The Real Alcázar of Seville is a royal palace still in use: when the Spanish royal family is in Seville, this is where they stay. And it is not what it seems. The openwork arches, the Arabic inscriptions and the carved wooden doors of its finest palace were not commissioned by a sultan but by a Christian king, Pedro I of Castile, with craftsmen brought from Toledo, from Granada and from Seville itself.
On the official website entry costs 15.50 euros, and anyone born or living in Seville gets in free. The upper floor, the Cuarto Real Alto, is paid for separately. In winter the official hours end at 17:00, so plan the visit for the morning or early afternoon.
Why would a Christian king build himself a palace that speaks Arabic?
Palaces built one inside another
The Alcázar is not a single building but a group of palaces from different periods, enclosed within the same walls. The oldest enclosure dates from the eleventh century, in the area of today’s Patio de Banderas.
You go in through the Puerta del León, the Lion Gate, named after the lion above the arch: it was a painting, and in 1892 it was replaced by the tile panel you see today. The name probably dates from the nineteenth century, and before that it was the Montería gate. After the Castilian conquest of 1248 the Christian court settled for decades in the Almohad buildings; between 1252 and 1260 Alfonso X also built the Gothic palace here.
In 1503 the Catholic Monarchs set up the Casa de Contratación here, the office that regulated trade and shipping with the Americas. Its rooms looked onto the Patio de la Montería, the courtyard from which you enter the palace of Pedro I.
The palace of Pedro I
The palace of Pedro I closes off the Patio de la Montería with its façade. The king had it built next to the Gothic palace of Alfonso X, as his private residence, and work was finished around 1364, the date you can read on the doors of the Salón de Embajadores.
From the fourteenth century the kings of Castile stopped copying European models and began to look to those of al-Andalus, Islamic Spain. Pedro I went all the way: on the walls of his palace he had his own praises written in Arabic.
The Patio de las Doncellas
The main courtyard is the Patio de las Doncellas, the Court of the Maidens: a rectangle of 21 by 15 metres, enclosed by four galleries of openwork arches.
Look at the middle of the courtyard: the pool and the two sunken gardens on either side are medieval, but for more than four centuries nobody saw them. Between 1580 and 1584 they were filled in and covered with a marble floor, and they came back to light in the excavations of 2002.
Now look up. The upper floor belongs to another age: it was rebuilt between 1540 and 1572, with round arches on marble columns carved in Genoa. Two centuries, one above the other, in the same courtyard. In 2024 this courtyard also appeared on Spain’s 2-euro coins.
The Salón de Embajadores
What is above your head, in the most sumptuous room of the palace?
A golden dome, a half sphere, which the Spanish call a media naranja, a half orange. Diego Ruiz made it in 1427, more than sixty years after the palace. Beneath the dome runs a frieze of portraits of the kings.
The doors of the hall, of carved wood, are fourteenth-century: on the outside they carry Arabic inscriptions praising the lord of the palace, on the inside a psalm and the opening of the Gospel of John in Latin.
The Patio de las Muñecas
Why is a courtyard called “of the dolls”?
Nobody knows for certain. In 1637 the historian Rodrigo Caro thought it might be where children were brought up, or that the name came from its small size. Today it is thought to come from the little girls’ faces carved where some of the arches begin: look for them.
It was probably the part of the palace reserved for the queen. In the room off the north gallery, on 30 June 1478, Isabella of Castile gave birth to Prince Juan, the son of the Catholic Monarchs: that is why it is called the Cuarto del Príncipe.
The Baths of María de Padilla and the gardens
Beneath the Patio del Crucero lies a vaulted twelfth-century gallery, full of water: the Baños de Doña María de Padilla. You reach it from the Garden of the Dance.
In the gardens, look for the Pavilion of Charles V, built between 1543 and 1546: inside and out, down to the benches, it is covered in sixteenth-century tiles.
Practical information
Details checked on 29 October 2026 on the official website, alcazarsevilla.org. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
The palace is next to the cathedral and the Giralda, which you can see on the same day: the cathedral opens at 11:00, and on Sundays only in the afternoon. For a late fifteenth-century noble house in Seville, Gothic and Mudéjar, there is the Palacio de las Dueñas. And for the Nasrid palaces of the city some of his craftsmen came from, the Alhambra in Granada.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons: the Patio de las Doncellas, by Benjamin Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0; the façade of the palace of Pedro I, by Jl FilpoC, CC BY 4.0; the dome of the Salón de Embajadores, by Alvesgaspar, CC BY-SA 4.0; the Patio de las Muñecas and the Baños de Doña María de Padilla, by Alberto.Bravo, CC BY-SA 4.0; the Puerta del León, by José Luis Filpo Cabana, CC BY 4.0.
