Seville and Spain Visit

So we made the decision to take a little side trip and go to Seville Spain, a couple hour drive from here in Albufeira Portugal. It’s a nice drive along a highway with pretty cool hills and valleys and overlooks towards the Atlantic ocean

Seville is fairly large metropolis area and we booked a apartment in downtown in the old town that turns out you can only walk to.

Downtown Seville is a maze of small streets. I’m trying to follow a map or Google map its almost impossible and we got turned around more than once. Just trying to find our overnight accommodations was an adventure. Eventually when we did find it it turned out to be down what looked like a Little Alley at the very end. In normal times none of us would probably even walk down there. 😂

A great evening and a very cool bar with a nice meal and a few drinks made all of the stress and excitement of the walk go away in a great way. We had a traditional game of euchre and a couple of glasses of wine to toast a wonderful evening in Seville.

The next morning up and showered and ready to go for our entire full day in beautiful Seville. As we are great at planning things well in advance, we decided to research what to do and what to see about a half an hour before we left apartment. The large cathedral (Catedral de Sevilla) turns out to be the fourth largest one in the world and when you get inside, you can see why. Even the from the outside, it’s an impressive structure.

Once inside, (€10) unbelievable set up with basically 15 or 16 very small chapels scattered throughout for small services a very large alter, which is pretty impressive by itself. There are many bishops and other prominent people who are buried here one of them being Christopher Columbus. His monument statue, whatever you wanna call it has four guys carrying him. I was told by Sue they represent the four regions of Spain from that time. We didn’t even know he was there, but it was pretty cool that we did see him. 🚢

After that fun religious retreat, we decided to take a walk down to the water where we found we could go for a boat ride. Walking to the boat we stopped and had lunch at this bar restaurant that looked like it was about 1000 years old. It seems like it easy way to learn a little bit more about this beautiful city and of course you could get a glass of wine on the boat. 🍷 They show you a lot of the cool old buildings and some of the modern ones from when Seville had Expo 92. One of the cooler towers at the water and actually right close to where we got on the boat is a place where they used to store gold that they plundered from the New World back in the day.

After our boat ride, which was really informative and very nice it was time to walk back to our apartment for a regroup. Just walking around the streets of this European City is something special. Going out for dinner that night you could see Setas de Sevilla ("Mushrooms of Seville") all lit up and its glory. This thing is supposedly the largest wooden structure in the world and it’s pretty impressive. We had a great dinner and a few laughs and slept well knowing we put on 12,000 steps. 💪

Getting up on Friday morning, packing our belongings together and heading out for a coffee and a croissant for breakfast brings us to the end of our trip to Seville. We contemplating driving down Cadiz to look at the water but decided spending an extra 2 1/2 hours in the car wasn’t exactly something we looked forward to.

Instead, when you drive back to Portugal right at the border, there’s a beautiful little town called Ayamonte and if you drive enough, you get to a beach called Plays Isla Canela. There’s a lot of nice hotel resorts in this area and it was a nice walk on the beach.

On the way back home it was discovered that Rory had never been to IKEA of all places so we stopped at IKEA and had the cheap IKEA lunch.

Overall, it was a great little adventure to visit Spain. 🇪🇸

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