Seville Tapas and Convent Sweets: Hidden Nuns, Old Markets and the Oldest Bar in Town

From a palace turned tenement to the Alameda: Calle Feria's Thursday market, the convent turnstiles of Santa Inés, San Leandro, Madre de Dios and Santa Ana, El Rinconcillo of 1670, sherry from the jar and a pastry shop of 1885

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

1. 1. Plaza del Pumarejo: The Palace That Became a Kitchen for Many

   Plaza del Pumarejo 3, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   Stand in the middle of this lively little square and look at the long, faded building on one side, with its grand doorway, its iron balconies and its patched-up plaster. Children play, neighbours chat outside the bars, and laundry flutters on the upper floor. That building was built to impress a single family. It ended up feeding dozens.

   It is the Casa del Pumarejo, a palace from the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Pedro de Pumarejo was a merchant who grew rich selling goods from the Indies, and when he bought the house in 1775 he had more than seventy surrounding houses pulled down to give it a proper square. The square you are standing in is, quite literally, a rich man's front garden.

   Fortunes change. After his death the family sold the house, it became a school, and in 1883 it was turned into a casa de vecinos, a tenement. The upper floor was divided into small homes, the ground floor into workshops and shops. Many families shared one patio, one water source, and very little money... and that is where our food story begins.

   In houses like this, the dish of the week was the puchero, a slow stew of chickpeas, a little beef or chicken, bacon, chorizo and black pudding, with whatever vegetables were cheap. One pot, simmered for hours, served in three turns: first the broth, often with a sprig of mint, then the chickpeas and vegetables, and finally the meats. And the next day the leftover meat and fat were shredded together into a rich paste called pringá, pressed into bread and toasted. The montadito de pringá, one of the great tapas of Seville, was born as thrift.

   When the old palace was threatened in recent decades, the neighbours organised to save it, and it is now protected as a site of cultural interest and run by a residents' association. A house of the rich, then of the poor, now of the barrio. Walk west along Calle Relator and turn left into Calle Feria, where every Thursday Seville holds its oldest market.

2. 2. Calle Feria: El Jueves and the Bread Riot of 1652

   Calle Feria, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   Stand on the pavement of Calle Feria and look along it: grocers, haberdashers, a bakery, bars with steel counters, old men reading the paper, a motorbike squeezing past. It looks like an ordinary working street. On a Thursday morning, it becomes something else.

   Every Thursday of the year, except Holy Thursday, the pavements fill with blankets and folding tables: old keys, lamps, saints, coins, vinyl records, broken clocks, postcards of Seville from a century ago. Sevillians call it simply El Jueves, the Thursday, and it is the oldest street market in the city. A document of 1292 shows King Sancho the Fourth regulating a Thursday market in Seville, and tradition has always tied it to this street.

   In those days it sold food. Country people came in through the northern gates with grain, oil, vegetables and animals, and the street took its name, Feria, from the fair. Over the centuries the food moved indoors, into the market hall at the far northern end of the street, which Sevillians consider the oldest documented market in the city, on its present site since 1719. Out here, El Jueves became a place for second-hand treasures and serious bargaining.

   Bread, though, made this street famous for a very different reason. In May 1652 Seville was still mourning a terrible plague, taxes were crushing, and the price of bread had become unbearable. From the twenty-second to the twenty-sixth of May, the people of the Feria district rose up, seized weapons and held the city's authorities at bay. Historians call the Motín de la Feria one of the most serious revolts in Castile in more than a century, and it began, as so many revolts do, with the price of a loaf.

   If you come back on a Thursday, arrive early. The dealers set up at dawn, and the best things are gone before the tourists wake up. Now walk south down Calle Feria and bear left into the quieter streets towards Calle Doña María Coronel, where a nun is waiting behind a wooden wheel.

3. 3. Convento de Santa Inés: Bollitos Through the Torno

   Calle Doña María Coronel 5, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   Push open the door into the small entrance hall of the convent and you will find no shop, no counter and no nun. Just a list of sweets on the wall, a bell, and set into the wall a wooden cylinder with a shelf in it, like a little revolving door. This is the torno, and it is one of the oldest ways of buying food in Seville.

   The rules are simple. You ring, a voice answers from behind the wall, and you say what you want. You place your money on the shelf, the cylinder turns, and a moment later it turns back with your box of sweets. The nuns are enclosed, they live apart from the world, and the torno lets them earn a living without ever being seen.

