Sevilla pt 1

Alright, here's the long anticipated beginning to a series of blogs at least three parts deep.

We arrived in Sevilla about in time for lunch. So after dropping off a few things for the hotel, we went straight to Alcazares Reales de Sevilla, a Moorish castle built by the Almohades hundreds of years ago. We saw a miniature model of the Nao Victoria, one of five ships Magellan commanded in his attempt to find access to the spice entrepots in Asia. Incidentally, Magellan (Portuguese) approached King Charles V (Spain) with this plan after the Portuguese crown rejected his plan. Also, Magellan did not circumnavigate the world, he died in the Philippines trying to Christianize and make allies with the peoples.

Anyways, enough of the history lesson, the ship looked really small and now I can imagine how crappy that voyage must have been. Later we visited Patio de las Doncellas (possibly called such because the Moorish Kings allegedly asked for 100 virigins every years from the Christians) which featured this long, shallow pool with goldfish and cool designs on the walls. Here are some pictures:




Next we saw the gardens, which had trees from all around the world, including this 350 year old tree that looked ugly as sin but was still somehow living. The garden featured a neat little shrubbery maze as well. Oh, and there were orange trees everywhere. Here's some pics.




Next, we saw a huge fountain which somehow circulated water from this pipe on top of the castle, this gave the fountain a somewhat water-fall effect.


You can kinda see the water to the right of that center column.


Here's a pic of the entire gardens from up top:




Alright, so that's all of Real Alcazar. This blog literally took me about half an hour to write, so I hope you all appreciated it. Next one will be real soon, I promise.