The history of Seville Granada and Cordoba
The history of the Rio Guadalquivir, one of Spain's great rivers, reflects that of the south of the country. Now bloated with silt, it is a portly descendant of the fast flowing, frequently flooding Baetis (Blessed) river that the Romans knew. From the mountains of north-eastern Jaen, its waters wend their way westwards for some 600km (375 miles), carving an ever widening valley that culminates in Las Marismas. These broad marshlands stall its entry into the Atlantic beside the sherry town of Sanlucar de Barrameda. When their fleets arrived here in the 1st century BC, the Romans could sail upriver as far as Cordoba, a strategic point already colonized by Phoenician, Carthaginian and Iberian settlers.
The Romans and southern Spain
The Romans laid the ground plan of southern Spain, building roads, bridges and aqueducts. They established Cordoba, the home of Seneca and Lucan, as the capital of Hispania Ulterior, and redeveloped many of the prehistoric settlements built alongside the Baetis, including Hispalis (now Seville), Carmona and Wilica. The vicinity's numerous archaeological excavations have produced many an artifact that now graces the museums and stately homes of Seville and Cordoba. Of these the most famous is the gold jeweler that constitutes the Carambolo treasure in Seville's Museo Arqueologico. This incredible collection testifies to the wealth of the kingdom of Tartessus that flourished here in the 8th and 9th centuries BC. Near Santiponce (on what are now the western outskirts of Seville) you can wander amid the crumbling ruins of Roman Italica, birthplace of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, while at Carmona you can see the remains of the necropolis and amphitheatre.
The Visigoths in Spain
The fall of the Roman Empire led to the rise of the Visigoths, who set up their capital in Toledo. A number of Visigoth fountains, arches and columns can still be seen lurking inside Andalusia monuments constructed many centuries later. In AD711 the Moors principally Arabs and North African Berbers landed at Tarifa. This arrival marked the start of a phenomenal advance: in seven years the Moors conquered virtually the whole peninsula. What had begun as a daring foray was to result in eight centuries of Moorish rule and the flowering of a great civilisation.
The Moors called their new land Al-Andalus, and the river that fed it Guadalquivir (Great River). By the 10th century, Cordoba, the capital of Al-Andalus, had become the most important city in Europe. It was four times its present size, and had a university, libraries, public baths, workshops, street lighting and more than 1,000 mosques.
The greatest of these, La Mezquita, still stands as a testimony to this golden age, which reached its apogee with the construction of the palaces at Medinat al Zahra (now Medina Zahara, just outside Cordoba). Today their partly restored ruins barely hint at the opulence of a royal pleasure park that had its own zoo, mint, fabric factory and arsenal. At its centre stood a pool filled with mercury; when stirred, the sunlight's reflection would flash round the surrounding marble patios and the gold and silver tiles of the roofs.
The Moors in Andalucia
Fabulous wealth grew from the Moors' talent for irrigation in the rich lands of the Guadalquivir Valley. The Greeks had introduced the vine and the olive both cultivated intensively by the Romans but it was the Arabs who added the orange and the almond tree, along with rice, aubergines, saffron, cotton, silk farming, Merino sheep and herbs, spices and fruits. They also, like the Phoenicians before them and the British long after, exploited the mineral resources of the surrounding sierras.
Inevitably, it did not last. By the 11th century the refined glory of the Umayyad Caliphate had disintegrated into feuding taifas (factional kingdoms). These were easily overrun by the strict and austere Almoravids whose Berber armies were summoned to prevent a Christian reconquest. They in turn were succeeded by the more liberal Almohads, who established their capital in Seville the greatest of the taifas and bequeathed us the Giralda and Torre del Oro as mementoes of their reign.
The Decline of Andalucia
In 1212 the Christians defeated the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena, a turning point in the 700-year Reconquista. By 1236, Ferdinand III had captured Cordoba, and in 1248 he took Seville. Ferdinand was aided by the complicity of the first Nasrid king, Ibnal Ahmar, who had retreated from Jaen to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and a new power base in the former Almoravid capital of Granada. As a result of a peace treaty with the Christians, the kingdom of Granada which covered the modern provinces of Malaga, Granada and Almeria survived as a vassal state for 250 years. The city flourished, not least due to an influx of Muslim refugees and artisans from other captured cities. Indeed the newcomers played a key role in building the Alhambra, the Nasrid dynasty's memorial to the swan song days of Al-Andalus. At the same time the Christian king Pedro the Cruel was also employing Moorish craftsmen to build another tribute to this fading world the Alcazar in Seville.