   The convent was founded in 1374 by Doña María Coronel, and her legend is not sweet at all. The story goes that King Pedro the First, who had already had her husband killed, pursued her relentlessly. To end it, she disfigured her own face with boiling oil. She then founded this convent of Poor Clares, and her body is still kept here and shown to the faithful on special days of the year.

   The speciality of Santa Inés is the bollito, a small round pastry made with flour, sugar, olive oil and sesame, crisp outside and soft within, the kind of thing you eat one of and then, somehow, five. Convent sweets in Andalusia often carry flavours from the Moorish centuries: sesame, aniseed, almonds, honey. Christian nuns kept alive a pastry tradition that came, in part, from the very kitchens they had replaced.

   One more surprise. The poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer set one of his most famous legends, Master Pérez the Organist, in this convent: a blind organist whose music was so heavenly that, after his death, his organ played by itself at Christmas midnight mass. Keep your box closed for now. El Rinconcillo, Seville's oldest bar, is just around the corner on Calle Gerona.

4. 4. El Rinconcillo: The Bar of 1670

   Calle Gerona 40, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   On the corner across from the church of Santa Catalina you will see an old facade, hams hanging behind the windows, and a crowd of people standing inside with small plates in their hands. Step through the door and look down at the long, dark wooden counter. If anyone has ordered, you will see numbers written on it in chalk.

   This is El Rinconcillo, the little corner, which opened in 1670 and claims the title of oldest bar in Seville. In 1670 Murillo was still painting, the silver fleets still sailed up the Guadalquivir from the Americas, and Seville was recovering from the great plague of 1649 that had killed perhaps half its people. Ever since, people have come in here to drink, eat, argue and gossip.

   The chalk is the famous detail. The waiters write what you owe directly on the wood in front of you, add it up at the end and wipe it clean. No paper, no screen. Above the counter hang the hams, below it the bottles, and on the walls the old tiles of a building that has been patched and loved for centuries.

   What should you taste? The classic here, and the dish Seville would put on its flag if it could, is espinacas con garbanzos: spinach and chickpeas stewed with garlic, cumin, paprika and bread fried in olive oil and crushed into a sauce. Its spices tell you where it comes from. The cumin and the bread thickening go back to the kitchens of al-Andalus, the Moorish centuries, while the chickpea was the everyday protein of the poor for generations. Another old favourite is salt cod, fried or with tomato, from the days when fish travelled inland only if it was salted.

   A tip from Sevillians: stand at the bar rather than sitting. The bar is where the bar happens. And notice how short the visit is. In Seville you do not dine in one tapas bar, you graze from one to the next. So drink up, and walk south down Calle Alhóndiga, named after the medieval public granary, to the convent of San Leandro, where the most famous sweet in Seville is made.

5. 5. Convento de San Leandro: Yemas and the Wine Cellar Legend

   Plaza de San Ildefonso 1, 41003 Sevilla, Spain

   Facing the little square of San Ildefonso, find the plain doorway of the convent of San Leandro, a gate in a high blank wall that gives almost nothing away. Behind that wall live Augustinian nuns, and inside, set into another wall, sits a torno like the one at Santa Inés.

   The community was founded in 1295 and moved to this site in 1369, which makes it one of the oldest convents in the city. San Leandro himself was a bishop of Seville in the sixth century, in the Visigothic age, long before the Moors arrived. So the name over this door reaches back almost fifteen hundred years.

   And through the torno comes one thing above all: yemas de San Leandro. Little golden balls of egg yolk cooked slowly with sugar and a touch of lemon, each one wrapped in its own paper. They are rich, soft, intensely sweet, and the nuns have been making them for centuries. Order a box, and you are buying from one of the longest-running food traditions in Seville.

   Why are so many convent sweets made from egg yolks? The favourite explanation in Andalusia is this: the wine makers of the region, including the sherry houses, used beaten egg whites to clarify their wine, and the leftover yolks were given to the nuns, who turned them into sweets. Historians point out that convents also received eggs as gifts and alms, so the story is probably only part of the truth. But it is a lovely piece of logic, wine and sweets as two halves of one egg.

   Before you go, think about the building around you. These convents were small cities, with gardens, kitchens, orchards and cellars hidden behind blank walls, and the torno was their only shop window. Many have closed in recent decades as vocations dwindled, so every box sold helps keep one alive. Now walk south through the lanes, past the walls of the Casa de Pilatos, to Calle San José and another convent with a torno, and a story nobody expects.

