Plaza de España

The executive committee of what was then called the Exposición Hispano-Americana was created on 6 November 1910, and on 5 April 1911 it opened a competition for the architectural design of the show, closing entries on 1 September that year. Competitors had to submit schemes for ten pavilions and a large sports ground on the model of the stadium of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and the rectangular track built for the Valencian Regional Exposition of 1909. Two of the pavilions were to be permanent, one for fine arts and one for assorted industries; they became the city's archaeological museum and its museum of arts and popular customs. The scheme was to occupy the ground around the huerto de la Mariana.

The competition was won by the architect Aníbal González, who proposed a series of semicircular, square, mixtilinear and elliptical plazas joined by a main avenue skirting the gardens of the Palacio de San Telmo, gardens given to the city by the Infanta María Luisa and adapted as a park by the French engineer Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier. In 1911 the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría asked that the Royal Pavilion also be made permanent, in acknowledgement of the Crown's collaboration with the exposition. The request was accepted without difficulty, and González set the pavilion in the huerto de la Mariana beside the other two permanent ones, in what he first named the Plaza de Honor and later the Plaza de América, moving the stadium to a new site to the north-east. At a meeting on 16 May 1913 the committee approved that siting and the stadium's transfer to the huerta del Carmen, on land of the Junta de Obras del Puerto, which meant postponing its construction. On the ground the stadium was to have taken, a Palacio de Actos y Fiestas was foreseen, in a space named the Plaza de España.

González presented his first design for the plaza on 14 July 1914. He laid it out towards the west, open to the park, with a great central esplanade and a semi-elliptical ría crossed by eight bridges; at the far side stood the Palacio de Actos y Fiestas in the centre with the Industry and Agriculture pavilions to left and right, linked by pergolas set on segments of a circle, and facing the palace's convex front he devised a monumental fountain. The executive committee approved the project on 31 July 1914. Forestier, who had worked on the design of the María Luisa park, rejected the idea of the ría on the grounds that Seville was a city short of water.

González took charge of executing the plaza, working with collaborators including the engineer José Luis de Casso Romero and the architect Aurelio Gómez Millán. Works began in August 1914 with levelling and earth-moving. In 1915 they slowed to the point where only the ría was carried out, and it was decided not to build the structures that would have closed off the entrance to the park at the glorieta de San Diego. On one of his visits to Seville, on 14 December 1915, Alfonso XIII suggested that the Plaza de España be a permanent building that could be used after the show was over.

The definitive project, matching what was eventually built apart from small changes, was drawn by González in 1918, by which time it had been decided that the buildings would serve as a Universidad Obrera, with the school of arts and crafts in the centre and the adjacent side naves given over to teaching workshops. The same scheme set the Aragón and Navarra gates at the centres of the curves, museums at either end and the North and South towers to finish the composition, cut the eight bridges of the earlier design to four, and planned ceramic-clad benches along the outer wall for the 48 Spanish provinces, Seville excepted. Between 1914 and 1920 the work advanced very slowly, with tenders going unfilled because of bricklayers' strikes and rising prices for building materials. In 1919 the ría and its bridges were finished, brick walling went up for the workshops and galleries, and excavation began for the foundations of the North tower. A report by González of April 1920 records the balustrade and the lamps beside the ría as almost complete, and the bench for the province of Córdoba made as a sample. By 1923 the ceramic elements of the central building were being fixed in place, a sign that its exterior was practically finished, but between September 1923 and June 1924 the works fell behind again through their enormous cost and through changes made to give the plaza greater grandeur.

The North and South towers, 70 metres high, rose between 1923 and 1926 against the opposition of the Academia de Bellas Artes, which held that they could rival the Giralda. At the end of 1925, with the delay plain and the completion dates for the exposition works in doubt, Miguel Primo de Rivera moved to force the pace by appointing José Cruz Conde as royal commissioner on 21 December, adding the post of civil governor of Seville to strengthen his powers. In 1926 González resigned his positions at the exposition and left the project, by then closed in all its fundamental elements; his assistant Gómez Millán went with him, and Pedro Sánchez Núñez took over the works still outstanding. By October 1926 the Aragón gate was almost finished and the Navarra gate still lacked its roof.

1927 was the year of the final push. Works that looked finished still required a great many jobs, and that year the projects for metalwork, joinery, fitting out of spaces, wall finishes, exterior work and most of the installations were approved. Activity went on in the same way through 1928, with several buildings by then practically complete: in February the royal commissioner was informed that everything in the central building was done except two salons on the principal floor and their counterparts in the basement storey; by May its painting was finished, and that same month the works direction formally handed it over to the exposition committee. Decoration of the Navarra and Aragón gates continued meanwhile, clearly behind schedule. The first document on the plaza by Vicente Traver, the exposition's new director architect, dates from 10 July 1928 and concerns the ceramic ornament of the benches representing the Spanish provinces.

