The Alcázar sells out first. Then Seville starts.
Which palace ticket actually skips the queue. What a Córdoba day costs from the Santa Justa platform. Whether the tablao with dinner is worth twice the tablao without. Reviews of every tour you can book in Seville and the province around it.
A palace, a tablao, a tapas counter, and one day out of the city.
The four bookings a first Seville trip is built around. What each one costs, and what the travellers who took it say.
01The first morningRoyal Alcázar Entry TicketThe Mudéjar palace and its tiled courtyards. Entry runs on timed slots and the cool early ones go weeks ahead.
02The eveningLive Flamenco Dancing Show Ticket at the TheaterNinety minutes of live cante, guitar and heel work in a theatre, not a hotel lounge with a set menu.
03Dinner, walkedThe Seville Tapas Crawl Tour by Food Lover TourSix or seven counters across Santa Cruz and the Alameda, eaten standing up the way the city actually eats.
04The day outPueblos Blancos and Ronda Full-Day TripRonda on its gorge, Setenil built in under the rock, and the white villages strung between them.
Seville: the Alcázar before ten, the cathedral after.
Everything in Seville →
The palace and the cathedral stand ten minutes apart and both run on timed entry, so the order is decided before you land. Take the Alcázar first, while the courtyards are still cool and the coach groups are still at breakfast, then climb the Giralda when the light comes round.
Plain entry, or a guide through the Mudéjar rooms
The bare ticket opens the courtyards and the gardens. A guide is what explains why a Christian king had Muslim craftsmen build him a palace with Arabic inscriptions across the walls, and gets you through the Salón de Embajadores without reading a placard.
The Giralda climb, and what the ticket covers
The tower went up as a minaret, so it climbs on thirty-five ramps wide enough to ride a horse up. The combined ticket adds the Patio de los Naranjos and the Salvador church a few streets north.
The Mezquita, forty minutes up the line
Hundreds of columns under double tiers of red and white arches, with a Renaissance cathedral standing inside them. Fast trains from Santa Justa make it a morning out and back in time for dinner.
Seville first, then the four cities its trains reach by lunch.
A Mudéjar palace and the largest Gothic cathedral standing, a mosque with a cathedral inside it an hour up the line, sherry cellars and dancing horses, an Atlantic city on a sandbar, and a town split down the middle by a gorge.
The days out Seville books more than any other.
The full catalogue →More travellers take these than anything else in the city or the province, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Royal Alcázar Entry Ticket
Explore Seville’s Royal Alcázar with a timed entry ticket, Moorish palace rooms, vast gardens, tiled courtyards, and Game of Thrones locations.
From · $23
Read our review →2
Cathedral and La Giralda Entry Ticket
from $20
3
Live Flamenco Dancing Show Ticket at the Theater
from $27
4
Casa de la Memoria Flamenco Show
from $28
5
1-Hour Guadalquivir River Sightseeing Eco Cruise
from $19
6
Skip-the-Ticket-Line Mosque-Cathedral Guided Tour
from $31
7
Cathedral, Giralda, and Royal Alcázar Guided Tour
from $69
8
Setas de Sevilla Entry Ticket
from $18
Flamenco in Seville is a small room and a hard floor.
The city did not invent it, but it built the tablaos, and Triana across the water raised half the singers. A real show runs an hour and a half with no microphone and no clapping along. The dinner shows on the tourist strip are a different thing, and they are priced like one.
Córdoba is forty minutes up the line and a different century.
The Mezquita is the reason to go and the Judería is the reason to stay past lunch. Come in the first half of May and the patios open their gates, hung wall to wall with geraniums, and the whole quarter smells of jasmine.
Every Córdoba day out →
Córdoba, Jerez, Cádiz or Ronda. Pick one and do it properly.
Seville is the base almost everyone books from. Four directions out of it, what it costs to board each one, and how long the day really runs door to door.
What a day in Seville actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it charges. Most of the city fits under the price of dinner; the days out of the province are where the money goes.
Palace and cathedral entry, walking tours, tapas counters and the river boat.
The full days out: Córdoba, Ronda and the white villages, Doñana, the Jerez cellars.
