The Alcazar of Seville: Gardens, Palaces and Practical Tips

Step through the Lion Gate off the Plaza del Triunfo and a thousand years of Seville open up behind one wall: a Moorish courtyard, a Gothic hall, a Christian king’s palace built by craftsmen trained in Muslim Granada, and gardens of orange trees and pools that run on for acre after acre. The Seville Alcazar is still a royal residence, which makes it one of the oldest palaces still in use, and it rewards an unhurried visit. This guide explains how the palace grew, what to look for in each part, how entry works and how much walking is involved. A day here is one of the highlights of our Small Group Tour of Spain & Portugal, which spends three nights in Seville near the end of its route.

A palace built in layers

A fortress has stood on this site since the tenth century, when Seville was ruled from Córdoba, and almost every power that held the city since has rebuilt part of it. The Almohads, the North African dynasty that made Seville their Iberian capital in the twelfth century, raised a palace here whose Patio del Yeso, the Plaster Courtyard, still survives. After Ferdinand III of Castile took the city in 1248, his son Alfonso X built a Gothic palace on the Almohad foundations. A century later Pedro I, King of Castile from 1350 to 1369, added the building that most visitors come to see, and in the sixteenth century Charles V remodelled the Gothic halls and married Isabella of Portugal in the Alcázar in 1526.

The result is not a single design but a sequence of courtyards and halls, each from a different century, joined by doorways that take you from one world to the next. Together with the cathedral and the Archivo de Indias across the square, the Alcázar was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1987. For how it fits into the wider city, our guide to the highlights of Seville covers the cathedral, the river and the barrios.

The Palace of King Pedro

The Palacio del Rey Don Pedro, begun in the 1360s, is the heart of the Alcázar and a celebrated example of Mudéjar art, the style that Muslim craftsmen and their pupils worked for Christian patrons. Pedro was on good terms with Muhammad V of Granada, the sultan who was building the Palace of the Lions at the Alhambra at the same time, and workmen from Granada are recorded among those who decorated his palace. The family resemblance is obvious: carved stucco, tiled dados in interlacing star patterns, lobed arches and Arabic inscriptions, some of which praise the Christian king who commissioned them. Our article on Moorish architecture in Córdoba, Seville and Granada traces how these forms passed from the mosques and palaces of Al-Andalus into Christian Spain.

The Patio de las Doncellas

The Courtyard of the Maidens was the official, public centre of the palace. A long rectangular pool runs down its middle between two sunken gardens, which were uncovered by archaeologists in the early 2000s and restored, and the ground floor is ringed by arcades of lobed arches on paired marble columns. The upper gallery, with its round arches and balustrade, was added in the sixteenth century, and the meeting of the two styles, Mudéjar below and Renaissance above, sums up the building in a single view.

The Hall of the Ambassadors

Pedro’s throne room is the most elaborate interior in the Alcázar. Triple horseshoe arches open onto the rooms on each side, the walls are covered in stucco and tiles, and overhead rises a gilded wooden dome of interlocking stars, added in 1427, that seems to turn slowly as you look up into it. The smaller Patio de las Muñecas, the Courtyard of the Dolls, was the private heart of the palace, named after the tiny faces carved into the base of one of its arches.

The Gothic palace and the Baths of María de Padilla

Beyond Pedro’s palace lie the halls built for Alfonso X and reshaped for Charles V, now known as the Salones de Carlos V. Their walls are lined with sixteenth-century tiles from the workshops of Triana, across the river, and hung with tapestries. Beneath the Patio del Crucero beside them, reached from the gardens, are the so-called Baths of María de Padilla: a long, vaulted underground cistern of still water, named after Pedro’s mistress, that was in fact the rainwater store of the Gothic palace above. On a hot afternoon it is one of the coolest places in the Alcázar.

The Casa de Contratación: Seville and the Americas

Around the Patio de la Montería, the great courtyard beyond the Patio del León, are the rooms of the Casa de Contratación, the House of Trade founded by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1503 to control commerce and navigation with the Americas. For two centuries trade with the Americas was channelled by law through Seville, and the city’s wealth in this period paid for much of what you see in the cathedral and the old town. The Archivo de Indias across the square, which holds the records of Spain’s American empire, makes the same story visible on paper. Across the same courtyard rises the façade of Pedro’s palace, its doorway framed by carved panels and crowned by deep wooden eaves.

