“Seville does not have mountains. She is the summit of herself, the ideal summit, the supreme bastion.” Eight years before Alfonso —infallible— to turn around a deficiency: the absence of a geographical reference at altitude. The phrase seems to have been dictated by a naive patriotic pride, but it can also be interpreted ironically. In a place where winter almost doesn’t exist—“you know, you don’t get old in Seville”—where any street that rises a few meters above the river level is called a slope, where old women are still called girls and in which rain, as Borges wrote in that colossal verse, is a fact that, without a doubt, happens in the past, the summit is not up, but embedded at ground level.
“If this city gives us an ineffable sensation, it is because it offers itself entirely at a single glance.” Perhaps that is why the Plaza de España, the last great historicist monument of the ancient metropolis of the Indies, which sculpted in architecture its lost past while the Restoration ran out of time, was conceived as the crown of some gardens—those of the Infanta María Luisa Fernanda, Duchess of Montpensier—which were part of the private recreation of the San Telmo Palace, which was not yet integrated into the city.
The Seville of the 1920s had not yet emerged from its historical turmoil. The overcrowding of internal emigration was already bursting the neighbors’ houses and sowing frustration in the (bitter) life of the working masses. Its southern horizon, just like in the tangos, was only synonymous with the periphery. It was there that Aníbal González, the architect of the Exposition of ’29, related to the Luca de Tena family, conceived the harmonious geometry that, many decades later, would end up being Lawrence of Arabia’s Cairo and the Royal Palace of the Planet Naboo in El attack of the clones, one of the episodes of the Star Wars saga. A gigantic public forum of 31,000 square meters in a city where the simple confluence between two streets, always narrow and tiny, is already considered a square, which the mayor of Seville – José Luis Sanz (PP) – intends to fence off to turn it into a piggy bank. open.
The idea, which has provoked an intense wave of citizen indignation, apart from the political instrumentalization campaign fueled by the left-wing parties, involves turning public space and heritage into an object of tourist consumption, while at the same time despising and denying the very essence of what a city is: a meeting place between different people, regardless of where they are registered. As a proposal, it is an absolute nonsense that reveals the surrender of municipal politicians to the mass tourism industry. It is unlikely that it will go ahead, given the majority opposition and the refusal of the central government, which manages the public buildings that are integrated into the monument. The City Council cannot dispose of what is not legally its own – the square belongs to the people of Seville – and even the Junta de Andalucía has avoided coming out to support the Sevillian mayor, among other things because José Luis Sanz was never a candidate Moreno liked. Bonilla, but the last imposition of Pablo Casado before being sacrificed on the Ides of Genoa.
The controversy, in any case, has served to highlight the social problem that in capitals such as Seville, Cádiz, Granada or Málaga is causing the speculative bubble associated with tourism, which has dislocated the real estate market, annihilated traditional commerce and, now, appropriates the best public spaces. A constant in the recent history of the capital of Andalusia, where Holy Week itself is financed by the filling of almost all the historic squares, with the tolerance and secular complicity of the town council itself.
In all of them, chairs and payment boxes are placed, the income of which is a million-dollar business for the brotherhoods, which enjoy this commercial canonry in perpetuity, without public competition and under a monopoly regime. They never have enough. Even enclaves as venerable as the Courtyard of the Orange Trees of the Cathedral, heritage of the primitive mosque of Isbilya, which was a free access square until the Church registered it as a private property that operates within the paid tourist routes of the temple. metropolitan, have been stolen from the citizens without either the mayor or the Board (at that time socialist) preventing it.
The antecedents, then, abound, although none is as striking as the privatization of the Plaza de la Encarnación in Seville, where a municipal government formed by the PSOE and IU awarded a construction company (Sacyr) a commercial administrative concession for 40 years to exploit commercially the Metropol Parasol (Las Setas) and its surroundings. The socialists, who now criticize the closure of the Plaza de España, also went so far as to put up for rent in international tourist forums (the project was called Sevilla Venues) all the historic enclaves in the heart of the capital of Andalusia – the Plaza de España, the Murillo Gardens, the Alameda de Hércules or the New York Pier—to host “exclusively” events, receptions and private events organized by “investors.”
This proposal, sponsored by Juan Espadas, current spokesperson for the PSOE in the Senate and head of the Andalusian socialists, was conceived by his successor, Antonio Muñoz, who lost the Seville Mayor’s Office last year to José Luis Sanz, and involved privatizing the capital gains from tourism. and socialize its costs. The Plaza de España, whose importance in the construction of the cultural and sentimental imaginary of Seville is only comparable to that formed by the triangle between the Giralda, the Cathedral and the Alcázar —“the best cahíz on earth,” wrote Antonio Collantes de Terán —, is from day one an anachronistic work. Counterflow.
Aníbal González, who was fired as architect of the Ibero-American Exhibition three years before its opening, conceived it as an eternal monument while the Modern Movement (MoMA) triumphed in Europe. Its classic workmanship, made thanks to brick and tile artisans, contrasts with the mechanistic and distilled architecture of the early 20th century. While avant-garde architects fled from ornament as from the devil, in Seville the father of regionalism finished off the arcades of the Plaza de España with balustrades, sculpted medallions and pieces of polychrome ceramics. Seville: always within your watch.
For Aldo Rossi, Pritzker Prize winner and one of the leaders of European architecture, the great value of the construction of Aníbal González, who died in ruins at the age of 56, leaving debts to his family, who could not even pay for his funeral because he lacked of savings, is neither in its design nor in its construction. It lies in its ability to make a city, transforming a wild periphery into a colossal and lasting urban center. Closing it and turning it into a cash register is equivalent to killing Seville, the New Alexandria of Chaves Nogales.