Cathedral and La Giralda

We had big plans to go and see the roman ruins outside of town today. I think it is about our fourth try to see these ruins. So, of course, we woke to rain. Roman ruins in the rain doesn't sound great so we decided to try something indoors. We opted to visit the Cathedral and La Giralda. The Cathedral is actually built on the same site in which a mosque stood until it was torn down to build the cathedral. It is the 3rd largest cathedral in Europe. The Spaniards said that they wanted to build a cathedral so large that anyone who saw it would think they were mad men. It is a huge cathedral. It took 120 years to build. It looks big from the outside, but once you go in it is amazing how tall the cathedral ceilings are. The other claim to fame for this particular church is that Christopher Columbus is buried here. Apparently there are a couple of other places in Spain that claim to have his remains, but a few years ago the Sevillanos had the DNA tested and proved that the actual remains are here. Interesting fact: Columbus was buried in Spain, then moved to the Dominican Republic, then moved to Cuba. Once Cuba gained independence from Spain around 1900, his remains were again brought back to Spain. I mentioned this fact during the visit and Addy just could not get past this info. "How in the world did he move if he was dead?" I explained that his remains were moved in a box. I soon regretted sharing the info at all because it took us about 20 minutes to process, and we could not move on until it was very clear in her mind.

La Giralda is actually a tall bell tower that was used by the Muslims to call people to pray. The bell tower was saved and incorporated into the cathedral and it has a large weathervane with a lady on the top. I don't remember the story of the lady... A law was passed that no building in Sevilla could be taller than La Giralda. We decided to walk up the 35 flights to the top. The flights are actually ramps rather than stairs, because they used to ride horses up to ring the bells. We got to the 34th landing and then a line started to form. Pretty soon a security guard came by, then a paramedic rolling a mini stretcher, then a housekeeper with a mop. Everyone in the hall was quite curious as to what was going on (or maybe they all knew and we were in the dark because of the language barrier). Pretty soon they started their way down with a lady who had a bloody bandaged head. The kids were more impressed with that than all the gold, silver, arches, and crucifixes in the whole cathedral. All I had was my iphone, but here are some snapshots (of the cathedral and La Giralda, not the lady).