Strolling through Seville

Seville is not exactly my favourite city, but I work for one of the august higher educational establishments there, so I do have to go to the place  regularly to impart classes. As I live in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, which is at the mouth of the river Guadalquivir - the same river that runs through Seville - this involves a two-hour commute by coach or, indeed a two-hour drive by car. if you're interested, you can read previous posts about Sanlúcar here, here, here or here.

An aside: "How", you might well ask, "does the car journey last as long as the bus journey, especially as you don't stop in the five major towns en route?" And indeed: "Isn't it cheaper and more environmentally friendly to use public transport?". And I would answer "The car journey is just as long because as I don't have to get up so early, I arrive in Seville in time to get caught up in two separate traffic jams, one on either side of the city". And in answer to the second I would reply that "As my classes start first thing in the morning, no bus arrives in Seville early enough for me to get to my first class on time, thus necessitating an overnight stay in the city the night before. This makes the bus journey more expensive than going by car so, unfortunately, the environment loses out on that one. Furthermore, try sitting on the bus next to someone with halitosis who has in all probability just had toast with olive oil and garlic for breakfast. That will dampen your enthusiasm - even if the bus journey does give you four hours more reading time". I once made the journey on a bus that stank of rotten teeth - wherever I tried sitting. This, incidentally, is not an indictment of the hygiene habits - or lack thereof - of the great Spanish public. People in Spain tend to be scrupulously clean; more so than in most European countries, especially, entre nous, the one sandwiched between Spain and England. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to forget, here as elsewhere, that mouths can be just as noisesome as armpits - or even worse. 

A useless piece of information: Listerine was originally a badly-selling floor cleaning product, but a clever marketing chappie discovered halitosis and convinced the manufacturer to rebottle it as a mouthwash. I suppose that the composition has changed since then. This was a cynical move by anyone's standards, but the marketer deserves a Nobel prize for services to humanity, though there's still a long way to go before we are no longer assaulted by the halitosis of our fellows. 

Digressions over, here are the photos. Let's start in Sanlúcar as I prepare to leave:

Sanlúcar's Calzada de la Duquesa with Doñana across the
 river in the extreme background.

Quinto Centenario Bridge. The winning design was,
strange to relate, submitted by the brother of
the then Minister for Foreign Affairs.
  Image courtesy of Panoramio

The first traffic jam I run into is on the access roads to the Quinto Centenario bridge. Built for Seville's Expo '92 - more of which later - it was rumoured to have been designed with eight lanes. Apparently, three of these lanes disappeared unaccountably along with part of the budget to build it, so it was built with five lanes. All rather silly considering that three lanes of traffic in each direction converge there. This problem is further compounded on the southern side of the bridge as there are a further two filter lanes full of cars jostling to get onto the access.Furthermore,the lanes on the bridge itself are illegal as they contravene the minimum width required by Spanish law.




Having parked my car, I walk past the Andalusian Regional Parliament which used to be a hospital, called Hospital de la Cinco Llagas - literally the hospital of the five running sores - a reference to Christ's wounds. Now, however, there's only one enormous running

Hospital de las Cinco Llagas. Suppurating with corruption.

sore there - the blatant corruption and money-grabbing antics of the politicians as they root around in the trough. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, there's a corruption case grinding through the courts at the moment involving the alleged defalcation of over €1bn through various clever wheezes involving politicians of the ruling (Socialist) regime and high officials of trades unions, as well as quite a few of their family members. If in power, the Right would be just as bad.

A view downriver to the Torre Pelli skyscraper

I then cross the river, going over Santiago Calatrava's spectacular Alamillo Bridge to what used to be the Expo '92 International Exhibition which celebrated the fifth centenary of the Discovery of the Americas - yet another opportunity for the politicians, their families and friends to grab money from the State with the complicity of the government of the time. To be scrupulously fair, however,it must be said that lorryloads of the marble that entered the Expo site for use there found its way into hundreds of bathrooms and kitchens in the city of Seville. Everyone involved had their share of the cake, not just the politicoes. I think I'm not mistaken in stating that the final Expo audits, like the EU's annual budgets, have yet be signed off by the corresponding Courts of Auditors.

In its day, the bridge caused a furore among the more narrow-minded Sevilian traditionalists because the height if its arm meant that it, not the cathedral belltower, was the first thing seen by people arriving in Seville from the North. Now they moan about the Torre Pelli which I mentioned in a previous post. 

Two views of the bridge: one from the bridge deck looking towards the backwards-leaning mast and the other taken from behind the mast itself. there is a widespread view among structural engineers that the roadway is self-supporting and that the mast and stays are there for show only. Still, it is rather pretty. Originally there were going to be two such bridges spanning two separate arms of the Guadalquivir, but the money ran out - or found its way into politicans' pockets faster than it could be spent on the two bridges - so the second bridge, connected to the Alamillo by a breathtaking causeway (see the photo below) is a more humdrum box bridge

The causeway. in the distance you can see a white mast leaning away
from the structure. There is one on either side, recalling the mast of
the Alamillo bridge itself.

Municipal allotments - but how are they allotted?

Once over the bridge, my stroll takes me past some allotments among the orange groves that the Expo left untouched. Apparently, to get one you need to have friends in certain places.

And finally it's on towards one of the two centres where I give my classes before getting into my car and escaping from Seville and its monuments to institutionalised corruption.

When I started to write this entry, I was just going to write a brief, bland commentary on the photos, but as I started, I realised that at almost every turn I could make a comment on corruption - a sorry state of affairs indeed.