Seville – museums and architecture in Parque de María Luisa

Parque de María Luisa is Seville’s largest park, located to the south of the Casco Antiguo.

Once the gardens of the Palace of San Telmo they were donated to the city in 1893 and redeveloped in 1914 in preparation for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929 (WW1 got in the way). Plaza de España in the south-east corner of the park was part of this redevelopment (post here).

There are two museums located in the southern part of the park. As a former archaeologist, the most interesting for me was the Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla www.museosdeandalucia.es.

Just over the way is the Museo de Artes y Costumbres Populares www.museosdeandalucia.es.

There were some beautiful examples of lacework, and a few nice posters, and the scale model of the Giralda in the stairwell is auite impressive, but it’s the Neomudéjar building itself that is the star.

On the other side of Paseo de las Delicias there are a couple of hangers on from the 1929 expo. I love the ornate Pabellón de Argentina. The over-the-top neo-baroque style has Ibero-American and mestizo influences.

Just next door is the incongruous Art Deco Pabellón de Guatemala with it’s blue and white ceramic-covered walls.

And just up the road it the Costurero de la Reina, aka the Queen’s Sewing Box, a small hexagonal castle which is the oldest Neomudéjar building in Seville. Legend has it that the Queen used it as a garden retreat but the lady in question actually passed away in 1878 before it was completed in 1893. Once a guard house, it now house’s the Tourist Information office.

On the other side of the park, on the corner with Calle Felipe II and Avenida de la Borbolla, is Villa Ozama, a beautiful modernist house, built it between 1912 and 1916 by the architect Manuel Martímez Más.

And that was the majority of the sightseeing I did on my 2018 trip. Off into the centre of town now…

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