The day before I arrive in Seville, a bronze decorative urn falls from the top of La Giralda, the famous tower – part 12th-century minaret and part Renaissance campanile, that looms over the city’s huge Gothic cathedral. Dislodged by the storms that lashed Andalusia earlier in the year, the lily-shaped urn, representing the purity of the Virgin Mary, fell 300ft and smashed into the Plaza Virgen de Los Reyes below.
Portentous? Perhaps, but such signs feel appropriate when you’re on the trail, as I am, of an artist as devout, brilliant and downright strange as Francisco de Zurbarán. The 17th-century painter and adopted son of Seville, who specialised in visions of monks and martyrs floating out of spectral fog, has a major new show at London’s National Gallery opening in May and, to mark it, I’m squeezing in a mini-pilgrimage through Spain’s bottom left corner.
Happily, the falling urn didn’t injure anyone, but when I arrive near the scene, conscious that there are three more up there, I hurry past the flamenco dancers who have gathered around the plaza’s fountain and go into the cathedral. Here I find the chapel of San Pedro, where, above the altar, hangs one of Zurbarán’s Immaculate Conceptions. The ascendant Virgin Mary, swathed in a glowing salmon pink robe and dark green cloak and surrounded by clouds of cherubim, floats over a cityscape of Seville as it was in 1630. “Wow,” seems to be the only suitable response.
There will be other enrapturing Zurbaran canvases at the National Gallery but there is a giddy pleasure in encountering his works where they were conceived and executed.
Later, by the Guadalquivir River, I find one of the buildings portrayed in the cathedral’s Immaculate Conception, the 13th-century Torre del Oro, built during the Almohad Caliphate. Then, at the Museum of Fine Arts on Seville’s Plaza del Museo, I’m pulled up short by a Zurbarán crucifixion. The painter, whose father was a cloth merchant, seems as concerned with the folds of the white loincloth as Christ’s suffering. Four hundred years ago, this gallery was the mother house for the Mercedarian religious order, and now I am able to walk through cloisters where Zurbaran’s paintings of their martyrs, now in the upstairs galleries, once hung on the walls. Packed with masterpieces and only €1.50 (£1.30) for entry, it is a calming, contemplative space in a city that has recently navigated deluges, super-heated summers and mass tourism. Despite all this, Seville remains itself: there are still shellfish bars with a couple of beer pumps and an apparently unending supply of prawns, which is just what I find at the Cervicia la Mar de Frescuita on Calle San Eloy in the Casco Antiqua district to the east of the Guadalquivir.
Nearby in the bar of the historic and rather fabulous Hotel Colon they serve sherry Bloody Marys, a pokey twist on the region’s famous fortified wine. The guest suites are themed around Spanish Golden Age painters though, rather than a Zurbarán, a dwarf from Velázquez’s Las Meninas is reproduced on my door.
I breakfast under the hotel’s 1920s stained-glass skylight featuring orange trees and then find the real thing in abundance at the monastery of Santa Maria de la Defension near Jerez de la Frontera. An hour’s drive across the open Andalucian plain, this is where Zurbarán painted a series of works for one of the lost wonders of Spanish Baroque art, a floor-to-ceiling altarpiece of gold-gilded wood. Leaving the plain and coming up into rolling downland, the first sight of the monastery is an immense baroque facade of columns and pinnacles, studded with stone figures of Carthusian saints.
Inside, I walk through a succession of interlinked cloisters, hidden gardens and chapels that were used as barracks by Napoleon’s troops during the Peninsula war, when at least one work on a panel by Zurbarán was burned as firewood. Now all is quiet, apart from the cry of a hawk and the wind rustling the orange trees. The original altarpiece is lost to history but the secret chapel behind it remains. No wider than a corridor, this is where monks would have come face-to-face in flickering candlelight with more of Zurbarán’s portrayals of Carthusian saints. Today, lighting the way with my mobile, I have a skin-prickling intimation of unseen forces.
Most of Zurbarán’s saints from this chapel survived and are in the Museo de Cadiz, half an hour’s drive away. The city sits on a small section of land bound by water that was once approached by an isthmus, but I drive over at an elevation of 69 metres on the huge La Pepa suspension bridge. From up here, you look across docks and refineries, but come down to earth in the 19th century. The grid of terraces, townhouses and bars and small shops around the Plaza de Mina dates to the 1830’s modernisation of the city. Besides the tropically forested Plaza de Mina, I find the entrance to the Museo de Cadiz and a room full of Zurbarán saints inside. Some of these will be coming to the National Gallery but, wonderful though that establishment is, you can’t, as I do, stand immediately outside in the shade of two Giant Indian Fig trees. Not forgetting, of course, to check for teetering urns above.
The Zurbarán show at the National Gallery will be on from 2 May to 23 August 2026.
Michael’s trip was hosted by the Spanish Tourist Board and the Seville Tourist Board.
How to get there
British Airways operates daily flights to Seville from London Heathrow. Flight time is around three hours.
Where to stay
Hotel Colon, a Gran Melia Hotel is ideally located in Seville’s Old Town with suites themed around Spanish Golden Age painters.
