This article was written by Cam with help from Meg and Claude AI. All photos are property of Cam and Meg.

Starting Our Cruise

Leaving Lisbon and sailing down the Tagus River, past the Tower of Belém. We said farewell to Portugal and headed down the Iberian coast towards Spain. The next afternoon, we entered the Guadalquivir River, passing through locks, eventually docking in downtown Seville. Our ship, the Azamara Journey, is a smaller vessel, with only 690 guests. This size allows the vessel to visit ports that the larger size cruise ships simply cannot get into. We were very glad to be where no other cruise ship could be. 

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Arriving in Seville the Pearl of Andalusia

It was half past seven on the last evening of March and the day was winding down towards night. We stepped into Plaza de España and were lucky enough to see the last of the sun hitting the towers turning everything it touched to beautiful colours of copper and rust. The towers rose above us as the sun withdrew behind them, the long shadows stretching across the curved colonnade and the ceramic-tiled alcoves that lined the plaza’s embrace. Meg hopped into an alcove and there was a theatrical quality to it. 

That night, Seville revealed something else entirely. As we moved into the old city towards the Cathedral, we actually heard it before we saw it. Drums and horns sounded an ongoing beat with chanting also filling the air. Hundreds if not thousands of hooded pilgrims carrying crosses and candles. Their faces obscured, their flames casting long shadows across Seville’s ancient facades. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people lined the narrow streets and squares. The procession belonged to another century.

Walking Amongst the Procession – A Step Back in Time

Figures in white robes moved slowly through the candlelight. At the head of it all, a great float bore Christ carrying the cross, shoulders bent under its weight. The crowd was silent in the way crowds rarely are — and stilled, as though the city itself had drawn a long, slow breath. We stood among strangers and felt, briefly, like witnesses to something that did not belong to us but had generously admitted us anyway. On the ship, many people had spoken of wanting to witness one of these processions. Having seen it, we now understood why.

Our second day in Seville was given over to wandering, which is the only honest way to move through a city like this. We found the Torre del Oro at the river’s edge in the morning sun. Golden in name and golden in the morning haze. We then turned toward the cathedral — the largest Gothic church in the world, though statistics feel inadequate inside it. We climbed the Giralda, a minaret-turned-bell-tower. The ramps worn smooth by centuries of up and down travel. From the top the view of the city showed colours of the earth. Terracotta and white spreading in every direction. 

Inside the cathedral, the organ commanded the space — more than ten thousand pipes. Even silent in the choir loft, it had a presence, a kind of latent authority.

Visiting Historic Bakeries

Leaving the cathedral, and wandering the narrow alleyways allowed us the most unique moment of our visit here. We found a small bakery run by nuns. We followed a Spanish couple through an innocuous door, which had a small multi-lingual sign saying ‘sweet shop’. The courtyard inside had a little counter with a wooden turnstile.  Beside it, a price list for baked goods. The bakery is run by cloistered nuns.  Customers never see their faces – and vice versa.  Clients knock with the knocker and order by yelling. The nuns place the order on the turnstile, the client verifies and then the nun provides a credit card machine on the turntable which you tap. A very modern touch to a very olden shopping experience.

A Mid-Afternoon Pause

By afternoon our travels had taken us across the river to Triana. This neighbourhood is also where many ceramic tile ‘factories’ are situated. We were able to watch an artist meticulously painting trivets.  She was very intensely focused despite the hubbub around her.

Although the Triana market was closed, the open-air cafés were welcoming.  We ordered drinks and did nothing more than watch Seville go about its business. As we did so, golden hour carried out its slow work on the water. After a long day, that felt like exactly enough.

The Real Alcázar – A Historic Palace

On our final morning, we were at the Real Alcázar at the moment the gates opened. The reward was the kind that patient travellers are occasionally granted: quiet. The reflecting pool held just the two of us in its stillness, the palace’s intricate facade doubled in the water below. Later, the gardens unfolded like a series of secrets — jasmine-scented corridors, hidden fountains, ordered geometry giving way to lush abundance. By afternoon, the city had turned its attention to the sacred. Well-dressed families moved through the crooked alleys toward church services with a purposefulness that reminded us we were passing through, pleasantly unmoored, while Seville observed its own ancient rhythms around us.

Off to Cadiz.

There is a lightness to Cádiz that Seville, for all its grandeur, does not possess. Where Seville draws you inward with shadowed courtyards, candlelit processions and the gravity of centuries — Cádiz opens outward: toward the Atlantic, toward the sky. It is one of the oldest cities in Western Europe. While it has miles of beaches, and hotels, historically, the town guarded the harbour entrance. Several forts can still be found around its coast. 

The buildings are bleached, salt-scrubbed and cheerful. The white facades bright in the morning sun. We began at Torre Tarvia, the tallest building in the old town. It has a camera obscura, essentially a periscope – a tube with a mirror and lenses – which projects a live image of the city projected onto a circular table in miniature. Rooftops, streets, and neighbours seen hanging laundry, watering plants and anything else that they do on their rooftop terraces. The surrounding sea rendered in silence, like a living map of a place that had long since stopped being in any hurry.

