Reales Alcázares

This year I attended the VII European Congress of Protistology which was held in Seville in early September, and planned some travel afterwards. On Wednesday, the day before the conference ended, we all had a private tour of the Real Alcazar, which means Royal Palace. "Alcazar" comes from the Latin castra, meaning castle or fortress, which the Moors then adapted to Al-ksar, which became "Alcazar" in Spanish. 

An outside view of the palace's architecture

The Moors ruled in Southern Spain for a few hundred years, and they build this fortress initially, but later generations of Christian Spanish rulers kept using it and adding on to it. When the Christian King Pedro I ordered his palace built in the Alcazar, he hired local craftsmen to decorate it in the mudejar style, which was sort of a Christian-Islamic hybrid style that drew heavily on influence from Moorish art and architecture. 

Facade in the Mudejar style

Below is an image of the courtyard which served as the public courtyard. There was water in the center and a sunken garden containing orange trees, providing some shade in the hot summer. Some of you may also recognize this as the Water Gardens of Sunspear in Game of Thrones, which was indeed filmed here.

The Courtyard of the Maidens

And speaking of gardens, we also toured the outer palace gardens which are still very well landscaped and taken care of. 

I also really enjoyed being able to think of a time in 14th-century Spain when the Christians could live together with the Muslims and Jews, before the Reconquista of 1492 after which the Jews and Muslims were all forcibly expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, and the Spanish Inquisition began. But on a brighter note, this palace was also a nice prelude to my next stop on this trip, Granada, which holds the Alhambra, another beautiful example of muslim architecture but on a much greater scale.