Seville Cathedral audio guide,
five stops, free.

Tip your head back and follow the tower from the ground to the bronze woman at the top, because you are looking at two buildings stacked on one another, four centuries apart. The lower two thirds is a minaret. Everything from the bell arches upwards is a Christian belfry that was put on top of it in the fifteen-sixties.

The minaret came first. Work on it began in 1184, a tower for the great mosque that the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, whose capital was Seville, had built on this spot. It did not go smoothly. The building stopped almost as soon as it had started, and it only got going again around 1188, under the caliph's son, Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur. Ahmad ibn Baso had begun the base in cut stone, on a foundation that reuses blocks from the walls of an older palace and from the Roman city walls, and a Maghrebi architect, Ali al-Ghumari, raised the shaft above it in brick. On the tenth of March 1198 it was finished with four metal spheres on top, to celebrate al-Mansur's victory over Alfonso the Eighth of Castile.

Now look at the face turned towards you. It is divided into three vertical strips. The windows run up the middle, and they climb in steps, because behind them a ramp spirals up inside the tower and each window lights a stretch of it. On either side is that lattice of lozenges, sebka, and if you could get close you would find the little columns under it topped with marble capitals two or three centuries older than the tower: Umayyad capitals of the ninth and tenth centuries, in the style of Madinat al-Zahra, and the historian Leopoldo Torres Balbás counted ninety-two of them reused here.

The spheres did not last. An earthquake in 1356 brought them down. Two centuries later Hernán Ruiz the Younger built the belfry you see above the plain brick, between 1558 and 1568, and round its top he wrote in Latin that the name of the Lord is a most strong tower. On the thirteenth of August 1568 the bronze figure of Faith, cast by Bartolomé Morel, was set on the summit, turning with the wind. A weathervane in human or animal shape is a giralda in Spanish, and Cervantes still uses the word for the statue in Don Quixote. Only later did the name slide down to cover the whole tower.

One more thing before you go in. The figure up there is the original, back since 2005 after six years away being restored, with instruments inside now to watch how she is ageing.

Four men in bronze, each two metres sixty tall, carry a coffin on their shoulders at the end of the south transept: a funeral procession, cast in metal. Their faces and hands are alabaster, which is why they look so pale against the dark metal. The two in front are the kingdoms of Castile and León, the two behind Aragon and Navarre. Between Castile and Aragon, on the side of the coffin, is the Admiral's coat of arms, and it is in fact the coffin's door.

The coffin is not Columbus's size, and it was never meant to be. What is inside is a gilded lead urn, made in 1795, with a lid that reads: here lie the bones of Christopher Columbus, first admiral and discoverer of the New World.

Those bones travelled more after his death than most people do in a lifetime. Columbus died in Valladolid on the twentieth of May 1506 and was buried there in the Franciscan convent. His son Diego had him moved to the Carthusian monastery in Seville, La Cartuja, which received the body in April 1509. Some time after 1536, nobody knows exactly when, the remains crossed the Atlantic to the cathedral of Santo Domingo. When Spain handed its part of Hispaniola to France, they were dug up on the twentieth of December 1795 and taken to Havana. And when Spain lost Cuba in 1898, they came back, reaching Seville on the nineteenth of January 1899 aboard a ship that happened to be called Giralda.

The monument came with them, in a sense. Arturo Mélida, a Madrid sculptor, designed it in 1891 for Havana Cathedral, and it was finished here instead. Mélida chose the spot himself, beside the huge Saint Christopher painted on the wall and facing the doorway dedicated to the same saint, the Admiral's namesake. It was inaugurated on the seventeenth of November 1902. Mélida died in Madrid four weeks later.

Are they really his bones? Santo Domingo says no: in 1877 a lead box inscribed to the discoverer was found in its cathedral, and those bones, kept since 1992 in the Columbus Lighthouse, have never been DNA-tested. Seville's remains have been. In 2003 samples were taken from them and from the bones of his brother Diego and his son Hernando. The short fragments of mitochondrial DNA matched the brother's, and the researchers concluded that at least what lies here is Christopher Columbus.

Before you move on, look up at the Saint Christopher. The Italian painter Mateo Pérez de Alesio, working on a Saint Christopher in this cathedral, is said to have told his colleague Luis de Vargas that one painted leg of Vargas's was worth more than his entire saint.

The gate in front of you, at the north end of the courtyard, has been a way in and out of this site for more than eight hundred years. The Door of Forgiveness was the main entrance to the Almohad mosque, lined up with the central aisle of the prayer hall and with the mihrab, the niche that showed the direction of Mecca. Look at the arch under the deep wooden eaves. It is a pointed horseshoe, and the Cathedral's own description says it has kept its original form since the twelfth century. Every worshipper who came to Friday prayer in Almohad Seville walked in under that curve.

This courtyard was where they washed first. It was the mosque's sahn, the ablutions court, and the Christians kept it after 1248 and found other uses for it: a cemetery, a place for the city's annual fairs, a place to preach. The fountain by you is modern, but its upper bowl is Visigothic, older than the mosque, and it is the same bowl the Almohad fountain had. The orange trees stand in a strict grid, and the thin channels between them, which you saw from the top of the tower, still carry the water.

Before you leave, find the covered gallery at the courtyard's north-east corner, the Nave del Lagarto, and look up by the Lagarto Gate. Lagarto means lizard, and the lizard hanging from the ceiling is in fact a crocodile, stuffed, an old votive offering. On the floor above that gallery is the Colombina library. It grew from the bequest of Hernando Colón, Christopher Columbus's son, in 1552: some six thousand items, nine hundred and forty of them books printed before 1501, and among the manuscripts the original of the Book of Prophecies that Columbus himself wrote in 1504. So the man whose bones you have just seen has his handwriting in the same building.

The doors of the gate are Almohad too, wood sheathed in bronze and worked with interlace and Kufic inscriptions that repeat two phrases from the Quran: power belongs to God, and eternity belongs to God. The knockers on them now are replicas; the originals are kept inside the Giralda.

Walk through, out into Calle Alemanes, and turn round. The street face is where the Christian city dressed the old gate: terracotta figures of 1520 by Miguel Florentín, Saint Peter and Saint Paul at the sides, the Virgin and the Archangel Gabriel above them, and over the arch a large relief of Christ driving the merchants out of the Temple, set on the front door of a former mosque.