Seville Travel Guide: How to Feel, Eat and Live the Most Passionate City of Spain

The smell of orange blossom in March. The white heat of August stopping time and silencing the streets at three in the afternoon. The sound of flamenco rising from some tablao at eleven at night. The Holy Week processions that have been stopping the world for seven days for centuries. The April Fair with its casetas, its lanterns and its sevillanas spinning time faster and faster without stopping. The ice-cold fino at a historic tavern counter with a tapa of Iberian ham that is exactly what you needed even though you didn't know it.

And beneath all that, Spain's most extraordinary monuments: the world's largest Gothic cathedral with its Giralda that was the Almohad mosque's minaret, the Real Alcázar with its Mudéjar palaces and gardens where the kings still live, the Plaza de España with its tile semicircle appearing in Star Wars, the Santa Cruz neighborhood with its medieval alleyways smelling of jasmine and night-blooming jasmine.

In just over an hour you will discover how to get around a completely flat and completely walkable city, what to see without wasting time, where to eat pringá and fried fish and salmorejo the way real Sevillians eat them, how a night that doesn't start until ten and doesn't end until the heat allows actually works, and how to organize your trip around however many days you have. Complete with itineraries for two, four and six days, practical advice on the Andalusian heat, money and customs, and the best day trips: Córdoba with its Mosque, Cádiz, Jerez with its bodegas and its flamenco, Doñana and Ronda.

Seville is waiting for you. And it is exactly as passionate, as beautiful and as completely Andalusian as they say. And even more than you imagined.