In 1492 the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella captured Granada, Columbus discovered the New World, and the Jews were expelled from Spain. By then the notorious Inquisition had been in force for 12 years (it was to survive until 1821), autosdafe (burnings of heretics) were a fact of Sevillian life, and conversos (converted Jews) were having their wealth confiscated for investment in projects such as Columbus's second voyage. In 1503 the monopoly of trade with the New World was awarded to Seville's Casa de la Contratacion, from which the city reaped great profits.
One of its employees, Amerigo Vespucci, gave his name to the new continent, Hernando Cortes sailed from Seville to ravage Mexico, and Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Conquisladores returned laden with gold and new curiosities such as peppers, tomatoes, quinine and tobacco.
Seville and the Moors
By 1588 Seville had a population of at least 80,000, and a stature equal to that of Venice. But from the end of the 16th century it embarked on a slow, glorious descent into decadence, a decline exacerbated by the expulsion of the moriscos (converted Moors) in 1610 and a terrible plague in 1649. During the 16th and 17th centuries Seville acted as a transit point for trade, administration and emigration. Its Lonja (Exchange), financed by a quarter percent tax on the import of silver, is now the Archive of the Indies, where you can see the signatures of these early colonizers.
Seville religion
These were heady days in Seville. Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), who served time in Seville's prison, recorded its colorful, roguish underworld in his novels; Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-82) painted the beggars and other characters that filled the city's crowded streets. The Church, its coffers filled to bursting by the activities of the Inquisition, acquired a wealth that enabled it to build for itself luxury city centre sanctuaries that to this day force pedestrians into circumnavigator detours.
At one point the city had more than 70 convents, a glut mitigated only by their decorations, which often featured paintings and sculpture by artists such as Velazquez, Cano, Zurbaran, Murillo and Leal - all members of what is now referred to as the Seville School. Their works can be seen in Seville's excellent Fine Arts Museum.
In 1717 the silting of the Guadalquivir forced the Casa de la Contratacion to be moved south to Cadiz, thus hastening official recognition of Seville's decline. Cordoba and Granada were now merely provincial backwaters in a demoralized country whose empire had been shriveled by the 1701-14 War of the Spanish Succession. In the 18th and 19th centuries Andalusia gained a reputation as the home of gypsies, brigands, majos (dandies) and matadors that enchanted northern Europeans.
Seville was seen as a city of aristocratic seducers called Don Juan and streetwise barbers called Figaro, while a sultry gypsy girl by the name of Carmen worked in the heat of its famous tobacco factory. In reality, however, Andalusia was a place of political chaos and deep poverty: by the beginning of the 19th century, 72 percent of the farming land in Seville was owned by an elite and invariably absentee landlord class that comprised barely five percent of its population.
Travellers in southern Spain
Poverty contributed to the appeal of southern Spain for the numerous aristocratic travelers who hired mules, boats and carriages to tour its provinces. They enjoyed its dilapidated state, exotic landscape and Moorish Oriental heritage. The Alhambra now a picturesque ruin inspired many a Romantic eulogy. Washington Irving swam in its ancient pools, Theophile Gautier cooled sherry in its fountains and hotels appeared on the hill. But it was the passionate, sensual lifestyle of the Andalusians that really set northern heart’s pumping.
Hans Christian Andersen, visiting Andalusia in the 1860s, admitted his disappointment that he had experienced 'just a little encounter with bandits'. One intrepid lady traveler, en route to the Sahara in the same period, confessed that, after hearing a guitarist in Granada, 'you are ready to make love and war'. Spain, which meant Andalusia to these visitors, was in vogue. This fashion as encouraged by the nation's victories in the Peninsular War (1809-14), its low cost of living and the growth of trade interests such as sherry. Granada and Seville topped the bill of places to see: 'Seville, the marvel of Andalusia, can be seen in a week' declared Richard Ford in his 1845 Handbook for Spain, a masterly work that did much to put Spain on the tourist map. Cordoba tended to receive, as it does today, a more perfunctory inspection.
