Tag Archives: Contemporary Age

ELECTRICITY SHED OFF THE 1929 PARK

This small electricity booth, with its Neo-Baroque style, is the only remainder that has survived to this day from the great amusement park that was built for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929. It occupied an area of almost 43,000 square meters between the avenues of La Raza and de la Palmera and at the time it was considered in quality to be on par with the best in the world. Unfortunately, despite initial plans to keep it, the park was eventually dismantled and sold. Some parts of its attractions are still preserved today in the historic amusement park of Monte Igueldo, in Bilbao.

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SEVILLE CITY HALL

The Sevillian town hall has its headquarters in a magnificent 16th century building, which preserves much of its façade traces of the exquisite Plateresque Renaissance style in which it was built.

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The building was originally attached to the Casa Grande de San Francisco convent, which originally occupied the entire area of Plaza Nueva and its adjacent blocks. The works began around 1527, coinciding with the stay of Emperor Charles V in the city to celebrate his marriage to Isabel of Portugal. Throughout the century, different architects succeeded one another in directing the works, such as Diego de Riaño, Juan Sánchez, Hernán Ruiz II or Benvenuto Tortello.

In the 19th century, following the disappearance of the San Francisco convent, the building was significantly expanded. It was then that the neoclassical façade facing Plaza Nueva was built, the work of Balbino Marrón (1861) and the extension of the façade towards Plaza de San Francisco, directed by Demetrio de los Ríos (1868).

Towards the outside, the exquisite Plateresque decoration of the part built in the 16th century stands out. We can see a complex iconographic program, full of mythological characters and references to Roman antiquity, mixed with the emblems of Carlos V. In this way, it was intended to exalt the city's past, relating it to the glorification of the figure of the emperor . In this way, the aim was to consolidate Seville as the most important city of that great empire that took shape during the 16th century.

On both sides of the arch that originally gave access to the Convent of San Francisco we see two niches with the figures of Hercules and Julius Caesar. Both characters are considered the mythological and historical founders of the city. The sculptures were added in 1854 one of the extensive restorations undertaken on the building's façade. They are the work of Vicente Hernández Couquet.

WALL OF THE PASEO CATALINA DE RIBERA (CONTEMPORARY)

As part of the urban redevelopment works in this sector of the city, undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century, this wall or fence was built to separate the gardens of the Alcázar from the Paseo de Catalina de Ribera and the Jardines de Murillo. It is almost 400 meters long and is made in the historicist style that was so popular at the time. In fact, it is a crenellated wall, despite the fact that it does not have any defensive purpose.

Also historicist and with a certain monumentality are the two portals that are located at both ends of the Paseo, which today serve as auxiliary accesses to the gardens of the Alcázar.