Private guides, the crossings to Tangier and Gibraltar, and the once-a-trip splurges.
An hour south the wine turns pale and the horses dance.
Jerez keeps the bodegas, the cool dark naves with barrels signed by whoever passed through, and the Real Escuela where Cartujano stallions perform to an orchestra. Carry on to the coast and Cádiz sits out on its sandbar, three thousand years old and still eating fried fish out of paper.
- 1How the Andalusian Horses Dancefrom $31
- 2Andalusian Horse Dance and Museumsfrom $38
- 3Yeguada de la Cartuja Carthusian Horses Tourfrom $22
Three things that only happen in this corner of Andalusia.
Old towns and cathedrals exist all over Spain. A palace a Catholic king had Moorish craftsmen build for him, a mosque with a cathedral standing inside it, and a school where the horses are the performance do not.
The Real Alcázar
Pedro I pulled down a wing of the old Almohad fortress in the 1360s and had craftsmen from Granada and Toledo build him a palace in their own idiom, Arabic inscriptions and all, while he ruled as a Catholic king. The Patio de las Doncellas is the courtyard everyone photographs. The gardens behind it are where the crowds thin, and the upper royal apartments are still in use, which is why entry to them is capped and ticketed separately.
- 1Royal Alcázar Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 28,378 reviews
- 2Cathedral, Giralda, and Royal Alcázar Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 9,165 reviews
- 3Cathedral, Giralda & Alcazar Entry With Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 8,560 reviews
The Mezquita-Catedral
Hundreds of columns of jasper and granite hold up a double tier of red and white arches, laid out over two centuries from 785. After 1236 the building became a cathedral, and in the sixteenth century a nave was raised straight through the middle of it. Almost nothing was pulled down to make room, so you walk out of the forest of arches into a Renaissance choir and straight back in again.
- 1Skip-the-Ticket-Line Mosque-Cathedral Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 9,634 reviews
- 2Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral: Skip-the-Line Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 6,610 reviews
- 3Jewish Quarter, Mosque, and Alcázar Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 4,279 reviews
How the Andalusian Horses Dance
The Real Escuela Andaluza del Arte Ecuestre trains Cartujano stallions in classical dressage and puts them on for the public on fixed days, in an arena, to eighteenth century music. The horses piaffe and rear on cue and the riders wear period dress. On the days between shows you can watch training instead, which costs less and, some argue, teaches you more.
- 1How the Andalusian Horses Dance★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 6,168 reviews
- 2Andalusian Horse Dance and Museums★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,289 reviews
- 3Yeguada de la Cartuja Carthusian Horses Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 970 reviews
Four Seville bookings that will not wait.
Most of this city can be arranged over breakfast the same morning. These four run on timed slots, two-day-a-week schedules and rooms with forty seats in them.
- 01Royal Alcázar Entry TicketEntry runs on timed slots with a hard cap on each one. The cool early slots go weeks ahead, and there is no queue to join once they are gone.
- 02Cathedral and La Giralda Entry TicketThe cathedral sells timed entry as well, and the tower shuts to visitors during services and on feast days.
- 03How the Andalusian Horses DanceThe Jerez school performs on a fixed two-day-a-week schedule. Arrive on the wrong day and you are watching training through a rail.
- 04Skip-the-Ticket-Line Mosque-Cathedral Guided TourCórdoba caps entry by the half hour and the free early morning slot fills first. The guided tickets are the reliable way in on a summer weekend.
From June the city hands the afternoon back to the sun.
Forty-plus is an ordinary July reading here and the stone holds the heat until midnight. Sevillanos deal with it by splitting the day: out early, indoors from two, out again at nine. Book the same way. Courtyards and the river in the morning, something shaded in the middle, everything else after dark.
Tapas here is a way of standing, not a portion size.
You order at the counter, you eat it there, you settle up and move on to the next one. A guided crawl earns its price once, for the bars you would have walked straight past and for someone to explain why the sherry poured in Seville is not the sherry poured in Jerez.
Seville, Itálica, Córdoba, Jerez, Cádiz: the run almost everybody does first.
Seville
Itálica
By kind of day: palace, tablao, bodega or road
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