By the end of the 19th century, Spain had lost virtually all of its remaining colonies, and it still lacked political stability. The nation remained neutral in World War 1 but in the 1920s it became bogged down in a war of independence with its onetime masters, the Berber tribes of Morocco. In an attempt to create a lasting order out of chaos, General Miguel Primo de Rivera assumed power in a semi dictatorship that had the concurrence of King Alfonso XIII: the pastiche pavilions built for the 1929 Ibero American Exposition in Seville are a legacy of his period of power.
In the 1930s Ernest Hemingway wrote Death in the Afternoon, a paean to the 'noble art' of bullfighting, but it was fighting of a different nature that characterized that decade in Spain. Almost one million people were killed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), including many who were executed at the start of the conflict in Seville, Cordoba and Granada, which were among the first cities to be taken by Franco's Nationalist forces. One such victim was the Granada born writer, Federico Garcia Lorca. Indeed many artists, writers and intellectuals volunteered their support for the Republican cause, but they could not stand between Franco and a fascist victory.
Spain and World War II
In the aftermath of World War II, in which Spain remained neutral, the country was left isolated and impoverished. Franco's dictatorship lasted until his death in 1975, a period of steady economic advance scarred by political and cultural repression. Many Andalusia’s migrated to the northern industrial cities or abroad, leaving the countryside deserted. Franco's acceptance in 1953 of American military bases in exchange for loans, along with Spain's subsequent admission to the UN, accelerated its economic recovery and led to the development of mass tourism during the 1960s.
In 1975, monarchy returned in the shape of King Juan Carlos, soon to be followed by democratic elections. In 1982 the Socialist PSOE party, led by the charismatic Sevillian lawyer Felipe Gonzalez, won a sweeping victory that paved the way for long overdue investment in the region. The great manifestation of this was Expo '92 in Seville, which brought new roads, high-speed trains and a building boom to the regional capital.
And yet, for all the high-tech facelifts, the romantic, rose in the teeth view of Andalusia persists. The Andalusia’s themselves foster this image in their patios, bars, peiias (clubs) and ferias (fairs), and in the countryside, where donkeys are still used to plough the fields. Andalusia will always be Spain spiced with the tang of North Africa, a mountain locked land racked by summer heat and fed by the waters of the Guadalquivir.
The Romans and southern Spain
The Romans laid the ground plan of southern Spain, building roads, bridges and aqueducts. They established Cordoba, the home of Seneca and Lucan, as the capital of Hispania Ulterior, and redeveloped many of the prehistoric settlements built alongside the Baetis, including Hispalis (now Seville), Carmona and Wilica. The vicinity's numerous archaeological excavations have produced many an artifact that now graces the museums and stately homes of Seville and Cordoba. Of these the most famous is the gold jeweler that constitutes the Carambolo treasure in Seville's Museo Arqueologico. This incredible collection testifies to the wealth of the kingdom of Tartessus that flourished here in the 8th and 9th centuries BC. Near Santiponce (on what are now the western outskirts of Seville) you can wander amid the crumbling ruins of Roman Italica, birthplace of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, while at Carmona you can see the remains of the necropolis and amphitheatre.
The Visigoths in Spain
The fall of the Roman Empire led to the rise of the Visigoths, who set up their capital in Toledo. A number of Visigoth fountains, arches and columns can still be seen lurking inside Andalusia monuments constructed many centuries later. In AD711 the Moors principally Arabs and North African Berbers landed at Tarifa. This arrival marked the start of a phenomenal advance: in seven years the Moors conquered virtually the whole peninsula. What had begun as a daring foray was to result in eight centuries of Moorish rule and the flowering of a great civilisation.
The Moors called their new land Al-Andalus, and the river that fed it Guadalquivir (Great River). By the 10th century, Cordoba, the capital of Al-Andalus, had become the most important city in Europe. It was four times its present size, and had a university, libraries, public baths, workshops, street lighting and more than 1,000 mosques.
