotherhoods, cloistered nuns and the Virgin of the Macarena. Walk a little way up the Alameda, then turn right into Calle Peris Mencheta and follow it to where it meets Calle Feria.
2. Omnium Sanctorum & Calle Feria

Calle Peris Mencheta, 41002 Sevilla, Spain

On the corner in front of you rises a sturdy tower of honey-coloured brick, its upper storey covered in a net of interlocking arches, like lace stretched over a wall. This is Omnium Sanctorum, the church of All Saints, and it guards the busiest corner of the old Macarena district.

When King Ferdinand III took Seville in 1248, he found a great Muslim city and very few churches. The new Christian parishes were built over the following century in a style Sevillians call Gothic-Mudéjar: Gothic doorways and vaults from the north, married to brick, horseshoe arches and geometric decoration from craftsmen trained in the Islamic tradition. That diamond-shaped net on the tower is called sebka, and you will find exactly the same motif on the Giralda, the old minaret of the cathedral.

Look closely at the stone and you may notice how fresh some of it is. In July 1936, in the first days of the Civil War, several churches in these northern parishes were set on fire, and Omnium Sanctorum was among them. The interior was gutted and had to be rebuilt. Then the military rebels took the working-class barrios of the Macarena by force, and the reprisals that followed left wounds the neighbourhood remembers to this day.

Now turn and look along Calle Feria. Every Thursday morning this street fills with a flea market that Sevillians simply call El Jueves, Thursday, and that claims roots going back to the Middle Ages. Old keys, cracked tiles, brotherhood medals, saints with chipped noses... If you want to understand this barrio, come early on a Thursday and watch grandmothers bargain over a plaster Virgin.

All along Calle Feria you will see shrines and posters for the Holy Week brotherhoods, because this is their heartland. And the most famous of them all is waiting at the top of the street. Follow Calle Feria north to its very end, where a basilica stands beside a yellow arch in the old city wall.
3. Basílica de la Macarena & the Macarena Arch

Calle Bécquer 1, 41002 Sevilla, Spain

Ahead of you, painted ochre and white, the Macarena arch cuts through the old city wall, and right beside it stands the basilica that holds the most loved image in Seville. Whatever time of day you arrive, someone will be slipping in through the door to say hello to her.

She is the Esperanza Macarena, Our Lady of Hope, a seventeenth-century carved image whose sculptor nobody knows for certain. Her face is tilted slightly, with tears on her cheeks and lips parted, as if she were about to speak. On her chest she wears five emerald brooches, the gift, so the story goes, of the bullfighter Joselito El Gallo, her devoted son. When he was killed in the ring in 1920, Sevillians say the Macarena was dressed in black mourning for him.

Her great night is the Madrugá, the small hours of Good Friday. Around midnight the doors open, the arch frames her silver canopy, and she sets out on a procession that lasts the whole night and well into the next afternoon. Men hidden beneath the float, the costaleros, carry her on their necks, while people sing saetas to her from balconies. If you have never seen Holy Week here, imagine a whole city refusing to go to bed.

The basilica itself is modern, built in the 1940s, because the old parish church of San Gil next door, where she used to live, was set on fire in 1936. The image had already been hidden and survived. There is a darker chapter too: General Queipo de Llano, who led the military coup in Seville that July, was buried inside this basilica. In 2022, under Spain's democratic memory law, his remains were removed.

The arch beside you is one of the old Almohad gates, rebuilt in 1795 in the form you see now. Tradition says kings made their ceremonial entry into Seville through it. Step out through the arch, cross the wide road outside, and walk up to the enormous Renaissance building on the far side of the gardens.
4. Hospital de las Cinco Llagas: From Hospital to Parliament

Calle San Juan de Ribera, 41009 Sevilla, Spain

Take in the length of this pale façade, stretching across the gardens like a palace that forgot where to stop. It was built not for a king but for the sick poor of Seville, and it was named after the five wounds of Christ: the Hospital de las Cinco Llagas.

The idea came from a remarkable woman, Catalina de Ribera, who founded a hospital for women around 1500 inside the city. Her son, Fadrique Enríquez de Ribera, Marquis of Tarifa, left a fortune in his will to give it a building worthy of the name. Work began in 1546, outside the walls, where the air was thought cleaner and contagion further away, and some of the best architects of the age took turns over the following decades, among them Hernán Ruiz the Younger, who also crowned the Giralda with its belfry.

