Seville

Tapas hopping

Move between two or three bars rather than ordering one large dinner.

The social rhythm is as important as any individual dish.

Montadito de pringá

A small bread roll filled with slow-cooked meat mixture.

A specifically Andalusian and Sevillian bar classic.

Mercado de Triana or Feria

Use a market to connect produce, neighbourhood and lunch.

Markets keep the food guide grounded in daily city life.

Real Alcázar

A royal palace still in use: a Christian king's building, made in the Andalusi manner, on a site with centuries of earlier Islamic palace history beneath and around it.

The building most people picture — the Palace of Pedro I, with its stucco, tilework and coffered ceilings — was built for a Castilian king in the 1350s and 1360s, using craftsmen working in the Andalusi tradition, roughly a century after Seville had ceased to be a Muslim city. That is the thing to hold on to as you walk through: this is not a surviving Moorish palace, it is a Christian one that chose to be built this way, inside a walled compound that had been added to and rebuilt many times before he arrived. The site keeps going underneath and around it. Excavations in the Patio de las Doncellas uncovered the sunken garden of the original fourteenth-century courtyard — walkways, planting beds and pools that had been paved over — and there is much earlier occupation below that. Above ground the Renaissance added an upper storey to the same patio, so you can stand in one courtyard and read three different periods from the floor up. Move slowly, and pay attention to the sequence of spaces rather than to individual rooms: you are steered from bright to dark, from tight to open, from indoors to garden, again and again.

Few buildings make the entanglement of Islamic and Christian Seville as tangible: here they are not two stories with a date between them but one set of rooms.

Look for: The plasterwork inscriptions. Arabic and Castilian appear together, on the same walls, in the same palace.

Something you might otherwise miss: The floor level of the Patio de las Doncellas. What you walk on is not the original ground — the fourteenth-century garden lies below it.

Wendelse tip: Leave real time for the gardens. The palace only makes sense as a machine for moving between built rooms and planted ones.

Islamic foundations; the Mudéjar palace of Pedro I, 1356–1366; centuries of later work · Half a day if you are enjoying it; two hours is the minimum that is not a rush · First thing, while the courtyards are still cool and empty

The Cathedral and the Giralda

The largest Gothic church in Europe, built on the mosque's footprint, with the mosque's minaret still attached to it as a bell tower.

Treat these as one building, because that is what they are. The decision taken in 1401 was to replace the old Almohad congregational mosque, damaged by earthquake, with a new Gothic cathedral at a scale nothing in the city justified — while keeping the minaret, and keeping the ablutions courtyard, which is still planted with orange trees. The tower is the more interesting half. It has the classic Almohad minaret structure: a square central core wrapped by four outer walls, with ramps rising in the space between them, wide and shallow enough that the climb was possible on horseback. You feel that as you go up — there are no stairs for most of the ascent, just a long turning slope, and the openings give you the city in instalments before you reach the top. The last stage of the Almohad tower was replaced in the sixteenth century by a Renaissance belfry by Hernán Ruiz, crowned by the four-metre bronze weathervane that gives the tower its name. So the tower is literally a twelfth-century Islamic structure wearing a sixteenth-century Christian hat, and nobody thought that strange enough to hide.

One ensemble, two religions and four centuries, with none of the joins concealed — Seville's layering made physical.

Look for: Where the brickwork changes as you climb. The Almohad structure and the Renaissance addition do not match, and the seam is visible from the outside too.

Something you might otherwise miss: The Patio de los Naranjos. Its shape and its irrigation channels are the mosque's courtyard, not the cathedral's garden.

Wendelse tip: Walk the full exterior before you go in. From the outside you can see the cathedral's Gothic bulk pressing against an older, calmer tower it did not build.

Almohad minaret, late 12th century; Gothic cathedral begun 1401; Renaissance belfry, 16th century · 1.5–2 hours including the ramp ascent · Late afternoon, for the light on the tower's brick

Plaza de España

An enormous semicircle of brick, ceramic and water on the edge of María Luisa Park, built for a world's fair.