The greatest of these, La Mezquita, still stands as a testimony to this golden age, which reached its apogee with the construction of the palaces at Medinat al Zahra (now Medina Zahara, just outside Cordoba). Today their partly restored ruins barely hint at the opulence of a royal pleasure park that had its own zoo, mint, fabric factory and arsenal. At its centre stood a pool filled with mercury; when stirred, the sunlight's reflection would flash round the surrounding marble patios and the gold and silver tiles of the roofs.
The Moors in Andalucia
Fabulous wealth grew from the Moors' talent for irrigation in the rich lands of the Guadalquivir Valley. The Greeks had introduced the vine and the olive both cultivated intensively by the Romans but it was the Arabs who added the orange and the almond tree, along with rice, aubergines, saffron, cotton, silk farming, Merino sheep and herbs, spices and fruits. They also, like the Phoenicians before them and the British long after, exploited the mineral resources of the surrounding sierras.
Inevitably, it did not last. By the 11th century the refined glory of the Umayyad Caliphate had disintegrated into feuding taifas (factional kingdoms). These were easily overrun by the strict and austere Almoravids whose Berber armies were summoned to prevent a Christian reconquest. They in turn were succeeded by the more liberal Almohads, who established their capital in Seville the greatest of the taifas and bequeathed us the Giralda and Torre del Oro as mementoes of their reign.
The Decline of Andalucia
In 1212 the Christians defeated the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena, a turning point in the 700-year Reconquista. By 1236, Ferdinand III had captured Cordoba, and in 1248 he took Seville. Ferdinand was aided by the complicity of the first Nasrid king, Ibnal Ahmar, who had retreated from Jaen to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and a new power base in the former Almoravid capital of Granada. As a result of a peace treaty with the Christians, the kingdom of Granada which covered the modern provinces of Malaga, Granada and Almeria survived as a vassal state for 250 years. The city flourished, not least due to an influx of Muslim refugees and artisans from other captured cities. Indeed the newcomers played a key role in building the Alhambra, the Nasrid dynasty's memorial to the swan song days of Al-Andalus. At the same time the Christian king Pedro the Cruel was also employing Moorish craftsmen to build another tribute to this fading world the Alcazar in Seville.
In 1492 the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella captured Granada, Columbus discovered the New World, and the Jews were expelled from Spain. By then the notorious Inquisition had been in force for 12 years (it was to survive until 1821), autosdafe (burnings of heretics) were a fact of Sevillian life, and conversos (converted Jews) were having their wealth confiscated for investment in projects such as Columbus's second voyage. In 1503 the monopoly of trade with the New World was awarded to Seville's Casa de la Contratacion, from which the city reaped great profits.
One of its employees, Amerigo Vespucci, gave his name to the new continent, Hernando Cortes sailed from Seville to ravage Mexico, and Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Conquisladores returned laden with gold and new curiosities such as peppers, tomatoes, quinine and tobacco.
Seville and the Moors
By 1588 Seville had a population of at least 80,000, and a stature equal to that of Venice. But from the end of the 16th century it embarked on a slow, glorious descent into decadence, a decline exacerbated by the expulsion of the moriscos (converted Moors) in 1610 and a terrible plague in 1649. During the 16th and 17th centuries Seville acted as a transit point for trade, administration and emigration. Its Lonja (Exchange), financed by a quarter percent tax on the import of silver, is now the Archive of the Indies, where you can see the signatures of these early colonizers.
Seville religion
These were heady days in Seville. Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), who served time in Seville's prison, recorded its colorful, roguish underworld in his novels; Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-82) painted the beggars and other characters that filled the city's crowded streets. The Church, its coffers filled to bursting by the activities of the Inquisition, acquired a wealth that enabled it to build for itself luxury city centre sanctuaries that to this day force pedestrians into circumnavigator detours.
At one point the city had more than 70 convents, a glut mitigated only by their decorations, which often featured paintings and sculpture by artists such as Velazquez, Cano, Zurbaran, Murillo and Leal - all members of what is now referred to as the Seville School. Their works can be seen in Seville's excellent Fine Arts Museum.
