Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Built for the 1929 World's Fair, the Ibero-American Exposition, and including the extravagant pavilion for Spain, the Plaza de España, the Parque María Luisa is one of the most gracious parks in Andalusia, Spain or, come to that, Europe. Its name comes from the Bourbon princess who donated much of the grounds of the Palacio de San Telmo to the city in 1893, though the park's current appearance is due to its landscaping for the 1929 Expo, which is why paths and avenues criss-cross .it, meeting at plazas, ponds and fountains, providing endless alternative routes around it, on foot, on bicycle or, a Seville tourism favourite, by horse-and-carriage.

Take a quick look at a street map of Seville and you immediately see that the Parque Maria Luisa takes up a big chunk of the south of the city. And it is really big, 400,000 square metres planted with exotic species of trees, bushes and flowers. As well as the Plaza España, buildings in the park include the Museo de Artes y Costumbres or Popular Arts and Customs Museum (originally the Mudéjar Pavilion), and the Archaeological Museum (originally the Renaissance Pavilion).

The Plaza de España is a semi-circle 200 m across, the curve of which is lined by buildings, behind a canal crossed by four bridges, representing the four original Spanish kingdoms (Castile, Leon, Aragón and Navarre). Its shape represents Spain embracing its colonies, which is why it looks towards the River Guadalquivir, the way to the Americas (there is much more of this symbological stuff, but I'll spare you more). It is a real, solid structure with perfectly functional buildings, now occupied in fact by the Spanish government's representation in Andalusia and by offices of the Spanish Armed Forces, but the plaza as a whole has an unreal, theme-park feel to it, and it is no surprise to find that it has been used as a film set, most notably in Lawrence of Arabia and in the Star Wars movie Attack of the Clones. It can be visited by day (until 10.00 pm) or admired at night, when the controversial (not part of the original design) fountain in the middle of the plaza is lit up.