Sevilla

Before Madeira, we stopped at Cadiz. A friend gave me her ticket for a tour of Sevilla, a couple hours inland from there. It took until now for me to realize that I had a couple things to say about that tour.

First, I think I got my pocket picked. Lillian, a woman at my table, had been warning us for several days about pickpockets in Sevilla (known to English speakers as Seville because we English speakers seem to feel we have the right to rename foreign cities -- Beijing to Peking, for instance -- for our ease of pronunciation, though I personally have no problem saying "Seh-vee-ya"). Now Lillian is a woman of strong, if sometimes dubious, opinions, and when she insisted that "It's the pickpocket capital of Europe. There's one in every family in Seville , and they're PROUD of them", I didn't worry too much.

And lest you concern yourself overmuch about my loss, it was only 10 or 12 Euros (around $15) in coins that I was sure were there when I left the ship, but weren't when I reached in to pay for a minor purchase. Also in the same pocket was a Swiss Army knife worth twice the value of the coins (why lift the coins and leave the knife?) and several Kleenexes, some used, which I had vaguely considered as pickpocket repellent. Maybe pickpockets practice grabbing pocket change the way pianists practice scales.

The second thing I learned was the staggering amount of wealth Spain extracted from the new worlds Columbus' voyages opened to them. It was the huge carved wall of Cuban mahogany that was part of remodeling the central mosque into a Gothic cathedral once the Moors had been driven out of Spain (coincidentally in the same year Columbus first sailed) . It was the enormous gleaming silver ornamentation on the main altar.

And, oddly, it was seeing the House of Contracts in the Alcazar, the royal Spanish castle virtually across the street from the mosque-turned-cathedral. The House of Contracts was where the 16th and 17th century equivalent of venture capitalists came to get royal permission to organize voyages across the Atlantic to loot the New World, robbing people who didn't understand that, as Spanish colonies, they no longer had any rights to their land or their resources or their cultural artifacts or, for that matter, their lives.

Which was, of course, not the way the guide presented it. He was nostalgic for the time when Spain ruled the seas and was the wealthiest country in Europe. Hard times in Spain these days, so his nostalgia is understandable. The archetype of Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver is not just something Hollywood made up so Errol Flynn could buckle his swashes. Even losing ships to pirates and the dangers of the high seas and the occasional victories of the inhabitants of the New World, even deducting the percentage that doubtless poured into the royal coffers for the privilege of setting sail in the first place, the amount of wealth brought back to Spain was staggering.

And now, thanks to my Sevilla excursion, I think I can begin to imagine what that meant.