Barrio de Santa Cruz, Seville

Santa Cruz is a historic Seville neighborhood built partly across the city’s former Jewish quarter. Its story is unusually visible in the religious buildings around you: the district contains many of Seville’s oldest churches, as well as the Cathedral and the Giralda, a former mosque minaret adapted for Christian use. After Ferdinand III took Seville from Muslim rule, he gathered the city’s Jewish community here; at that time, it was the second-largest Jewish community in the Iberian Peninsula, after Toledo.

The neighborhood later declined following the expulsion of Spain’s Jews in 1492, then underwent major renewal during the eighteenth century. That transformation included turning a former synagogue into the Church of Saint Bartholomew. The plaza bearing Santa Cruz’s name occupies the ground of a demolished parish church, itself built over a synagogue.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was buried in that church, and the present Church of Santa Cruz holds his painting of the Last Supper. The district’s present appearance also reflects an urban redesign carried out around the late 1910s and early 1920s, led chiefly by architect Juan Talavera y Heredia.