The Alcázar -- Seville's time capsule

This morning we visited the Alcázar.  It was, I believe, my 4th visit to this incredible palace / garden.  Since at this point I could probably give a pretty good tour myself, I thought I'd post some pictures and give a bit of an explanation of the place.

The Alcázar is the only European palace that was a royal palace in antiquity and continues to be one today.  The Alcázar's history starts back in Roman times (you can actually see some ancient foundation stones upon entering the palace.)

But the truly visible history begins with the Moors.  Seville was an important capital of Al Andaluz.  So it was only natural that palace and a mosque be constructed in the center of the city.  Parts of both the mosque and the palace are still around today, but christian royalty mostly tore them down in order to build a cathedral and a christian palace (the Alcázar) during the Reconquista.

So here's what remains of the moorish palace:

This wall is old...seriously old.  It's made of brick and stone -- a combination that was very common in moorish architecture.

This patio is directly outside of what was essentially an office. 

The arches are decorated with plaster (which was imprinted with intricate design molds while still wet.)

The rest of the moorish palace was, as I mentioned above, torn down.  But, interestingly enough, when the Christian royalty decided to create their own palace in the same place, they also decided to recreate almost exactly the moorish style of architecture and design...they also used Muslim workers.  This copycat architecture was very fashionable at the time and is called Mudejar.

You can see how similar the christian palace (built 2 centuries later) is to the original moorish palace.  Arches, tiles, and molded plaster are found throughout:

yea, that's a peacock.

The differences are most noticeable in the presence of portraits of christian kings and architectural details like this gold leaf covered ceiling dome:

There are moorish-inspired tiles all over the christian palace...but many reflect the fact that they were created for christian spanish royalty, specifically the royalty of Castilla y León (the emblems of which were a castle and a lion)