Iberian Spring: Day 6 Seville

Soundtrack: flamenco clapping and stomping

For our first full day in Seville we booked a food tour, a mix of culture, history and hopefully good things to eat. We met our guide P under Seville’s controversial Parasol or Setas (mushrooms), a huge wooden structure that dominates one of the old squares. The square has featured a marketplace for hundreds of years, but about 15-20 years ago the authorities decided to jazz the place up, held a competition that was won by a German architect, and the result was an over budget structure now known as the mushrooms.

From here we headed off into the market under the mushrooms for a bit of a primer on spanish ham. There are basically 4 grades of ham, each one gets colour coded. Green and white are the low end, these are not pure spanish pig breeds and are fed all manner of things, with the green ones eating some acorns. Then comes red, for not pure spanish breeds that eat lots of acorns, and finally black, which are pure spanish breeds and eat lots and lots of acorns. Most families buy a leg of ham around xmas each year as it’ll keep for several months without refrigeration: if you like your family you buy red, not so much white, and the others are only if you have cash to burn as the black ones can easily get a 1,000+ euro pricetag. If getting them as tapas the red and back can set you back around 15-20 euro, while the others may only be 3-5 euro. Then we tasted some black ham, and it was so good, an almost creamy layer of fat and then some punchy salty meaty goodness.

Our next stop was Bar el Comercio, famous for churros and hot chocolate. Sadly for L, they don’t do gluten free churros, but she did get to try their very delicious hot chocolate. The make the churros by piping a long strand of batter into hot oil, coiling this into a circle, flipping it a couple of times, and then cutting it into strips of fried dough goodness. Seville style churros are a little different, the dough is slightly savoury and by default they don’t dip it in cinnamon or sugar: you just get deep fried batter. They were quite tasty, and the thick hot chocolate completed the meal.

From here we wound our way through the narrow but flat streets to a former mosque/synagogue, that is now a convent: during one of the various historical purges the spanish kicked out the non-Catholics and set up a lot of them as convents. In a fabulously ironic twist, these days Spain imports a lot of its nuns from African Catholic populations, as few home town chicas are getting thee to a nunnery. To assist supporting themselves, the nuns do a lot of baking, and P picked up a box of goodies from here.

We headed next door to a tapas place where P explained all the things they do in Seville for fun in the days around easter. A bunch of this involves getting 100 of your friends and carrying religious floats around the city for hours at a time. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to dress up in traditional religious garb that sadly became the pattern for Klan outfits. We had a few USians from Georgia in our group and I’m sure they felt quite uncomfortable seeing these. We were the only Australians in this group, the rest were USians but of the decent we-really-don’t-want-to-nuke-anyone variety. Basically Seville goes crazy around easter, street parades every day, lots of folks don’t work, it sounds like a hoot of a party. Here we tried a traditional cold tapas of carrots, parsley, and garlic with a delicious olive oil dressing. It was punchy and surprisingly good, as I fele a cold coming on I made sure I ate plenty of the garlic. We also had a mini burger tapas, the filling similar to pulled pork that was also good. We tried a local specialty drink, vermouth and gin. Almost an anti-martini really where it was mostly vermouth and a splash of gin, though vermouth around here isn’t the martini variety, it’s locally produced infused and fortified wine that can be consumed on its own.

Our last stop was for Seville style fish and chips: marinated fish cut into pieces and then battered and fried, along with thinly sliced potatoes also deep fried. Sadly again not gluten free, the marinated fish was quite delicious, and different, as instead of adding vinegar to the cooked fish, these were marinated in vinegar so the batter stayed crispy. We washed these down with some local manzanilla, a lightly fortified Andalusian wine that is very, very dry. It’s one of those wines that they do everything wrong in the making: it’s fortified to about 15% abv in wooden casks with a lot of air space, but by encouraging a thick layer of yeast to form on top the wine is protected from oxidation. Here also P gave us a brief run down of Seville in the civil war, where it was a source of shame for some that the city capitulated to the fascists after 5 days, likely saving a lot of the city but at the same time being seen as fascist collaborators.

