The Lost Judería of Seville: Santa Cruz, Susona and the Synagogues That Became Churches

A walk through the maze of Barrio Santa Cruz, once the Jewish quarter of Seville: three former synagogues, a skull above a doorway, Murillo's vanished grave and the story of 1391 and 1492, told plainly

Seville · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Calle Mateos Gago: Along the Wall of the Judería

   Calle Mateos Gago, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Turn your back on the Giralda and face the street that climbs gently away from it, with orange trees down the middle, iron balconies overhead and the clink of glasses from its bars. This is Calle Mateos Gago, and it has a secret: for more than a century its line was a wall.

   When Ferdinand the Third of Castile took Seville in 1248, the city's Jews were given their own district, the Judería, in this south-eastern corner of town, squeezed between the palace of the Alcázar and the city walls. Its own inner wall ran out from the Alcázar and followed, more or less, the street under your feet, then curved away to the east. Inside it lived one of the largest Jewish communities in Castile: physicians, tax collectors, silversmiths, cloth dealers, scholars. Chronicles say that King Alfonso the Tenth, the Wise, handed the community several former mosques to use as synagogues.

   At night the gates of the Judería were closed. It was protection and enclosure at the same time, and for a while the arrangement worked. The community paid its taxes straight to the Crown, and the Crown, in return, kept the neighbours at a distance. When that protection failed, as you will hear at the next stop, it failed completely.

   Notice how little of that past shows on the surface. The street is named after Francisco Mateos Gago, a nineteenth-century Sevillian priest and scholar, and today it is one of the busiest tapas strips in the city. Yet the shape of the quarter survives almost intact. Step off this street into any lane on your right and you enter a maze of bends, blind alleys and tiny squares... a street plan that was never meant for carriages, laid down by people who wanted to live close together.

   So keep in mind, as you wander, that the prettiest barrio in Seville is also a place of loss. Almost every pretty corner ahead holds two stories, the one on the postcard and the one underneath it. Walk up Calle Mateos Gago and slip right into the narrow lanes, towards a tiny junction marked by three crosses.

2. 2. Plaza de las Tres Cruces: June 1391

   Plaza de las Tres Cruces, Calle Cruces, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   In the middle of this little crossroads of lanes stand three slender columns, each one crowned with a cross. Nobody hurries past them. The lanes are too narrow, the walls too close, and the whole place feels like a small room open to the sky.

   The street is simply called Calle Cruces, the street of the crosses, and Sevillians love to argue about the columns: some say the shafts were reused from far older buildings, others that they marked a stop for prayer. What nobody disputes is where they stand... in the heart of what was once the Jewish quarter. And that makes this a good place to tell the story that changed the Judería for ever.

   In the 1370s and 1380s, an archdeacon from the town of Écija, Ferrán Martínez, preached sermon after sermon in Seville against the Jews, urging Christians to destroy the synagogues. The archbishop and the Crown told him to stop. He did not. Then, in 1390, both the archbishop and the king died, and the new king, Henry the Third, was a child. There was no one left to restrain him. In March 1391 there was rioting. On the sixth of June, a mob broke into the Judería.

   Houses were plundered and burned, synagogues taken, families killed in these very lanes. Chroniclers spoke of thousands of dead, and many of the survivors accepted baptism to save their lives. Within weeks the violence spread like a fire along the roads, to Córdoba, Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona and dozens of smaller towns across Spain.

   The Judería of Seville never truly recovered. Its synagogues became churches, and a new class of people was born: the conversos, Jews who had become Christians, often under duress, and who would be watched with suspicion for generations. Keep that word in mind, conversos, because the rest of this walk depends on it. Now head north-east through the lanes towards Calle Levíes and the church of San Bartolomé.

3. 3. San Bartolomé and Calle Levíes

   Calle Virgen de la Alegría, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Stop in front of the calm, rather severe facade of San Bartolomé, all straight lines and pale stone, on a lane so quiet you can hear the swifts. It looks like a church built by people who had read about ancient Rome in books... which is roughly what it is.

   The building you see went up in the decades either side of 1800, in the neoclassical taste of the time. But the parish is far older, and Sevillian tradition holds that one of the synagogues of the Judería stood on or near this spot until 1391, when it was taken and turned into a church. The new facade did a good job of hiding that history. Most worshippers walking in today have no idea of it.

   Now look at the street sign on the corner: Calle Levíes. The Leví family. The most famous man of that name was Samuel ha-Leví, treasurer to King Pedro the First of Castile in the fourteenth century. He was so powerful that in Toledo he built a magnificent synagogue, the one now called El Tránsito, with the king's own coat of arms in its plaster. Tradition places his houses here in Seville, on this street. Then the king turned on him, as kings did. Samuel was arrested, and around 1360 he died in prison.

