Castle of San Jorge

The Visigoths created a fortification in the area beside the river to defend Spalis, their name for Seville. The medieval fortress that stood on the west bank of the Guadalquivir there was called the Castle of Gabir, and its defensive complex was the castle itself, shielded by a wall carrying ten towers, a moat and a barbican.

In 1171, under Almohad rule, Abu Yaacub Yusuf, caliph in Isbilia and the ruler who made the city the capital of his empire, ordered a floating bridge built at that stretch of the river. The Puente de Barcas was laid across a line of boats to join the east and west shores, and the chains that held it rigid ran to the Castle of Gabir. The same year the caliph spent an immense sum on works that brought water into the city, and he ordered the building of the Alcázar, the Buhaira palace and the fortress of Alcalá de Guadaíra. He was defeated by Afonso I of Portugal at the siege of Santarém in 1184, and died there.

Ferdinand III of Castile, with the help of the fleet of Ramón de Bonifaz, broke the chains and with them the barrier of the bridge, and that helped him take the city in 1248. From the conquest until 1280 the castle belonged to the Military Order of Saint George of Alfama, patron of knights and soldiers.

In 1400 the Order of Saint George of Alfama disappeared and was absorbed into the powerful Order of Montesa. That, together with the castle's steadily diminishing importance as a defensive element, is why the second half of the fifteenth century found the Castle of San Jorge in a period of neglect.

The abandoned castle was delivered in 1481 to the newly created Inquisition, which used it as headquarters and prison. It was not the only building the Inquisition held in Seville for that purpose: from the beginning of the sixteenth century it also kept a "perpetual prison" in rented premises close to the Church of the Salvador, on Calle Azofaifo, in a property belonging to Elvira de Zúñiga y de Guzmán.

According to Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine artist Pietro Torrigiano was arrested by the Inquisition and died in the Castle of San Jorge in 1522 in a kind of hunger strike, though it is possible that the story is apocryphal.

The Inquisition left the castle in 1626, its walls having gone on deteriorating under the heavy flooding of the river.

After the Inquisition withdrew, the castle passed to the Count-Duke of Olivares, who took charge of its repairs and upkeep and of the surveillance of goods carried to its doorstep. In 1639 it returned to the Inquisition, which held it until its definitive departure in 1785. The Colegio de las Becas then occupied the site.

The castle was later given to the city, and between 1800 and 1803 the municipality demolished it. The clearance opened a widened way from the Plaza del Altozano through to Calle Castilla, and a new street named for San Jorge was laid out.

In 1805 Beethoven premiered Fidelio, an opera set in a Sevillian prison holding prisoners of conscience in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The composer named no building in the text, but it is very likely the Castle of San Jorge he meant.

In 1823 the Mercado de Triana was built on the castle's plot, and the food market has stayed in operation ever since, through successive reworkings. Numerous archaeological excavations were carried out beneath it, and they concluded that the remains should be put on museum display. In 2009 Seville City Hall inaugurated the Castillo de San Jorge project, an interpretation centre for the ruins and for the religious repression the Spanish Inquisition conducted.

Beside the market runs the Callejón de la Inquisición, the Alley of the Inquisition, once part of the fortifications and now linking Calle Castilla with the Paseo de Nuestra Señora de la O in the Barrio de Triana. Seville has more recently drawn the castle into its Sevilla, Ciudad de Ópera initiative, which has put the site on tours of the city's operatic heritage and placed a commemorative plaque there. The remains are protected as a bien de interés cultural, a designation recorded in 1985 and again in 1993.