This is the largest thing built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition, and it does not behave like the rest of Seville at all. Aníbal González laid it out as a semicircle roughly 230 metres across between its two towers, turning its open side towards María Luisa Park and, beyond it, the river the exposition's American guests arrived by. Everything about it is scaled for crowds and photographs: a curved canal with bridges over it, continuous galleries, monumental stairs, towers at each end. What holds it together is the material. It is brick and ceramic, industrially produced and applied everywhere, including the ring of 48 tiled alcoves around the perimeter, one for each Spanish province. That tells you the point: this was a national advertisement in local materials, designed in a consciously Andalusian manner, and completed a few months before the crash that ended the exposition's ambitions. Which is why it feels unlike the medieval centre — it was not grown, it was staged.

It shows Seville inventing a version of itself for an international audience, and shows you exactly which parts of the old city it chose to imitate.

Look for: The province alcoves. Find yours, or find one for a province you have been to, and compare the tiled scenes — they are not interchangeable.

Wendelse tip: Come on foot through María Luisa Park rather than arriving at the front. The plaza was designed to be revealed from inside the park.

Regionalism; Aníbal González, built 1914–1929 for the Ibero-American Exposition · 45–60 minutes, plus the park · Early morning or the last hour of light; the open plaza is punishing at midday

Las Setas — the contemporary interruption

A vast timber canopy dropped into a square in the old quarter, over the Roman city it was built on top of.

This is not here because it is famous. It is here because it is the one place in central Seville where the historic city is deliberately interrupted, and encountering it after a day of brick and tile is genuinely interesting. Chosen from 65 competition entries and completed in 2011, it is around 150 by 70 metres and some 26 metres high, built mainly of micro-laminated timber over the Plaza de la Encarnación. It came about almost by accident: excavation for an underground car park in the 1990s hit substantial Roman and later remains, which stopped the project and eventually produced the Antiquarium beneath the structure, opened in 2011. So the sequence goes Roman house mosaics at the bottom, a market and public square in the middle, and a walkway across the roof at the top. Go up for the view by all means, but look at the thing itself: it takes the shading and the raised public terrace that Seville has always used and builds them at an inhuman scale in an unexpected material.

A city this confident about its past is the right place to see what a deliberate contemporary intrusion does to a historic square.

Look for: How the structure meets the ground. It touches the square at very few points, which is what makes the plaza usable underneath it.

Wendelse tip: Do the Antiquarium and the roof in one visit rather than treating the walkway as a viewpoint alone. The two levels are the argument.

Completed 2011; Jürgen Mayer H., engineered by Arup · 1 hour for both levels · Towards sunset

The Giralda keeps reappearing

The tower turns up at the end of streets across the centre, usually when you are not looking for it.

The old streets are narrow and rarely straight, so you get the tower in slices — a fragment above a roofline, a whole face at a junction, nothing at all for three turnings. It is how the city is navigated without a map, and it is why the tower feels omnipresent in a place where you can almost never see it whole.

Anywhere in Santa Cruz, the Alfalfa area and the lanes north of the cathedral.

Tiles are not confined to monuments

Ceramic is everywhere in ordinary Seville: bars, street signs, house numbers, the bottom metre of a wall.

Seville has made tiles on an industrial scale for centuries, much of it historically on the Triana side of the river, and the material ended up in everyday use rather than reserved for palaces. A tiled dado can be washed down and it takes the wear that the bottom metre of any street wall gets. Street names painted onto ceramic panels rather than printed on signs are the easiest version to spot.

Neighbourhood streets in Triana, Santa Cruz and around the Alfalfa.

Look through the doorway

Many Seville houses turn inward, and the street door is often open onto the courtyard behind it.

The plan is inherited: rooms arranged around a central patio with the plain wall to the street. Privacy and household life account for much of it, and the climate for a good deal more — the courtyard is the shaded, ventilated, planted heart of the house and the façade is a barrier. What you will actually see through an open door and its iron gate is tiles, plants, a floor being hosed down, sometimes a fountain. It is worth slowing down for, and worth not photographing: these are people's hallways.

Residential lanes in Santa Cruz and Triana, particularly in the evening.