Sevilla is a beautiful old city with an interesting history. After the discovery of the Americas, it was the main hub of trans-oceanic trade and became an economic juggernaut. The first circumnavigation of the globe originated from Sevilla lead by Ferdinand Magellan. These facts seem strange because of how far from the coast Sevilla is.
Years before this visit to Sevilla, I had taken a trip here with friends. That's probably one of the main reasons why I have so few photos of this visit. This post is going to be short on photos, but long on distance covered.
In this post I'll cover the journey that my mom and I made from Ericeira Portugal to Tarifa Spain. We both had flights leaving Morocco in a week or two and had a lot of ground to cover to catch them.
My mom and I had met in Lisbon and visited Sintra. After a nice couple of days in that area, we drove our rental car down to Faro where we returned it. I don't remember much about the drive down other than enjoying the drive through Portugal with my mom.
After returning the rental car, we caught a bus to Sevilla Spain. In Sevilla, we rented an Air BnB for two nights, then we took another bus down to Tarifa. Since I've already made a post about Tarifa, I'm not going to make a new one about it. In Tarifa, we caught a boat to Morocco.
We arrived in Sevilla near the end of the day. It had been a long day of traveling. After we found our rooms, we rested up a little bit then walked down to a nearby square and found some dinner.
We had tapas at a nice little sidewalk restaurant. I had gazpacho for the first time and wasn't into it. It's literally just cold tomato soup. Not room-temperature soup, refrigerated cold soup. It wasn't spiced or anything, just cold soup like they got a can out of the refrigerator and put it in a bowl. Something about that just seems wrong to me.
One thing that that was awesome about the gazpacho was that this restaurant put pop-rocks on in! Pop-rocks are a candy that pops in your mouth when you eat it. It was such a weird thing to put on a soup, I've never seen anything like it before. So even though I wasn't into the soup, the pop-rocks made it fun.
After eating and enjoying the relaxing view of the city square, we went back to our rooms and turned in for the night.
The next day we had breakfast at our apartment and made friends with the property owner's dog. Our one full day in Sevilla wouldn't be very exciting. We had some logistics to take care of so the day was mostly filled with taking care of business. We had to secure our transportation down to Tarifa, and we had to buy our boat tickets to Africa.
We did see some of the sights in Seville, but I was being lazy with my camera. I think part of it was that I had just spent 5-6 months touring Europe and everything in Europe was starting to look like things I'd already taken photos of.
The Catedral de Sevilla was definitely impressive. The statues built into the walls reminded me of the cathedral in Zagreb.
After we got our tickets to Tarifa and Morocco, we stopped at a sidewalk cafe for lunch.
Some sort of protest or unity march went by as we were there. I think it was a union show of force. They weren't very disruptive or remarkable.
We wandered around Sevilla for a few more hours and enjoyed the city. It's definitely a pretty place and I wish I had spent some time here when I was traveling at a slower pace. I had skipped it because I'd already been here, but there was a lot that I'd missed on my first visit a few years before.
That night we found a nice place on the sidewalk for dinner and drinks. I skipped the gazpacho and had normal food. After dinner we returned to our rooms and rested up for the trip down to Tarifa.
We had a nice bus ride down to Tarfia and explored the town a little bit. I loved Tarifa on my first visit, and I still loved it this second time. It was fun to be able to show my mom one of the places that I'd already been to. She had seen my photos on Facebook during my first visit, and now she was getting to see it for herself. Across the water we could see Africa clearly.
We explored the old town area of Tarifa and checked out the beach. Lots of kite surfers were out doing their thing.
We enjoyed our evening in Tarfia. The next day we boarded the boat and headed to a place that would be completely new to both of us. Morocco wasn't on my list of places that I expected to visit in my travels, but my mom wanted to go and it sounded like a fun adventure.
That's where I'm going to end this post. It doesn't have as many photos as I'd like, but we had a fun time making our way down to the southern end of Europe. I hope you'll join us tomorrow as we visit a completely new city and a completely new continent!
Photo Source: The two photos of me were taken from my mom's Facebook page. The others are mine.