   There is a second twist. The palace a few steps along, the house of the Mañara family, is where Miguel de Mañara was born in 1627. As a young nobleman he had a reputation for gambling, duels and seduction, and many Sevillians still link him with the legend of Don Juan. Then his young wife died, and Mañara changed completely. He spent the rest of his life burying the poor and nursing the sick, at the Hospital de la Caridad by the river.

   So on one short street you have a Jewish treasurer brought down by his king, and a Christian rake who became something close to a saint. Seville likes to put its extremes next door to each other. Walk back south a few steps to the church on Calle Santa María la Blanca, whose name holds a surprise.

4. 4. Santa María la Blanca: The Synagogue Dressed in Lace

   Calle Santa María la Blanca 5, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   From the street, the church of Santa María la Blanca hardly announces itself: a stone doorway, a plain wall, a small belfry. Step closer to the doorway, though, because it is older than everything behind it.

   This was a synagogue. After the assault of 1391 it was taken from the Jewish community and consecrated as a church, under the name Santa María la Blanca. And here is the strange coincidence: in Toledo, another famous former synagogue carries exactly the same name. Two cities, two stolen houses of prayer, both rededicated to the White Virgin.

   Then, in the 1660s, the church was completely rebuilt, and the reason was a party. In 1661 Pope Alexander the Seventh issued a document favouring the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a cause Seville had championed passionately for decades, and the city celebrated for weeks. This church was remade for the occasion. Inside, if the door is open, look up: the vaults are covered in white plaster ornament so dense it looks like lace, held up by slim columns of pink marble.

   For the new church Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, the greatest painter in Seville, made four half-moon canvases. Two of them tell the legend of how a Roman patrician and his wife dreamed of a summer snowfall that showed them where to build a church to the Virgin. They are among the loveliest things Murillo ever painted... and you will not find them here. During the French occupation of Seville, from 1810 to 1812, they were carried off, and after a long journey they ended up in the Prado in Madrid.

   So the church holds two kinds of absence: the synagogue that vanished inside it, and the paintings that vanished out of it. And yet it is still a living parish, with weddings and baptisms under that lace ceiling. Continue east to the end of Calle Santa María la Blanca, where the old quarter met the outside world at a gate.

5. 5. Puerta de la Carne: The Gate and the Cemetery

   Calle Santa María la Blanca 43, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Here the old street suddenly opens onto traffic, buses and a wide avenue. Pause at this edge, because you are standing roughly where Seville's wall once had a gate, and where the Judería touched the open country.

   The gate had several names over the centuries. In Moorish times it was known by an Arabic name, and later Christians called it the Puerta de Minjoar, and for a time the gate of the Judería, because it was the quarter's own door to the outside. The name that stuck, Puerta de la Carne, the Meat Gate, came from the city slaughterhouse that stood just outside it. The gate itself was pulled down in the nineteenth century, when Seville tore down most of its walls to let the city breathe.

   Outside this gate lay the cemetery of Seville's Jews. In 1996 and 1997, when the city decided to build an underground car park at the corner of Calle Cano y Cueto, archaeologists were called in first. They uncovered a large, densely packed section of the medieval Jewish cemetery, hundreds of years of burials, and alongside them a group of graves of enslaved people from a later age.

   Most of the remains and objects went to the city's Archaeological Museum. But one tomb was left where it was found, protected under glass, on a lower level of the car park that was built here after all. So, a few metres under drivers looking for a space, a medieval Sevillian lies exactly where his family laid him.

   It is a very Sevillian solution, half respect and half pragmatism, and it raises the question every old city has to answer: how much of the past do you keep, and how much do you pave over? From here, turn right and follow the long garden that runs south beside the wall of the Alcázar, the Jardines de Murillo, to the tall monument with a ship on top.

6. 6. Jardines de Murillo: 1483, 1492 and a Ship of Stone

   Paseo de Catalina de Ribera, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Walk into the shade of the ficus and palm trees and stop beside the monument of two tall columns, a lion at their foot and a little bronze ship sailing on top. It is dedicated to Christopher Columbus, and it is one of the most photographed things in the gardens.

   These Jardines de Murillo were once orchards belonging to the Alcázar, the royal palace whose wall you can see along one side. In 1911 they were handed over to the city as a public garden and named after the painter Murillo, who spent his last years living in this barrio. The avenue beside them is named after Catalina de Ribera, a great noblewoman who founded a hospital for the poor. Everything here is gentle, which makes what follows harder to hear.