6. 6. Convento de Madre de Dios: Almond Sweets and Cortés's Widow

   Calle San José, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   Halfway along quiet Calle San José, look for the long convent wall and the church doorway set into it, sober on the outside, as these places always are. Behind it, Dominican nuns have lived for more than four centuries, and yes, there is a torno here too.

   The site itself is older than the convent. Sevillian tradition counts it among the places where the Jewish community had a synagogue in the Middle Ages, in the old Judería that covered this whole corner of the city. After the violence of 1391 and the expulsions that followed, the buildings passed into Christian hands, and in the sixteenth century the nuns built the church that stands here now.

   Then comes a name you would not expect on a back street. In 1570, Juana de Zúñiga, the widow of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, signed an agreement with this convent. She paid for the building of the church and its altarpiece and, in return, she received the main chapel and the exclusive right to be buried in the vault beneath it, she and her descendants. So the family of the man who brought down the Aztec empire lies in a quiet convent in the old Jewish quarter of Seville.

   It is worth pausing on that conquest for a food walk, too. From Mexico came chocolate, which the Spanish first tasted at the Aztec court, and the tomato, whose very name comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl. Every legal ship from the Americas had to come through Seville, so these foods entered Europe through this city, carried on a history of violence that is rarely mentioned at the table. Before the tomato arrived, gazpacho was a pale soup of bread, garlic, oil, vinegar and water.

   Back to the torno. The nuns of Madre de Dios are known for a long list of sweets: avemarías, almond bites, bienmesabe, which means it tastes good to me, and soft little magdalenas. Almonds and honey, again, the Moorish inheritance hidden inside a Christian convent. Now walk west, past the Giralda, cross the Avenida de la Constitución and turn into Calle García de Vinuesa, where a glass of sherry is waiting.

7. 7. Casa Morales: Sherry From the Jar

   Calle García de Vinuesa 11, 41001 Sevilla, Spain

   Step inside and let your eyes adjust to the dim light. Along the walls stand enormous clay jars, taller than a person, chalk marks on their sides, and in front of them a narrow bar where people lean with a glass of something pale gold.

   Casa Morales opened in 1850 as a wine shop, in the district of the Arenal, near the river where Seville's fleets once loaded and unloaded. Those great jars, tinajas, held the wine, and customers came in to have their own jug filled. Over time, people began to drink a glass on the spot, with a bite to eat, and the shop became a bar without ever quite stopping being a shop. Many of Seville's oldest bars were born exactly this way.

   Now, the glass. Ask for a fino or a manzanilla, and you are drinking the wine of the Marco de Jerez, the triangle of Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, south of Seville. Fino and manzanilla are aged under a living blanket of yeast called flor, which protects them from the air and gives them that dry, salty, almost bready taste. Manzanilla can only be aged in Sanlúcar, by the sea, and locals swear you can taste the salt breeze.

   The wine also ages in a solera: rows of barrels stacked in tiers, where a little wine is drawn from the oldest row and topped up from the next, and so on up the stack. Nothing is ever completely emptied, so in theory a drop of very old wine lives on in every glass. English merchants loved this wine for centuries, and the word sherry is simply their way of saying Jerez.

   Sherry is also the great partner of the tapa. A cold fino with salty almonds, olives or a slice of cured ham is one of the simplest pleasures in Andalusia. When your glass is empty, walk west along Calle García de Vinuesa and its continuation towards the bullring, then turn right to the market hall of the Arenal.

8. 8. Mercado del Arenal: A Market on a Prison

   Calle Pastor y Landero, 41001 Sevilla, Spain

   Walk into the hall and the noise hits you first: knives on boards, fishmongers calling out, the hiss of an espresso machine at a stall in the corner. Then the smell of the sea. Prawns, cuttlefish, sardines and fat anchovies lie on beds of crushed ice, a short drive from the Atlantic coast.

   The Mercado del Arenal was built in 1947 to a design by the Sevillian architect Juan Talavera y Heredia, and it was first named the market of the entradores, the wholesale dealers. But the ground it stands on has a darker past. This was the site of the Pópulo, a former convent that served for many years as one of the city's prisons. Seville replaced a jail with a larder, which feels like a sound decision.

