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Spain, Portugal and Morocco, November 2017

Seville, November 7, 2017: A River Cruise

From Seville Cathedral, we walked a few blocks to the east bank of the Guadalquivir River. There, near the Torre del Oro, we boarded a boat which took us on an afternoon cruise up the river. The cruise provided a startling contrast to the Cathedral; it left little doubt that while Seville is a city that treasures and honors its past, it is also a modern metropolis which is at the forefront of 21st-century innovation.

The Torre del Oro, “Tower of Gold”, the starting and ending point for our cruise, was built by the Almohads in the thirteenth century as a watchtower. In 1248 it served as an anchor point for a chain stretched across the river to block the Castilian forces besieging Seville. That stratagem failed. After taking Seville, the Castilians used the Torre as a prison. Despite its name, the Torre del Oro is not made of gold. It has that name because it casts a golden sheen on the water of the river.

Our cruise boat first took us south under the Puente de San Telmo, an elegant 1931 bridge spanning the Guadalquivir River, with sidewalks, a bike path and city views. Nearby on the east bank was the Palace of San Telmo, a 17th-century Baroque palace originally built as the University of Navigators, and now the seat of the Andalusian provincial government. The opposite side of the river was lined with modern apartment and office buildings, one of them housing the corporate offices of the Diario de Sevilla, a prominent newspaper.

Seville is a major port of call for cruise ships, and their terminal is at the Muelle (dock) de las Delicias, right alongside Maria Luisa Park. To reach it we first passed under the Puente de los Remedios, which terminates at the roundabout where we had seen the pretty little Punto de Información Turistica castle and the monument to Sebastian Elcano in the morning.

A large cruise ship, the Star Pride, was tied up at the cruise terminal. On the shore beyond it was visible the Argentine Pavilion from the 1929 Exhibition; it now houses the Antonio Ruiz Soler Professional Dance Conservatory.

A little farther on down the river, we passed an outdoor terrace bar called the Muelle New York, and in back of it, a large, elegant rose-and-white building housing the Escuela de Arte de Sevilla – the Art School of Seville. In the distance we could make out the low Puente de las Delicias and, beyond it, the tall V Centenario Bridge, where a major highway crosses the river.

At this point our boat reversed course and headed back toward the San Telmo bridge, where the northern part and longer leg of our cruise would begin.

Passing once more under the bridge, we observed an impressive round structure on our right (east bank); this turned out to be the Teatro de la Maestranza, an opera house built for the 1992 Seville Expo. Shortly we came to another bridge, the Puente de Isabel II or Puente de Triana. This is an elegant iron arch bridge completed in 1852, connecting the Triana neighborhood to the center of Seville. Beyond it loomed the tallest building in Seville, and indeed in all of Andalusia, the Torre de Sevilla. It is a 40-story skyscraper, 180.5 meters (592 feet) tall, housing primarily commercial offices, but it also hosts a 5-star hotel.

The various bridges we encountered served as points of demarcation for the several stages of our cruise. The next one after the Puente de Isabel II was the Puente Cristo de la Expiración, commonly known as El Cachorro (“the Puppy”). It owes its name to a nearby church, the Capilla del Patrocinio, a church from which the brotherhood of Cristo de la Expiración makes a procession during Holy Week. This event is popularly known as the “Cristo del Cachorro”, so the bridge has taken on that nickname as well. The bridge has umbrellas over the pedestrian walks to shade from the heat.

As the pictures show, there are graffiti on and underneath the bridge. A little farther on down the west bank, we passed several boat launching ramps where the backdrops were also plastered with graffiti, some of them quite artistic. Bearing in mind that graffiti are especially prolific in the Hispanic neighborhoods of American cities, I wondered if they are a manifestation of the a common Hispanic artistic proclivity that produced the works of such luminaries as Velazquez, Murillo, Goya and Picasso.

At El Cachorro the river takes a sharp bend to the right. Before continuing the account of our cruise on the Guadalquivir, I need to make a digression and say something about the history of this river in order to save the reader from becoming hopelessly confused (as I was at the time) about where we were and what we were seeing.

The Guadalquivir is the only major navigable river in Spain. In Roman times it was navigable as far up as Córdoba, but nowadays it is only navigable as far as Seville. It is a very annoying river, because it is both subject to silting up, which increasingly restricts its navigability, and to severe flooding, causing much damage and loss of life. In fact, the silting up of the Guadalquivir in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused Seville to lose its pre-eminence in Spain’s Atlantic trade, which became lost to the port of Cádiz at the mouth of the river.

The silting-up of the river did not in any way alleviate the flooding. Catastrophic floods continued, and continue even into the twenty-first century, despite the extensive engineering efforts taken to mitigate the problem. These include first and foremost the diversion of the river into a new artificial channel, the Corta de Tablada, to the west of the historical course. The Corta was completed in 1926, during the reign of King Alfonso XIII; the old course of the river thereafter became known as the Canal (channel) of Alfonso XIII, and now dead-ends at the San Jeronimo Bridge at the north end of the city. The new channel also improved the navigability of the river since it is 4 kilometers shorter than the old one and less subject to silting. But the Alfonso XIII channel is still available for use by cruise ships and other traffic via a port lock.

