Stopping at Seville on Our Spain Road Trip

We explored the city of Seville, or as the Spanish call it Sevilla (pronounced Suh-vee-uh). We first went to a bull fighting arena called Plaza de Toros to explore. When we were walking around, you could smell the bulls! Our parents were going to take us to a bull fight but then they read the reviews that said it was very gross because after they ended the fight, the matador kills the bull in front of the audience. We got to walk into the bull ring in the middle of the round stadium, which was completed in 1760, which makes it 260 years old. We saw where they kept the bulls, and where the bull and matador come out.

Plaza de Toros has more than 12,000 seats, and is the largest and most important bull fighting ring in Spain because it holds the largest bull fighting festival in the world. Bull fighting started off as a symbol of the Hispanic identity, where they originally worshiped and sacrificed bulls. It is still popular and important in tourism but its becoming a lot less popular because people don’t want to see a bull being slaughtered.

After we looked around we went on a walk to Metropol Parasol which is a structure that looks like wooden pieces put together. It reminded me of my 3D wooden puzzle dinosaur at home! Locals are known to call it the wooden mushroom. There was a market under the Metropol Parasol that we looked around and got lunch. We got a whole cone full of manchego cheese and we each got a empanada. The flavors of empanadas were goat cheese, caramelized onions, and peppers, or ham and cheese. I got goat cheese, caramelized onions, and peppers, my parents split both flavors and Brooklyn had ham and cheese.

As we were walking the streets we noticed that there were a lot of streets only people could walk on. We found an orange store filled with souvenirs and orange flavored candys, tea, orange everything! We bought orange pastries, orange cookies, and our parents got orange alcohol.

Seville’s oranges have a distinct bitter taste and are not meant to eat raw. They taste great when when they are candy and the juice can be used to replace lemon juice. Seville likes to include them in pastries, chocolates, jams, teas, and lotions. Seville’s oranges are related to grapefruit.

Oranges are also popular to were we are staying in Portugal, and Canada is in talks with the government here to bring theses oranges to Canada (to replace American oranges).

Next we went to Plaza de España is one of the most famous squares in all of Spain. The square has over 7,000 colorful tiles, showing historical event and was built in 1928. We rented a row boat to paddle around the square!