We finished beside the cathedral, eating the nun’s cookies. arently the nuns were very apologetic that they only had one variety in stock, as they’d had an exceptionally good easter. These were an almond-based, potentially not gluten free hard biscuit that was ok.

We headed back to the apartment via some clothes shops, a bookshop that turned out to be one that specialised in religions: so there were lots of different religious themed book, as well as Dracula and harry potter, I don’t know why. One of the clothes shops was next to a literal hole in the wall coffee place, so I ordered a Bonbom — an espresso with added condensed milk, so similar to ca phe dau. it was good.

After a rest we headed out. We had plenty of time to do the walk to our dinner and show destination, so stopped in a a bunch of places along the way. We checked out a couple of bookshops, a couple of record shops, and L also got a serve of strawberries, white chocolate sauce, and pistachio crumble from one of the several strawberry dessert shops we’ve walked past. We also stopped in at a few bookshops and record shops, it seems that there’s a healthy manga scene here. It’s quite fascinating to look at the ingles section in second hand bookshops, where the titles are anything and everything, from university textbooks on engineering to random fiction. So far in Seville I’ve seen more bells than books by Hemingway, I’ve even heard some bells tolling. There’s a stack of interesting records to be found here, L found a couple of Nina Hagen LPs, but we haven’t really got the right luggage space to get these home safely. Interestingly record stores seem to arrange artists by their first name, so Nina Hagen is under N, and if you want to avoid Phil Collins be careful flicking through P.

After wandering Seville’s picturesque and narrow back streets, we found our flamenco place, la madriguera de mai, which apparently translates as “Mai’s burrow”. It’s a little place that does well reviewed flamenco and tapas, only has instagram, and can only be booked through Whatsapp. They are very much no bullshit: you have to confirm your booking by 4pm on the day, and entry is between 8pm and 8.30pm, if you’re late they at least say they’ll lock you out. They also provide among the best value for money, at 40 euro each for food and the show. As we arrived promptly, the wonderfully exuberant host (who might have been Mai) showed us to the front row, and promptly read us the riot act: during the performances don’t get up, be silent, and no photos or filming. All seems fair, I wish more gigs had those rules. The performance is improvised flamenco, so the no filming also serves to preserve their IP. We ordered the home made sangria (as cheekily suggested) and then settled in. They understood gluten free very well, so we had some wonderful patatas bravas, potato slices fried to just the right amount of crunch covered in a creamy slightly spicy aioli; fried sardines, calamari, and fish, all done just right; delicious pork cheeks with patatas (I don’t think I’ve ever had pork cheeks before, and now I’ve had them two nights running: little piggies have very tasty faces); and some roasted green peppers that were bursting with flavour.

The flamenco performance was a lot of wow. It started with just a solo guitarist showing what he could do, which was pretty neat. Then out came his brother who sang and clapped: he was okay, definitely not like our fado dude with the underworld connections, more like a charming guy who was walking across a floor covered in lego. The singing had an Arabic feel, that kind of soulful wailing, charming but not my thing for an extended period. Which was good, because then the flamenco dancer came out and oh my god, if ever there was a dance style that exuded pure attitude then flamenco is it. She turned, flipped her skirt, twirled, clapped, sang, stomped, and all the while had a don’t fuck with me stare. Fado guy is going down in a cage fight with her, we have a new Iberian champion. We had more sangria during the interval and then the performers came out again, and this time she was swinging the shawl. And she was swinging it, at one stage I moved our sangria glasses out of harms way as I could feel the shawl swooshing past us. After some amazing two-handed twirling she showed us what she could do one handed, and just wow. Centripetal force never looked so amazing. Intense, amazing, powerful, the performance was just incredible.

After the show we had our photo op, then it was time to wander Seville’s streets back to the apartment. Seville seems to start closing around 11pm, there were still other out and wandering. It might be big white guy privilege but it felt safe, there were no packs of drunken men waving their small nether regions around, no one vomiting in the gutter, just calm revellers heading back to their respective burrows watching their footing on the cobble stones or squeaking their shoes on the smooth bits.

Tomorrow is more flamenco: we’re doing a lesson (where hopefully I just get to stomp and clap while L does all the twirling) and another evening show. I’ll also be looking for a barber for a shave, because when in Seville, why not.