A magnificently decorated 12th-century Islamic bath, full of bright geometric motifs and eight-pointed star-shaped skylights, has emerged, somewhat unlikely, from the walls and vaulted ceilings of a popular tapas bar in the heart of the southern Spain. city of Seville.
Last summer, the owners of the Cervercería Giralda, which has been pouring canes i cups near the cathedral of Seville since 1923 – decided to take advantage of local living work and the coronavirus pandemic to begin a much delayed renovation.
Although local legend and the strange historical document had suggested that the place might have been an old hammam, most people had assumed that the retro look of the Giralda was unique to the neomudejar, or Islamic renaissance style, in which architect Vicente Traver built the bar and hotel on top in the early 1920s.
“There was talk that there were bathrooms here, but not all historians were convinced and some thought everything would be much later,” said Antonio Castro, one of the four co-owners of the Giralda. “We were doing some work and got an archaeologist in, and that’s how the bathrooms were discovered.”
The archaeologist, Álvaro Jiménez, knew of the rumors. But, like many others, he had always imagined them to be fanciful. One day last July, however, the team was gently opening through the plaster covering the roof when it discovered an eight-pointed star-shaped skylight.
“As soon as we saw one of the skylights, we knew what it was; it just couldn’t be anything more than a bathroom, ”Jiménez said. “We just had to follow the pattern of the skylights.”
His explorations soon uncovered an exquisite piece of design dating back to the 12th century, when the Almohad caliphate ruled much of what is now Spain and Portugal, as well as a large strip of North Africa.
“Decoratively speaking, these baths have the greatest amount of preserved decoration of any of the known baths on the Iberian Peninsula,” the archaeologist said.
“Everything here is absolutely decorated and, fortunately, it has survived. The background is a white lime mortar engraved with geometric lines, circles and squares. In addition, you have eight-pointed red ocher-colored paintings and eight-petalled multifolithic rosettes. These two designs alternate and intertwine and adapt to the different geometric shapes of the skylight holes. ”
Although a lot of bleach still needs to be cleaned to reveal the red paint underneath, the hammam-cum-bar has already been preserved and repaired and the Giralda needs to be opened once again in two or three weeks.
Jiménez, who described the “kind of fateful alignment of different things,” said the bathrooms and bar “have been reborn and have become something wonderful; they were the right people, the right time, and a little bit of sort ”.
Castro and his partners are waiting for a new chapter in the long history of the Giralda. But they also toast to Vicente Traver’s foresight.
“It used to be a pretty well-known bar, but now people will be able to come in and have a beer or a glass of wine in a bar that is also a 12th-century hammam,” Castro said. “It’s good that the architect of the 1920s respected the bathrooms; it’s possible that others would have done it all, so we’re grateful to him.”