   In 1483, eight years before the rest of Spain, the Jews of Seville were ordered out. The newly founded Inquisition persuaded the Catholic Monarchs that conversos could never be good Christians while Jews lived beside them, and the Jews of the dioceses of Seville, Córdoba and Cádiz were expelled. The Judería, which had already been broken in 1391, now emptied.

   Then, on the thirty-first of March 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the decree expelling every Jew from their kingdoms who would not convert. They were given a few months. Tens of thousands left by land to Portugal and by sea to North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire, selling houses for almost nothing. The story goes that some families carried the keys of their houses in Sefarad with them, and passed them down for generations.

   And here is the coincidence that the column above you invites. On the third of August 1492, just days after the deadline for the Jews to leave, Columbus sailed from Palos, not far from here, on the voyage that reached the Americas. Spain was closing one world and opening another in the same summer. Now follow the garden south, cross towards the open space of the Prado de San Sebastián, and the darkest stop of this walk.

7. 7. Prado de San Sebastián: The Quemadero

   Prado de San Sebastián, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Look around this wide, ordinary space, with its buses, its gardens and its people walking to work. There is no plaque on the paving telling you what happened here, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of quiet.

   The Spanish Inquisition began its work in Seville. The first inquisitors arrived in the autumn of 1480 and installed themselves, after a short stay in a convent, in the castle of San Jorge across the river in Triana. Their target was not Jews as such, but conversos, baptised Christians of Jewish descent suspected of secretly keeping Jewish customs. Lighting candles on a Friday evening, refusing pork, changing the linen on a Saturday... any of it could be denounced by a neighbour or a servant.

   On the sixth of February 1481, Seville saw the first auto de fe: a procession, a sermon, and six men and women condemned and burned. For the executions, a permanent platform was built out here, beyond the walls, on the meadow of the Prado de San Sebastián. It was called the quemadero, the burning place, and it was decorated with four large statues of prophets. Historians place it roughly where the Teatro Lope de Vega and the statue of El Cid stand today, a short walk to the west.

   It was used for generations: for conversos in the early, terrible decades, later for Protestants in the great autos of 1559 and 1560, for moriscos, and for others. Sometimes, when the accused had died or fled, their bones or an effigy were burned instead. The platform stood for more than three hundred years, and it was only dismantled in 1809, during the war against Napoleon, when its stone was wanted for fortifications.

   It is hard to connect this sunny, busy place with any of that, and perhaps that is the lesson: history leaves no mark unless people choose to keep one. Take a breath, then walk back north along the Paseo de Catalina de Ribera and slip through the narrow gateway into the barrio, to the Plaza de Santa Cruz.

8. 8. Plaza de Santa Cruz: Murillo's Lost Grave and Rosina's Balcony

   Plaza de Santa Cruz, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Find a spot in the shade of the orange trees and look at the tall, intricate wrought-iron cross in the middle of the square, black lace against white walls. It looks as if it has always been here. In fact, both the cross and the square are newcomers.

   Until the early nineteenth century this was not a square at all. On this spot stood the parish church of Santa Cruz, and, like Santa María la Blanca, it had begun life as one of the synagogues of the Judería before 1391. The whole barrio, and every postcard of it, takes its name from that vanished church. Then, during the French occupation of 1810 to 1812, the church was demolished, and the space was left open.

   Inside that church lay Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. He died in Seville in 1682, after a fall from scaffolding while painting an altarpiece in Cádiz, or so the traditional story goes, and he was buried here, in the parish where he lived. When the church came down, his remains were lost. Somewhere under this square, or nowhere at all, lies the painter of Seville's sweetest Virgins, and the city has never found him.

   Now walk a few steps to the neighbouring Plaza de Alfaro and look up at the balcony that hangs over a garden wall. Guides will tell you it is Rosina's balcony, where Count Almaviva serenaded the girl in The Barber of Seville, Beaumarchais's comedy of 1775 that Rossini turned into an opera in 1816. Of course Rosina never existed, and neither did this balcony in the play. But Seville has inspired so many operas, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Fidelio, that it simply decided which balcony was hers.

   That is Santa Cruz in one square: a real grave you cannot find and a fictional balcony you can. From the Plaza de Alfaro, slip into the lanes heading west towards the Hospital de los Venerables, the grandest building in the barrio.

9. 9. Hospital de los Venerables: Velázquez and Murillo's Wandering Virgin

   Plaza de los Venerables 8, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   In front of you rises a long, dignified Baroque facade in ochre and white, with a doorway that seems almost too grand for the little square it faces. If the gate is open, glance through: you will see a patio with a sunken fountain, a few steps below the level of the street.

