Seville

Seville is built against the sun, and once you have seen that, the city explains itself. The lanes of the old quarters run narrow and crooked for shade rather than for charm. Houses turn their backs on the street and open instead onto a patio with a fountain or a well in the middle of it. Awnings go up over the shopping streets in summer, the afternoon empties out, and the place comes back after dark with the paving still warm underfoot. Andalusian heat is the organising fact here, and the architecture, the eating hours and the calendar are all answers to it.

Three cities in one walk

The monumental core is the first of them: a cathedral of enormous scale, a bell tower that began life as a minaret and was finished by Christians who liked it too much to pull it down, and beside them a royal palace whose courtyards were built by Muslim craftsmen for Castilian kings. That Mudéjar idea — Islamic craft working under Christian patronage — is the thread that runs through the city's best rooms.

East of the cathedral, the old Jewish quarter is a knot of whitewashed lanes, orange trees and small squares that were laid out before anyone thought about carriages. It photographs well and it is crowded accordingly; go early, or go at ten at night when the tour groups have gone and the residents are out.

Across the river, Triana has the ceramic workshops, the flamenco lineage and a different temperament altogether. Sevillanos will tell you it is a separate place, and the bridge across takes a few minutes.

When to come

Spring is the honest answer, with a large caveat attached. March, April and May give warm days, cool evenings and the orange blossom that the city smells of for a few weeks; October gives much the same weather from the other direction with the crowds thinned. Summer is severe rather than merely hot, and the sensible response to it is the local one: mornings, a long pause, and everything else after nine at night.

The caveat is the calendar. Holy Week and the spring fair fall within weeks of each other and turn the city into something else entirely — magnificent if you have come for them, exhausting if you have not. Rooms go months ahead and rates follow. Couples who want the city rather than the spectacle should aim at October, or late March on a weekday.

Is it expensive?

Less so than the big European capitals, and the gap is real rather than marginal. Eating and drinking are conspicuously good value if you eat standing up and in the places that are busy at the local hour rather than the visiting one. Where money goes is position and timing: a room inside the monumental core during the spring festivals is a scarce thing, sold as one.

What brings the bill down is walking. The old city is flat and compact, taxis are mostly unnecessary, and much of what makes an evening here — the lanes after dark, the bridges, the riverside, a square with a band in it — charges nothing at all.

What is worth paying for

Early or late access to the royal palace, which changes the visit completely; an hour of flamenco in a small room rather than a dinner show with a set menu; a rooftop with a view of the tower at sunset, where the drink is the ticket price and worth it. Beyond that, Seville rewards wandering more than it rewards booking.

Where to stay

Splurge

A converted palace house inside the old quarters, with a columned patio, a roof terrace and rooms arranged around the courtyard rather than a corridor. This is the version of the city people come for, and it is priced for the address and the silence behind the door. Right for travellers who want to walk everywhere and come back to somewhere cool at three in the afternoon.

Mid-range

A townhouse hotel a few streets outside the tightest lanes, with a patio, a small pool or a terrace, and a five-minute walk to the cathedral. You give up the postcard address and keep the position, the quiet and usually a considerably better room for the money. Most people should start here.

Good value

A family-run place in Triana or in the modern streets north of the centre, where rates ease markedly and the walk over the bridge becomes part of the day. Space improves, breakfast is a café rather than a buffet, and you sleep among people who live here.

The city at a glance

Availability tightens hard around the spring festivals and eases again by autumn, so comparing current stay and experience options across your dates is worth doing before you fix anything else.