The diversion of the river created an island between the two channels, known as the Isla de la Cartuja. That’s why I digressed into the above long-winded explanation; without it references to the Isla de la Cartuja would be mystifying. Of course it’s really a long peninsula rather than an island because the Alfonso XIII channel ends before rejoining the new channel, but it’s still referred to as an island. It is named after a monastery located near the Pasarela de la Cartuja, the next bridge up from El Cachorro. For a long time it was relatively undeveloped, but in 1992 it became the site of the World’s Fair held in that year, and after that development accelerated, and many of the landmarks we saw date from the post-1992 period.

The Torre de Sevilla skyscraper, completed in 2015, is one example. A short way north of it, and farther back from the river, is a round yellow postmodern structure called the Torre Triana, completed in 1993; inspired by the Sant’Angelo Castle in Rome, it is the main administrative building of the Government of Andalusia. Still further north, on the riverbank, is the Torre Schindler, an observation tower built for the Exposition of 1992. It is 65 meters (213 feet) high and is now part of a larger complex, the Museum of Navigation.

Following the rightward curve of the river past the Schindler Tower, we came to the Pasarela de la Cartuja, a footbridge also built for the 1992 Exposition. Between it and the next bridge, the Puente de la Barqueta, the bank of La Cartuja is lined with a pair of unique gardens. First is the Jardín Americano, the American Garden, filled with plant species donated by countries of the Americas for the 1992 Exposition. Next comes the Jardines del Guadalquivir, which has been described as a “modern take on Moorish gardens.” Also created for the 1992 Exposition, it was endowed with a number of sculptures, towers, bars, stages and other structures which have been abandoned since the Exposition, reputedly giving the park somewhat of a rundown appearance.

We were startled to see a giant rocket (apparently) standing in the Guadalquivir Garden. It turned out that it was not in the Garden itself but somewhat behind it, and it is a full-size replica of a European Space Agency Ariane IV rocket, brought to Seville from France specially for the 1992 Exposition and placed next to the Pavilion of the Future. The next generation of the Ariane series, the Ariane V, produced the vehicle that launched the James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana.

Just beyond the Guadalquivir Gardens, we came to the Puente de la Barqueta (“Bridge of the Barges”), a modern structure built specifically as the main crossing point for vehicular traffic for the 1992 Exposition.

Near the end of the Barqueta bridge on the Cartuja side is Isla Magica, a theme park with a roller coaster and other rides, shows and a lake.

Just north of Isla Magica we saw a large square building with a slanted blue structure on top shaped like a smokestack on an old cruise liner such as the Queen Mary. This curious structure turned out to be the RTVA (Radio y Televisión de Andalucía) building. RTVA is a corporate public agency owned by the government of Andalusia, providing radio and TV broadcasting.

After passing the RTVA building we came to the Alamillo Bridge, which marked the northern end of our cruise. The Alamillo is easily the most unusual and idiosyncratic bridge over the Guadalquivir; in fact it is the most bizarre bridge I have ever seen anywhere. A Wikipedia article characterizes it as a “cantilever-spar cable-stayed bridge with no backstays or anchorage,” but this does not begin to convey the startling weirdness of the bridge; you have to see it.

The Alamillo Bridge is not the only one of its kind in the world. It was the brainchild of the illustrious Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who has designed similar bridges in Buenos Aires, Dublin, Athens, Jerusalem and, closest to home, the Sundial Bridge over the Sacramento River at Redding, California. Although I’ve been to Redding, I’ve never yet seen the Sundial Bridge, or any of the others.

On the way back to the Torre del Oro, we were able to identify a few attractions that we hadn’t noticed previously. One was a monument to the Roman emperor Trajan standing inconspicuously by the waterside in front of an apartment building between some trees. In his time the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent with the conquest of Dacia, which is modern-day Romania. The association of Trajan, a native of Seville, with Dacia inspired a Romanian sculptor, Vasile Corduz, to create a sculpture of the emperor holding the Capitoline Wolf in his arms. The Romanian government then presented the statue to the city of Seville for the 1992 Exposition.

As we passed back under the Isabel II Bridge, we caught sight of the Castillo de San Jorge on the west bank. This is what remains of a fort built in medieval times that eventually became the Seville headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition. It was partially demolished in the 19th century and the Mercado de Triana, a grocery market, was built on the site. Today the market is still in operation, but the remains of the Castillo have been made into a museum devoted to the history of Seville, the Spanish Inquisition and religious repression in general.

If there had been an opportunity, I would have unfailingly visited the museum, but there was time that afternoon to visit only one more attraction, and that had to be the fabled palace of the Alcázar.

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