Plaza de España Audio Guide

Plaza de España: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Plaza de España

   Welcome to the Plaza de España, one of the most emblematic places in Seville. You are standing at the north-eastern end of the Maria Luisa Park, in a vast open space of about 50,000 square meters. Before you, a huge curved building opens its arms around the square, with its red brick, glazed ceramics and two tall towers. This place was created for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, and its architect was Aníbal González. Today it is counted among the greatest examples of regionalist architecture, a style that borrowed from Spain's own past and gave it a bright, colorful, thoroughly Sevillian finish. Over the next few minutes we will look at how the square came to be, how to read its architecture, and what the benches along its curve are really saying. Take your time. This is a place that rewards slow walking and plenty of looking up.

2. 02

   A Square Built for a World's Fair

   The story starts with an exhibition. Seville was preparing the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, and the plans had to be settled long before the doors opened. On the sixteenth of May 1913, the Executive Committee approved the final position of the pavilions of the Plaza de América and moved the planned stadium elsewhere. Where the stadium had been expected, a Palace of Acts and Festivals was imagined, in a space that came to be called the Plaza de España. Aníbal González carried the project through. Work ran from 1914 to 1929, which means this square took roughly 15 years to build. Up to a thousand men are said to have worked on it at the same time, and it was the largest construction of the whole exposition. It was also the most expensive. González was born in Seville in 1876, and he died here on the thirty-first of May 1929, the same year the exposition opened. The square had one more future in mind. When it was built, the plan was that after the exposition it would house the Universidad Laboral de Sevilla.

3. 03

   Reading the Architecture: Brick, Tile and Color

   Look closely at the materials. The building is built from exposed brick and richly decorated with polychrome ceramics, coffered wooden ceilings, wrought and embossed iron, and carved marble. The brick and the tile were chosen to work together, and that pairing is what makes the square a symbol of regionalist architecture. The structure has a central building, wings with intermediate buildings that break up the great length, and a tower at each end. Each tower rises 74 meters. The mix of styles includes Spanish Renaissance, Baroque Revival and Neo-Mudéjar, the Moorish-inspired revival, with a touch of 1920s Art Deco in the blend. González explained his thinking in his own words. He said he had drawn inspiration from the Spanish Renaissance, but modernized and reinterpreted it. And his guiding idea, he said, was that Seville is the homeland of color, so color must be handled in a way that enhances the values of the construction. When you stand beneath those towers, you are looking at that principle at full scale.

4. 04

   A Walk Through Spain: Benches, Canal and Fountain

   Walk along the curved wings and you are taking a tour of the whole country. Along them there are 48 benches decorated with ceramic murals, each showing a characteristic monument or historical moment from one of Spain's provinces. Seville itself is not placed alongside the others on a bench. It appears instead in four other murals in the square. There are also 48 busts of famous figures from Spanish history, such as Quevedo and Velázquez. The layout is usually read as symbolic. The semicircle is said to represent Spain embracing its former colonies, while the canal stands for the ocean linking Spain to the Americas. At the center stands the Vicente Traver Fountain, named after the engineer who designed the water system for the exposition. The canal was not universally welcomed. The French engineer Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, who collaborated on the design of the Maria Luisa Park, opposed building it because Seville was a city short of water. González took on the execution of the project, with collaborators including the engineer José Luis de Casso Romero and the architect Aurelio Gómez Millán.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   This may be the most-filmed monument in Seville in the history of cinema. It appears in classics such as Lawrence of Arabia and The Wind and the Lion, and in newer films such as Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and The Dictator. So some of the views here may feel strangely familiar. Before you go, try a few small things. Pick one provincial bench and read its tile mural the way you would read a comic strip. Look at the curve of the building from the far side of the canal, then look up at the towers. And remember that this square is only one piece of the Ibero-American Exposition. Nearby in the park, the Plaza de América grouped three further pavilions, including the Mudejar Pavilion, now a museum of arts and popular customs, and the Fine Arts pavilion, now an archaeological museum. There is plenty more waiting beyond the arches.