For more than four centuries this was a working hospital. It saw the waves of epidemic that swept the city, including the terrible plague of 1649, which killed tens of thousands of Sevillians in a few months. Wards ran around a sequence of courtyards, and at the centre stood a church, so that the bedridden could hear Mass. The hospital finally closed in 1972, and the building slowly fell into decay.

Then came its strangest reincarnation. After restoration, the Parliament of Andalusia moved in, holding its first session here in 1992. And the debating chamber is the old hospital church itself: regional deputies now argue about budgets and schools beneath a Renaissance vault built for prayers for the dying. Few parliaments anywhere sit in a former chapel.

Remember the family name, Enríquez de Ribera. The same Fadrique who paid for this hospital went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and came home to build a palace in the old city that Sevillians would call the House of Pilate. Now walk back towards the Macarena arch, and instead of going through it, turn left along the outside of the walls on Calle Muñoz León.
5. The Almohad Walls of Calle Muñoz León

Calle Muñoz León, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

Walk slowly along this rust-coloured rampart and let your hand hover over the surface. It looks like stone, but it is not. It is rammed earth, lime, sand and gravel pounded layer by layer into wooden moulds, and if you look carefully you can still see the horizontal lines where each mould was lifted and refilled.

This is the longest surviving stretch of the walls that once wrapped the whole of medieval Seville, a circuit of roughly seven kilometres with well over a hundred towers. They were raised and strengthened in the twelfth century under the Almoravids and then the Almohads, the Berber dynasties from North Africa who made Seville the capital of their Iberian empire and also built the great mosque whose minaret became the Giralda.

Notice that the defence is double. In front of the main wall runs a lower outer wall, the barbican, with a corridor between them. An attacker who scaled the first line found himself trapped in a narrow killing ground, under the arrows of defenders on the tall square towers. It was state-of-the-art engineering for its age.

And yet in 1247 the armies of Ferdinand III of Castile surrounded Seville and simply waited. The siege lasted more than a year. The fleet cut the bridge of boats to Triana, food ran out, and in November 1248 the city surrendered. Most of its Muslim inhabitants were forced to leave, and the conquerors divided their houses among themselves. These towers watched the whole tragedy from where you stand.

For centuries afterwards the walls kept out floods and plague rather than armies, until the nineteenth century, when Seville tore most of them down to let in light, air and traffic. This stretch survived because the Macarena barrio had grown up against it. Keep following the wall to its far end, where it meets a small church built right into an old gate.
6. Puerta de Córdoba & the Church of San Hermenegildo

Calle Puerta de Córdoba, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

Here the wall ends at a squat medieval gate, and pressed against it, almost leaning on its shoulder, stands a modest church with a simple bell gable. It is easy to walk past. Please don't, because this corner holds one of the oldest stories in Seville.

First the gate. The Puerta de Córdoba was where the road to Córdoba left the city, and unlike the Macarena arch, which was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, it keeps much of its medieval fabric. Of the dozen or so gates that once pierced the walls of Seville, only a handful survive, and this is one of the most authentic.

Now the church. It is dedicated to Saint Hermenegild, a Visigothic prince who lived more than six centuries before the Almohads. His father, King Leovigild, was an Arian Christian, as the Visigothic rulers then were. Hermenegild, governing Seville, converted to Catholicism, encouraged by the city's bishop, Leander, and rose in revolt against his father. Leovigild besieged Seville, captured his son, and in 585 Hermenegild was put to death for refusing to take communion from an Arian bishop.

Sevillian tradition insists that the prince was imprisoned in the tower of this very gate, and that is why the church was built against it in the seventeenth century. Historians place his execution in Tarragona, far to the north-east, so treat the cell as legend. But the consequence is real history: a few years later his brother, King Reccared, converted the whole Visigothic kingdom to Catholicism in 589.

And the bishop Leander had a younger brother, Isidore, who became one of the most learned men of early medieval Europe and is still remembered as Saint Isidore of Seville. Faith in this city runs in layers, Roman, Visigothic, Islamic and Christian, one laid on top of the other. Now turn your back on the wall and head south-west through the lanes to Calle San Luis... a Baroque surprise is waiting a few minutes away.
7. San Luis de los Franceses: A Jesuit Jewel Box

Calle San Luis 37, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

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.
8. San Marcos and Its Mudéjar Tower

Plaza de San Marcos 10, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

Find a spot in the little square where you can see the whole tower of San Marcos at once, from its plain lower shaft to the decorated upper storey. If it reminds you of something, you are right: Sevillians often call it a little sister of the Giralda.