   This is also the right place to talk about the word tapa, which simply means lid. The most popular story says that a barman would cover a glass of wine with a slice of bread or ham to keep out flies and dust, and the lid became the snack. Another legend credits a king who supposedly ordered that wine always be served with a bite of food, so that his subjects would not get drunk. Nobody has proved either version, and Sevillians are happy to tell both.

   What is certain is how Sevillians use their tapas. A tapa is not a starter. It is a way of moving through a city: a small plate here, another there, standing, talking, a few steps to the next bar. The drink that goes with it is often a caña, a small glass of very cold draught beer. In a city where summer afternoons pass forty degrees, a small glass is not stinginess, it is engineering: you finish it before it warms up. Seville has brewed its own beer since 1904, when the Cruzcampo brewery was founded on the edge of the city.

   Fried fish, by the way, is a Sevillian art: dusted in flour, plunged in very hot olive oil, served in a paper cone. Now walk north-east through Calle Zaragoza, cross the Plaza Nueva and follow Calle Tetuán to the Plaza de la Campana, where the most famous pastry shop in Seville has been waiting since 1885.

9. 9. Confitería La Campana: Sweets Since 1885

   Plaza de la Campana 1, 41004 Sevilla, Spain

   On the busiest corner of the old town, where traffic, pedestrians and shopping bags all collide, you will spot a corner shop with an old-fashioned sign, polished wood, and windows full of cakes. Inside, glass cases glow with pastries, and a queue of Sevillians of every age waits patiently.

   This is the Confitería La Campana, open since 1885, and for many locals simply the pastry shop of Seville. Grandparents bring grandchildren here for the same cakes they were brought for, and on Sunday mornings the boxes tied with ribbon walk out of the door to family lunches all over the city.

   What to look for? Seville's pastry tradition has two great parents. From the convents come the egg-yolk sweets: yemas, and tocino de cielo, literally bacon from heaven, a dense, silky custard of yolks and sugar that has nothing to do with bacon except its colour. From al-Andalus come almonds, honey and spice. And from the long winters of the countryside come the crumbly polvorones and mantecados of Christmas, made with lard and flour.

   Now look at the square itself. The Plaza de la Campana marks the start of the Carrera Oficial, the official route of Seville's Holy Week. During those seven days every brotherhood in the city must pass this exact corner, with its floats, its band and its hooded penitents, on the way to the Cathedral. People wait here for hours to see them, and a pastry shop on the corner of the procession route is, let us say, well placed. Pastries and piety have always gone together in Seville.

   Buy something small to eat on the way, because there is one more convent to visit, and it is a fair walk north. Follow Calle Trajano and Calle Amor de Dios towards the Alameda de Hércules, and turn into Calle Santa Ana, just west of it.

10. 10. Convento de Santa Ana: Mantas and Honey by the Alameda

    Calle Santa Ana 34, 41002 Sevilla, Spain

    You have left the shopping streets behind. This is a quieter Seville of narrow pavements, tiled doorways and neighbours greeting each other by name, a street just off the long, tree-lined Alameda de Hércules. Find the convent door on Calle Santa Ana, ring, and wait for the voice.

    Behind this wall live Carmelite nuns, of the barefoot, or discalced, branch of the order, the reform started in the sixteenth century by Teresa of Ávila. Teresa herself came to Seville in 1575 to found a convent of her reform in the city. Her nuns were meant to live in strict poverty and silence, supporting themselves with the work of their hands... which, in Andalusia, often means the work of their ovens.

    The speciality here is called manta, a pastry made from flour, egg, olive oil and honey. Simple ingredients, and that is the point. Convent pastry in Seville was never about expensive things, it was about patience: kneading, folding, frying, soaking in honey, the same gestures repeated by generations of women whose names nobody outside the wall ever knew.

    Think back over what you have eaten and heard today. A stew that fed a palace full of families, a Thursday market that goes back to 1292, a bread riot, sesame pastries from María Coronel's convent, chalk on a bar of 1670, yolks from the wine cellars, almonds in the house of Cortés's widow, sherry from the jar, fried fish on a prison site and cakes on the route of the processions. Seville's food is not a list of dishes. It is a history you can eat.

    And the evening is just beginning. The Alameda de Hércules, laid out in 1574 as one of the first public promenades in Europe, is a few steps away, and as the heat fades its benches and terraces fill with people starting their own slow round of tapas. Take your box of mantas, find a bench, and join them.