Plaza de Espana
Built 1914 To 1928 By Anibal Gonzalez As The Centrepiece Of The 1929 Ibero American Exposition, With Forty Eight Tiled Alcoves Representing The Provinces Of Spain · Seville, Andalusia
A half-moon of brick and tile five hundred feet across, built for a world's fair that almost nobody remembers and which very nearly bankrupted the city. The 1929 Ibero-American Exposition was meant to reconnect Spain with Latin America; it opened months before the Wall Street crash and closed early. What it left is the most generous public space in Spain: a curved colonnade with towers at each end, a canal running along the inner face with four bridges over it standing for the medieval kingdoms, and, set into the wall at ground level, forty-eight tiled alcoves, one for every Spanish province, each with a painted map and a historical scene. People look for their own province and Spaniards genuinely do this. It is free, it is open, and it is the sort of place a city builds when it is trying to prove something. Come in the last hour of daylight, when the brick turns and the tilework goes gold.
Avenida Isabel la Catolica, Seville, Andalusia, 41004, Spain
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED, AND IT HAS NONE. The Plaza de Espana is a public square with no gate and no ticket, open at every hour and floodlit after dark, which is one of the better times to see it. The MARIA LUISA PARK behind it keeps its own gate hours and closes at night. The rowing boats on the canal operate limited daytime hours and are weather dependent. The archaeology museum in the park keeps separate shorter hours. A VISITOR CHARGE HAS BEEN PROPOSED; confirm.