In 1717 the silting of the Guadalquivir forced the Casa de la Contratacion to be moved south to Cadiz, thus hastening official recognition of Seville's decline. Cordoba and Granada were now merely provincial backwaters in a demoralized country whose empire had been shriveled by the 1701-14 War of the Spanish Succession. In the 18th and 19th centuries Andalusia gained a reputation as the home of gypsies, brigands, majos (dandies) and matadors that enchanted northern Europeans.
Seville was seen as a city of aristocratic seducers called Don Juan and streetwise barbers called Figaro, while a sultry gypsy girl by the name of Carmen worked in the heat of its famous tobacco factory. In reality, however, Andalusia was a place of political chaos and deep poverty: by the beginning of the 19th century, 72 percent of the farming land in Seville was owned by an elite and invariably absentee landlord class that comprised barely five percent of its population.
Travellers in southern Spain
Poverty contributed to the appeal of southern Spain for the numerous aristocratic travelers who hired mules, boats and carriages to tour its provinces. They enjoyed its dilapidated state, exotic landscape and Moorish Oriental heritage. The Alhambra now a picturesque ruin inspired many a Romantic eulogy. Washington Irving swam in its ancient pools, Theophile Gautier cooled sherry in its fountains and hotels appeared on the hill. But it was the passionate, sensual lifestyle of the Andalusians that really set northern heart’s pumping.
Hans Christian Andersen, visiting Andalusia in the 1860s, admitted his disappointment that he had experienced 'just a little encounter with bandits'. One intrepid lady traveler, en route to the Sahara in the same period, confessed that, after hearing a guitarist in Granada, 'you are ready to make love and war'. Spain, which meant Andalusia to these visitors, was in vogue. This fashion as encouraged by the nation's victories in the Peninsular War (1809-14), its low cost of living and the growth of trade interests such as sherry. Granada and Seville topped the bill of places to see: 'Seville, the marvel of Andalusia, can be seen in a week' declared Richard Ford in his 1845 Handbook for Spain, a masterly work that did much to put Spain on the tourist map. Cordoba tended to receive, as it does today, a more perfunctory inspection.
By the end of the 19th century, Spain had lost virtually all of its remaining colonies, and it still lacked political stability. The nation remained neutral in World War 1 but in the 1920s it became bogged down in a war of independence with its onetime masters, the Berber tribes of Morocco. In an attempt to create a lasting order out of chaos, General Miguel Primo de Rivera assumed power in a semi dictatorship that had the concurrence of King Alfonso XIII: the pastiche pavilions built for the 1929 Ibero American Exposition in Seville are a legacy of his period of power.
In the 1930s Ernest Hemingway wrote Death in the Afternoon, a paean to the 'noble art' of bullfighting, but it was fighting of a different nature that characterized that decade in Spain. Almost one million people were killed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), including many who were executed at the start of the conflict in Seville, Cordoba and Granada, which were among the first cities to be taken by Franco's Nationalist forces. One such victim was the Granada born writer, Federico Garcia Lorca. Indeed many artists, writers and intellectuals volunteered their support for the Republican cause, but they could not stand between Franco and a fascist victory.
Spain and World War II
In the aftermath of World War II, in which Spain remained neutral, the country was left isolated and impoverished. Franco's dictatorship lasted until his death in 1975, a period of steady economic advance scarred by political and cultural repression. Many Andalusia’s migrated to the northern industrial cities or abroad, leaving the countryside deserted. Franco's acceptance in 1953 of American military bases in exchange for loans, along with Spain's subsequent admission to the UN, accelerated its economic recovery and led to the development of mass tourism during the 1960s.
In 1975, monarchy returned in the shape of King Juan Carlos, soon to be followed by democratic elections. In 1982 the Socialist PSOE party, led by the charismatic Sevillian lawyer Felipe Gonzalez, won a sweeping victory that paved the way for long overdue investment in the region. The great manifestation of this was Expo '92 in Seville, which brought new roads, high-speed trains and a building boom to the regional capital.
And yet, for all the high-tech facelifts, the romantic, rose in the teeth view of Andalusia persists. The Andalusia’s themselves foster this image in their patios, bars, peiias (clubs) and ferias (fairs), and in the countryside, where donkeys are still used to plough the fields. Andalusia will always be Spain spiced with the tang of North Africa, a mountain locked land racked by summer heat and fed by the waters of the Guadalquivir.
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