Seville

I spent several days in Seville last month. Among Spain’s larger cities, Seville is the place that I knew least well (I did spend a few hours walking around the city in 2010).

Like just about every other city in Western Europe, Seville has been putting a good deal of energy in the last few decades into encouraging alternatives to the automobile, but, like some other mid-sized cities (the Seville urban area has a population of approximately 1.5 million), it hasn’t gone as far in this direction as a few larger (and more congested) places. It was interesting to see what’s been accomplished—and what remains to be done.

Map of Seville and vicinity emphasizing rail transit lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:50,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. Note that the bicycle routes along waterways are typically open to pedestrians too.

Seville does, for example, have a Metro (which opened in 2009), but it’s a single 18-km line, using CAF light-rail rolling stock. The line is fully grade-separated; it’s mostly underground; and it has platform doors and good electric signage in both the stations and inside the cars. The trains I was on were pretty full—but the line (on weekends) was only running single-car trains with 15-minute headways. (Headways are shorter on weekdays.) Seville’s Metro carried approximately 56,000 passengers a day in 2023, up from a pre-Pandemic high of 44,000.¹ It is, in other words, one of the few metros in the world with higher passenger loads in recent times than it had pre-Pandemic. But 56,000 passengers is arguably not an enormous figure in a European urban area of Seville’s size. There is a general sense that Seville has been somewhat backward when it comes to rail transportation.² A second line—confusingly, Line 3—is under construction.

The San Bernardo station of Seville’s Metro.

Inside one of the Seville Metro’s cars.

In addition to the Metro, there is a short tram line, which makes it a little further into the Casco Antiguo—the city’s historic center—than the Metro. The tram line is in the process of being extended to the (main) Santa Justa train station, which the Metro misses by more than a kilometer.

The city has also built an impressive network of sidewalk bicycle lanes. Its post-World-War-II districts tend to have wide streets and wide sidewalks, so there is definitely room for these. Most of the users I saw on Seville’s bike lanes were driving scooters, however, not riding bicycles.

Sidewalk bicycle path along Avenida Eduardo Dato.

In addition, there are numerous pedestrian and bicycle paths along some of the city’s waterways. There is a bit of a story here. Seville owes its Age-of-Discovery importance to its location on the Guadalquivir River, which was then easily navigable to the Mediterranean. ³ Like many of the world’s other rivers, the Guadalquivir in its natural state sometimes flooded, causing an enormous amount of damage. Starting in the late 19th century, Seville’s administrators gradually altered the Guadalquivir’s once winding course so that it would flow straight (more or less north-to-south) well west of the historic city. A new water body, essentially a lake separated from the Guadalquivir by a substantial lock, was created at the edge of the city; it incorporated parts of the former course of the Guadalquivir as well as entirely man-made sections. It’s known as the Dársena of the Guadalquivir, or the Canal de Alfonso XIII. There are now walking/bicycling paths along parts of both the Dársena of the Guadalquivir and (less often) the river itself. They’re not continuous and, in places, are paved with cobblestones that look great but are not ideal for movement on foot or by bicycle. These paths get quite a bit of use despite their limitations.

One of the newer sections of the pedestrian/bicycle path along the Dársena of the Guadalquivir (the Canal de Alfonso XIII).

One of the cobblestone sections of the pedestrian/bicycle path along the Dársena of the Guadalquivir (the Canal de Alfonso XIII). The building in the mid-background is the 13th-century Torre del Oro.

Seville’s most striking feature may be its huge historic center, the Casco Antiguo. Some of the street layout here (and some bits of a few buildings) date back to Seville’s status as an important city (and sometimes the capital) of Muslim al-Andalus. More of the morphology of Seville’s Casco Antiguo dates to the city’s status as the chief port from which Spain sent ships to the New World during the “Age of Discovery.” Seville during this period eventually became one of Europe’s largest cities.⁴ Age-of-Discovery Seville corresponds roughly to today’s oval-shaped Casco Antiguo, which is roughly 3 km north-south and 2 km east-west. This doesn’t sound large, but it’s one of the largest spaces in Europe where narrow, irregular streets have survived into modern times—and where there have hardly been any Haussmannian “piercings.” The Casco Antiguo is still densely populated. Gentrification has to some degree reversed a 20th-century decline in population. ⁵ It’s also the center of Seville’s prosperous tourist industry.

The Casco Antiguo, with its narrow, irregular streets, is a pretty awkward place for automobiles. But automobile drivers in the years after World War II nonetheless insisted on accessing the district on a large scale, polluting the air and making life for pedestrians increasingly difficult.

A narrow street and a much much narrower sidewalk in Seville’s Casco Antiguo.

Spain on average has Europe’s densest cities. Many Spanish cities have historic quarters that are as dense as (if smaller than) Seville’s. A common response has been to pedestrianize most streets. In one case—Pontevedra in Galicia—cars have been nearly eliminated from the historic center. Seville for all sorts of reasons—perhaps above all the sheer size of the Casco Antiguo—has had a great deal of difficulty in following the lead of other cities here. Instead, it’s built several underground garages in the Casco Antiguo’s plazas. These, of course do very little to reduce traffic; they actually encourage and legitimize it. There have been constant discussions over the last several decades about what else to do.⁶ In the end, there has been a good deal of pedestrianization, particularly in the southern (more touristed) parts of the Casco Antiguo. Many streets have also been declared “pedestrian priority,” but, as elsewhere, this works awkwardly. Pedestrians inevitably feel they have no choice but to scatter when a car comes down these streets.

Pedestrianized street in the Casco Antiguo.

One problem is that it’s been difficult, owing in part to the extreme complication of the street geometry and also to residents’ insistence on using cars near their homes, to create continuous pedestrian corridors. This is an intractable problem that most definitely hasn’t been solved. There’s a similar but less severe issue in the quarters just north of and just across the Dársena from the Casco Antiguo, which are also characterized by narrow, irregular streets and where there simply isn’t enough space for automobiles and pedestrians to coexist safely. Here too, there’s been a certain amount of, well, patchy pedestrianization.

In other words, while Seville, like other Western European urban areas, has pushed back a little against the automobile during the last two or three decades, it has resisted moving as far in this direction as some of its counterparts elsewhere.