The resemblance is not an accident. The lower part of the tower is believed to have been the minaret of a mosque that stood here before 1248. When the Christians took over, they kept the solid shaft, added a bell chamber and covered the upper walls with sebka, that diamond-shaped brick lattice you met at Omnium Sanctorum. It is the Giralda story told in miniature: a call to prayer turned into a peal of bells.

Now look at the main doorway. The pointed arches and the carved figures are Gothic, but around them runs a frame of brick and interlacing decoration straight out of Islamic tradition. This mixture is what we call Mudéjar, named after the Muslims who stayed under Christian rule, and whose craftsmen kept building for their new masters for generations. San Marcos dates mostly from the fourteenth century and is one of the finest examples in the city.

Step inside if it is open, and you will be struck by how bare it feels. In July 1936 the church was set on fire and its altarpieces and images were destroyed. What remains is the architecture itself, naked: whitewashed walls and pointed brick arches. Some visitors find it sad. Others find that, without the gold, they finally see the building.

This square is the heart of the old barrio of San Marcos, once full of convents, and the bells you hear in the morning are still calling nuns to prayer. One of those convents is around the corner, and it has something sweet to offer. Leave the square to the east, into Calle Santa Paula.
9. Convento de Santa Paula: Sweets Through the Torno

Calle Santa Paula 11, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

Walk into the small courtyard and stop in front of the church portal, glowing with glazed ceramic: blue, yellow and green medallions framed by brick, with saints and angels looking down at you. Behind these walls, cloistered nuns have lived and prayed for more than five hundred years.

The Convent of Santa Paula belongs to the Hieronymite nuns and was founded in 1473 by a noble widow, Ana de Santillán. The portal you are admiring was completed around 1504, and its ceramics are by Francisco Niculoso, called Pisano, an Italian potter who settled in Triana and taught Seville to paint on flat tiles like a Renaissance artist. The sculpted figures are attributed to Pedro Millán. It is one of the most beautiful doorways in the city, and almost nobody comes to see it.

Now for the secret. Look for the little door marked for the sale of sweets, ring the bell, and you will find yourself facing the torno: a wooden drum set into the wall that revolves on its axis. A voice will answer from the other side. You say what you want, place your money in the drum, it turns, and back comes a jar. You never see the nun, and she never sees you. The enclosure stays intact.

Santa Paula is famous for its marmalades and jams, and above all for one made from the bitter oranges that grow on Seville's street trees. Those oranges are so sour that Sevillians do not eat them, which is why for generations they were shipped to Britain, where they became the classic breakfast marmalade. Buying a jar here is buying that story at its source.

Convent sweets are not a tourist novelty. For many enclosed communities, the torno is how they pay for heating, roofs and repairs to buildings centuries old, and as vocations decline, some convents in Seville have had to close. Leave quietly, walk back west along Calle Santa Paula and on through the lanes towards Calle Dueñas, where a palace gate opens into a garden of lemon trees.
10. Palacio de las Dueñas: Machado's Lemon Tree

Calle Dueñas 5, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

Through the gateway you glimpse a long garden path, palms, bougainvillea and, if you are lucky with the season, the glint of lemons among dark leaves. Behind them waits a palace of white arcades and carved plaster: the Palacio de las Dueñas.

The house was built at the end of the fifteenth century, mixing Gothic, Mudéjar and Renaissance features in the way only Seville seemed to manage. It passed to the Enríquez de Ribera family, the same family that founded the hospital you saw at the start of this walk, and through marriages it came to the Dukes of Alba, who still own it. The odd name comes from a convent of nuns, the dueñas, that stood next door until it was demolished in the nineteenth century.

On 26 July 1875 a boy was born in rented rooms inside this complex. His name was Antonio Machado, and he would become one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language. Decades later he opened a famous self-portrait with this line: "Mi infancia son recuerdos de un patio de Sevilla"... my childhood is memories of a courtyard in Seville, and of a bright orchard where the lemon tree ripens. That orchard, that lemon tree, are here.

Machado's life ended far from this garden. He supported the Republic during the Civil War, and in early 1939 he crossed the Pyrenees on foot among half a million refugees, old and ill, with his mother. He died a few weeks later in Collioure, in France, and is buried there. In his coat pocket, it is said, was a scrap of paper with a last line about the days of blue and the sun of childhood.

The palace has its own modern legend too. Cayetana, the eighteenth Duchess of Alba, adored it, and died here in 2014. It opened to visitors soon afterwards. And so the walk ends where it should: Roman columns, a weeping Virgin, Almohad walls, a martyred prince, cloistered nuns... and finally a poet remembering a Seville courtyard. Calle Dueñas leads you back towards the centre whenever you are ready.