A beautifully decorated 12th-century Islamic bathhouse, filled with dazzling geometric motifs and skylights in the shape of eight-pointed stars, emerged a little unlikely from the walls and vaulted ceilings of a popular tapas bar in the heart of the South Spanish city of Seville.
Last summer, the owners of the Cervercería Giralda – which dumped canes and copas since 1923 near Seville’s cathedral – decided to use local road works and the coronavirus pandemic to bring about a prolonged overhaul.
Although the local legend and the strange historical document suggested that the site may once have been an ancient hammam, most people assumed that the Giralda’s retro appearance to the neomudéjar, or Islamic revival style, in which architect Vicente Traver built the bar and hotel upstairs in the early 1920s.
“There was talk that there were baths, but not all the historians were convinced, and some thought it would all be later,” said Antonio Castro, one of the four co-owners of the Giralda. “We did work and found an archaeologist, and so the bath was discovered.”
The archaeologist, Álvaro Jiménez, knew about the rumors. But like many others, he always presented them as imaginative. Last July, however, the team gently cut through the plaster that covered the ceiling when they uncovered a skylight in the shape of an eight-pointed star.
‘As soon as we saw one of the skylights, we knew what it was; it could just have been nothing more than a bath, ‘Jiménez said. “We just had to follow the pattern of the skylights.”
Their expedition soon discovered a beautiful design dating back to the 12th century when the Almohad caliphate ruled much of what is now Spain and Portugal, as well as much of North Africa.
“Decoratively speaking, these baths have the largest amount of preserved decoration of any of the famous baths on the Iberian Peninsula,” the archaeologist said.
‘Absolutely everything here was decorated, and luckily it survived. The background is white lime mortar engraved with geometric lines, circles and squares. On top of that, you have red ocher paintings of eight-pointed stars and eight-flowered multiple rosettes. These two designs alternate and intertwine and adapt to the different geometric shapes of the skylights. ”
While there is still a lot of cleaning work to be done to reveal the red paint below, the hamam-cum-bar has now been preserved and repaired, and the Giralda will reopen in two or three weeks.
Jiménez, who described the ‘kind of fatal alignment of different things’, said the baths and the bar were’ reborn and become something wonderful; it was the right people, the right time and a little luck ”.
Castro and his partners are looking forward to a new chapter in the Giralda’s long history. But they also roast the foresight of Vicente Traver.
“It used to be a very famous bar, but now people can drink a beer or a glass of wine in a bar that is also a 12th-century hammam,” Castro said. “It is a good thing that the architect respected the baths in the 1920s – others may have moved everything out, so we are grateful to him.”