   This is the Hospital de los Venerables Sacerdotes, founded in 1675 as a home for elderly and poor priests. The man behind it was Justino de Neve, a canon of the Cathedral, a collector of art and, above all, a close friend of Murillo. Murillo painted his portrait, a gentle man in black with a little dog at his feet and a clock on the table. That portrait now hangs in the National Gallery in London.

   Neve also commissioned from Murillo an Immaculate Conception for this building, one of his most radiant: the Virgin floating in gold and blue, surrounded by tumbling angels. During the French occupation, Marshal Soult took it. In 1852 the Louvre bought it from his heirs for a sum that was then a world record for a painting. It only came back to Spain in 1941, in an exchange with France, and today it is in the Prado. Sevillians still call it the Immaculate of Soult, naming it after the man who stole it.

   Today the building is a cultural centre devoted to the other great painter of Seville, Diego Velázquez, who was born in this city in 1599 and trained here before leaving for Madrid and the court. His Santa Rufina, a young Sevillian saint holding clay pots, came home to the city in 2007 and is shown here. Inside, the hospital church is covered in frescoes by Juan de Valdés Leal and his son Lucas Valdés, painted illusions of architecture that make the walls seem to open.

   There is something touching about it: old priests once spent their last years in a house built by Murillo's best friend, and now the house watches over the work of Velázquez. Walk south down the lane towards the Alcázar wall and step into the white tunnel of the Callejón del Agua.

10. 10. Callejón del Agua: Water Inside the Wall

    Callejón del Agua, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

    Walk slowly along this narrow lane, with the high, rough wall of the Alcázar on one side and whitewashed houses on the other, their window grilles spilling with geraniums and jasmine. Through the occasional open gate you glimpse a cool patio tiled in blue and yellow. It is probably the most photographed lane in Seville, and for once the crowds are right.

    The name, Callejón del Agua, the Alley of Water, is literal. For centuries water reached this part of the city along the Caños de Carmona, a long aqueduct that brought it in from springs to the east. Inside the thickness of this very wall ran the pipes carrying that water to the gardens and fountains of the Alcázar. So the wall that marked the edge of the Judería was also a giant hidden waterpipe.

    That is the key to the whole barrio. The Jewish quarter was built in the shadow of the royal palace, literally against its walls. Its people lived close to the king's protection, close to the king's water, and close to the king's eye. When the Crown stood by them, the location was a blessing. When it did not, there was nowhere to go.

    What you see now, the flowerpots, the tiles, the romantic little gates, mostly dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Travellers from northern Europe came to Seville looking for an Orient of their imagination, and the barrio, half abandoned and very poor, was gradually tidied, whitewashed and dressed for them. In the 1910s and 1920s, ahead of the great Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, much of Santa Cruz was restored into the picture-book version you are walking through.

    Which does not make it fake. It makes it a place that has been reinvented again and again, by Moors, Jews, Christians, romantics and tourists, each leaving a layer. Follow the lane west to its end, then turn right up Calle Vida into the last and loveliest square of the walk, the Plaza de Doña Elvira.

11. 11. Plaza de Doña Elvira and Calle Susona: The Skull Above the Door

    Plaza de Doña Elvira, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

    Sit for a moment on one of the tiled benches of the Plaza de Doña Elvira, under the orange trees, with the little fountain murmuring in the middle. It is the most peaceful square in Seville. And around the corner, on a short lane called Calle Susona, a painted tile shows a human skull.

    That lane was once called Calle de la Muerte, the Street of Death, and the story behind it is Seville's best-known legend. In 1481, as the Inquisition began its work, a wealthy converso named Diego de Susán is said to have gathered other conversos to plan armed resistance against the inquisitors. That Diego de Susán was among the first to be condemned that year is recorded. What follows is legend.

    Diego had a daughter, Susona, famous as the most beautiful woman in Seville. She had a Christian lover, and, the story goes, she betrayed her father's plot to him to save his life. The conspirators were arrested and burned. Susona, unable to live with what she had done, ended her days in repentance, and in her will she asked that her head be hung above the door of her house as a warning. Legend says the skull stayed there for generations, and the tile on Calle Susona marks the spot.

    Is any of it true beyond the father's death? Nobody can say. But a city tells its legends for a reason. This one turns a political tragedy, people persecuted for their origins, into a romantic tale about love and guilt. It is easier to remember a beautiful traitor than six people burned on a February morning.

    And yet the barrio goes on living. Just off this square runs Calle Vida, the Street of Life, answering the old Street of Death a few metres away. You have walked through three former synagogues, a lost gate, a lost cemetery, a lost grave and a burning ground, and you end among orange trees and children chasing pigeons. That is Santa Cruz: beautiful, and worth remembering properly. The Alcázar and the Cathedral are only a minute away, through the lane at the corner.