How does entry to the Seville Alcazar work?

Tickets are sold for a set entry time, and buying online through the palace’s official website, the only authorised sales site, saves queuing at the ticket office in the Patio de Banderas. Visitors enter through the Lion Gate on the Plaza del Triunfo. The Cuarto Real Alto, the royal apartments on the upper floor that are still used by the Spanish royal family, can be seen only on a separate guided visit with its own ticket. Opening hours, prices and current conditions change, so check the official website before you go.

The gardens of the Alcázar

Many visitors spend as long in the gardens as in the palaces. They cover a large walled area behind the buildings and are a patchwork of periods: small enclosed Moorish-style gardens near the palace walls, Renaissance terraces, and later, more open gardens of palms, cypresses, myrtle and orange trees further out. Just beyond the palace, the Mercury pool, with its bronze statue of the god, is backed by the Galería del Grutesco, a long gallery built in the seventeenth century over a section of old wall and dressed in rough, grotto-like stone. Water runs everywhere, in channels, fountains and small pools, and the shade and sound of it explain why the rulers of Seville built their palace here.

How much walking does a visit to the Alcázar involve?

Expect a long morning on your feet, much of it on level ground. The palaces are mostly on one floor, with some steps between courtyards and rooms, and the cistern beneath the Gothic palace is reached by stairs. The gardens are large and their paths are a mix of paving, brick and gravel, so comfortable shoes matter, and in summer the heat in the open gardens can be intense by midday. Our Spain and Portugal tour is rated Level 2, Moderate: you should be able to manage three to five hours of activity a day, roughly the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground, and to climb and descend stairs.

The Santa Cruz quarter next door

The Alcázar’s eastern wall forms one side of the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the old quarter that was Seville’s Jewish quarter in the Middle Ages, until the violence of 1391 and the expulsion of 1492 ended its community. Today it is a maze of narrow lanes, whitewashed and ochre houses with iron balconies, small squares shaded by orange trees and hidden patios. The Callejón del Agua runs along the outside of the Alcázar wall, which once carried water to the palace, and the Plaza de Santa Cruz remembers the painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, who was buried in a church on the square that was demolished during the Napoleonic occupation. The lanes are best explored slowly and without a map, and they lead back, sooner or later, to the cathedral and the Giralda.

How long should you allow for the Alcázar of Seville?

Allow at least half a day for the Alcázar and its gardens together, and more if you want to add the Cuarto Real Alto or simply sit in the gardens. Combining the Alcázar, the cathedral and the Giralda, and a walk through Santa Cruz, makes a full and rewarding day.

The Alcázar on our tours

On the Spain and Portugal small group tour, Seville comes near the end of the journey. The group crosses back into Spain from Lisbon by way of Badajoz and Roman Mérida, the subject of our article on Mérida’s Roman ruins, and reaches Seville through the hills of Aracena. On Day 20 a local guide leads the group through the highlights of the city: the Alcázar, the cathedral and its treasury, the Giralda and the Barrio de Santa Cruz, with a flamenco show in the evening. The next day is spent at a sherry bodega in Jerez de la Frontera and in Cádiz, covered in our Seville, Jerez and Cádiz itinerary, before the route turns east to Córdoba and Granada. Our Spain and Portugal itinerary for mature travellers follows all twenty-four days, from Barcelona to Granada.

Discover Spain, a 21-day tour of Spain alone, reaches Seville early in its route after a half-day tour of Córdoba. Its day in the city takes in the cathedral and the Giralda, the Alcázar, the Archivo de Indias and the Plaza de España, and the following day is free to return to the gardens or explore at your own pace.

The Alcázar is a building that makes the history of Seville tangible: Muslim, Christian, imperial and royal at once, and still lived in. Walk it with someone who can read its layers, then give yourself time in the gardens, and the city outside the walls will make more sense for it.