The cost had run far past its estimate. The budget foreseen in 1914 came to 628,500.70 pesetas; by 1929 it had reached 15,310,365 pesetas, and once other last-minute expenses were added the total passed 17 million. The complex is sometimes dated simply to 1928, though the building record runs from the works of August 1914 through to 1929. On 9 May 1929 the inauguration ceremony of the Ibero-American Exposition was held in the Plaza de España, with Alfonso XIII, Victoria Eugenia and the rest of the authorities present.

From 1917 the intention was that, once the exposition was over, the plaza would house a centre for intermediate vocational training under the name Universidad Obrera. In 1924 there was a proposal to establish a Hispano-American University at Valladolid; it was then suggested that the Palacio de Ciencias y Letras in Seville, designed by González in 1917 for academic teaching, take that university and that the Plaza de España house a Colegio Mayor Hispano-Americano. The project came to nothing. In 1927 the north building of the plaza was adapted so that it could serve as an industrial school.

In 1936 General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano assigned the whole of the plaza to state offices. The barracks of the II Organic Division stood that year at the Plaza de la Gavidia, on the site now occupied by the Andalusian justice department, and in 1937 the region's military command was moved to the central building of the Plaza de España, which became known from then on as the Capitanía General. During the civil war the Jáuregui cinema, the steamship Cabo Carvoeiro, the Lumbreras cinema, the cellars of the Plaza de España and rooms in the naval command building were fitted out as prisons.

The Museo Histórico Militar de Sevilla, entered from one of the galleries, opened to the public on 17 December 1992, and on the side facing the Prado de San Sebastián the military library holds 38,000 works in 450 square metres, 8,299 of them dating from before 1901; there is also a theatre inside the Capitanía General. Since 2005 the central building has held the general headquarters of the Land Force of the Spanish Army, while the South tower houses the Spanish government's delegation in Andalusia and the North tower its sub-delegation in Seville. The Council of Ministers met in the plaza on 26 October 2018.

The balustrades along the ría were originally all of ceramic, with lamps of the same material. In 1946, given their advanced decay, those inside the plaza were replaced with red marble, while the outer front balustrades were kept in ceramic and restored in 2009. A major restoration ended on 17 October 2010 with commemorative acts for the reopening; its beginning is given as 2002 in some accounts and 2007 in others, with Seville city council investing nine million euros in recovering the monument as González had conceived it. The ceramic work was done by the Plaza de España workshop set up by Patrimonio del Estado, the Servicio Andaluz de Empleo and the city council: almost 25 per cent of the tiles on the province benches had to be replaced by replicas, along with 90 per cent of the ceramic bookcases and balustrades, and 20 ceramic lamps were made for the outer balustrade to replace others that had disappeared at an unknown date. The ría stood dry through the works and was waterproofed before being filled again, its water drawn from a well near the South tower and reused to irrigate the María Luisa park. In 2009 Antonio Jaramillo Morilla and Emilio José Mascort Albea, both teaching ground engineering at Seville's school of architecture, published an independent study arguing that the ría had been dug before the plaza was built and that draining it for the restoration had tilted the two towers by 12 and 5 centimetres. Jaramillo held that the ten-metre micropile underpinning carried out on the North tower in 2006 was insufficient, and that waterproofing the ría had been a mistake.

In Lawrence of Arabia (1962) it stood for the headquarters of the British army in Cairo; in The Wind and the Lion (1975), starring Sean Connery, it passed for a Moroccan setting as troops paraded through it; digitally altered, it became the royal palace of the planet Naboo in Attack of the Clones (2002) and the mansion of a dictator in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator (2012); and in the Netflix series Kaos it appears as the palace of Minos. In 2017 the European Film Academy named it a Treasure of European Film Culture, a distinction given to filming locations of symbolic character and great historical value for cinema. Concerts followed: Green Day played there in 2019 when MTV brought its European awards to Seville, and since 2021 the plaza has hosted the annual Iconica festival, with Raphael in its first year and Deep Purple, Scorpions, Tom Jones and Kylie Minogue in the years after.

The buildings and the gallery belong to the central administration and the rest of the plaza to Seville city council. It is protected as a bien de interés cultural, a status dated to January 1981 in some records and to July 2023 in others. From 2023 the staging of events on the site drew criticism for distorting its setting, and that December the council announced it would permit them no longer; there has been criticism too of the progressive deterioration of the surroundings, which a two-year conservation contract signed between the council and a contractor in 2021 did not halt. In February 2024 the mayor of Seville, José Luis Sanz, proposed closing the plaza and charging for entry, the takings to fund a ceramics workshop school that would keep the monument in good order. Closing it required an agreement with the State, which refused.