Nothing has Changed for Centuries

Wandering the old town, we were rewarded in the way that only truly ancient places can reward you. You could tell, moving through its narrow streets, that very little had fundamentally changed here over time. The stones underfoot, the low doorways and the small plazas opening unexpectedly off crooked alleys must have looked more or less like this for longer than most cities have existed. It was not a museum stillness, though. Locals moved through it with the casual ownership of people who have never needed to be impressed by where they live. We moved among them happily, unhurried, letting the streets decide our direction.

In the afternoon we found the beach, and the city fell away behind us. The sun was warm as we walked the long curve of sand. The Atlantic stretching wide and blue to the west. After the incense and the candlelight of Holy Week Seville, there was something deeply restorative about the clean air and open horizon. We both find the steady sound of the surf and the simple pleasure of walking with our feet in the cool sea with no particular destination to be relaxing. I think everyone does. 

Gibraltar – England’s Hold on the Med

Once the ship had arrived, we went ashore and found a city bus to take us to the Rock of Gibraltar. The bus climbed the switchbacks, and, as the town got smaller, we saw the sea pressing in on both sides. From up on the Rock, you have a great view. To the north, the Spanish coastline curving away toward Algeciras; to the south, Africa. Not the idea of Africa, but the actual continent, close enough to feel like a short swim rather than another world. 

The Strait of Gibraltar is only 14 kilometres at its narrowest. Standing at the top of the Rock, with the Mediterranean on one side and the Atlantic beginning on the other, you understand instinctively why this small, improbable place has been fought over for so long. It is not merely a piece of land. It is the hinge between oceans, continents and civilisations.

We needed to climb the last bit and it was an uphill climb. Inside, the tunnels begin to explain themselves slowly. As you enter, rock closes around you, and what reveals itself over the course of several hours is not a single feat of engineering but a composition. Excavations carried out across different wars and different centuries, each generation of defenders burrowed deeper and extended further. Their goal, to find new ways to make the mountain serve the purposes of survival. 

Canadian Contributions to the Tunnels (and Victory)

The earliest galleries date to the Great Siege of the 1780s, hand-drilled by British soldiers into limestone. But it was the Canadian contribution during the Second World War that made us proud. Working under conditions that were by any measure extraordinary. There was the constant noise, the dust, the darkness, the urgency of a war, whose outcome in 1942, remained genuinely uncertain. Yet, Canadian engineers still helped carve out a vast network of tunnels sufficient to house and supply an entire garrison. 

What lingers, walking back out into the sunshine, is the cumulative weight of the place. Gibraltar is only six and a half square kilometres, and yet it contains so much history: Moorish fortifications, British colonial architecture, a population that is neither fully Spanish nor straightforwardly English. Beneath the surface of the Rock itself, this extraordinary hidden city of tunnels that most visitors never fully reckon with. 

Once we finished with the Rock, we found our way to the most southerly point in Europe. Our impression is simply that it is windy.  Our captain had been pleasantly surprised at the lack of wind when we docked; I had trouble standing against it at Europa Lighthouse.  Apparently, it is often worse. 

Málaga

Easter Sunday arrives differently in Málaga than it does in Seville. Where Seville’s Holy Week processions carry the full weight of penitence and solemnity, Málaga on Easter morning had shaken something loose — there was joy in it. A brightness that matched the day itself. The procession that stopped traffic was less a funeral march and more of a celebration, the crowds lining the streets in good spirits, children on shoulders, the floats moving through the city with a kind of triumphant ease. We stood among the throng and let it wash over us before the cathedral doors drew me in.

The Málaga Cathedral is a magnificent and slightly unfinished thing — it has been missing its second tower since the eighteenth century, the funds for its completion having been redirected to the American Revolution, of all places. Inside, the Easter Sunday mass was in full voice, the Spanish rolling through the vaulted space with great confidence and zero concession to the uninitiated. I lasted approximately thirty minutes, following none of it, before slipping quietly out into the sunshine with what I can only describe as the mild sheepishness of a student leaving an exam early. The cathedral deserved better attention than I was equipped to give it that morning.

The afternoon redeemed everything. I climbed the hill above the city, and the path gave way to wildflowers — great drifts of colour along the hillside, vivid against the dry scrub and the pale stone. Below and beyond, the Mediterranean stretched out in every direction, flat and luminous and endless under the Easter sun. After the tunnels of Gibraltar, the solemnity of Seville, the ancient stones of Cádiz, there was something quietly perfect about sitting on a hillside among wildflowers, with nothing between us and Africa but open water and light.

End of Part I of our Iberian Cruise

For now, we thank you for reading the first part of our Iberian cruise. It has been a blast. Our cruise will carry on to Cartagena, Alicante, White Night, Valencia and finally Barcelona. Stay tuned.

Feel free to reach out via the link above or leave a comment

Cam and Meg