Seville, booked properly.
Which Alcázar ticket actually skips the queue. Which flamenco room is a tablao and which is a theatre. What the Córdoba train really costs you in hours. Every tour in and out of Seville, reviewed and ranked.
The Alcázar and the Giralda are a ten-minute walk apart.
All Alcázar tours →
Almost every first day in Seville is these two buildings and the streets between them. The choice is not which to see — it is whether you queue, whether you want the Mudéjar palace explained, and whether you climb the tower in the same ticket.
The Alcázar on your own clock
Royal apartments, the Patio de las Doncellas and the sunken gardens, at whatever pace you keep. Entry is by timed slot and the early ones go first.
Cathedral, Giralda and Alcázar in one run
Columbus’s tomb, the largest Gothic nave in the world, then the tower — which climbs on 35 ramps rather than stairs, built for a rider on horseback.
Seville from above, at the hour it cools
The old city reads differently from a roof: the cathedral bulk, the Setas lattice, the river, and the orange-tree canopy that hides most of the streets.
The six days Seville is booked for.
A palace, a cathedral, a tablao, a tapas lap, an hour on the river and the train to Córdoba. Most Seville itineraries are built from these six, and each one books differently.
What Seville actually books, in order.
Every review →Ranked by how many travellers have been and written it up — not by what anyone is pushing. The entry tickets win, which tells you something about how Seville is visited.
1
Royal Alcázar Entry Ticket
Timed entry to Seville's Royal Alcázar, Moorish-Christian palace with gardens, tiles, and Game of Thrones filming spots via Puerta del León.
From · $23
Read our review →2
Cathedral and La Giralda Entry Ticket
from $20
3
Live Flamenco Dancing Show Ticket at the Theater
from $27
4
1-Hour Guadalquivir River Sightseeing Eco Cruise
from $19
5
Skip-the-Ticket-Line Mosque-Cathedral Guided Tour
from $31
6
Cathedral, Giralda, and Royal Alcázar Guided Tour
from $69
7
Setas de Sevilla Entry Ticket
from $18
8
Cathedral, Giralda & Alcazar Entry With Guided Tour
from $65
In Triana, flamenco is a neighbourhood before it is a show.
Seville has two kinds of room. A tablao seats a few dozen close enough to hear the boards; a theatre seats hundreds and sells every night. Both are real, they cost about the same, and the reviews are the only reliable way to tell which one you are buying.
Seville eats standing up, and never in one place.
A tapas night is a lap, not a booking: four bars, one dish each, whatever the counter is proud of. A guide is worth it once — for the order of the bars and for knowing what to say at each — and after that you can run it yourself.
Every Andalusian day trip that fits between two Seville breakfasts.
Seville is the best base in the south, and the reason is the map: three cathedral cities, a sherry town, a gorge, a wetland and a Roman amphitheatre all sit inside a day return.
Itálica
DoñanaA mosque with a cathedral built inside it, 45 minutes up the line.
The Mezquita is the reason to go and it earns the trip: eight hundred columns under red-and-white arches, and a Renaissance choir dropped into the middle of them in the sixteenth century. The Judería around it is a street plan that survived what happened to the people who laid it out. Go early — the building takes an hour longer than anyone plans for.
- 1Skip-the-Ticket-Line Mosque-Cathedral Guided Tourfrom $31
- 2Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral: Skip-the-Line Guided Tourfrom $35
- 3Jewish Quarter, Mosque, and Alcázar Tourfrom $50
From June to September, Seville makes you move the day to its edges.
This is the hottest big city in continental Europe and July afternoons sit above 40°C. Locals do not fight it: the morning is for monuments, the middle of the day is for a long lunch indoors, and the city comes back out at seven. Book that way and Seville in August is a good trip rather than an endurance test.
Seville on $20, and Seville on $200.
Every published review, sorted by what the tour actually costs. The city is cheap to see well — the money goes on the days that leave town.
Entry tickets, the river hour, a flamenco seat, a tapas lap. Nearly everything inside the old city sits here.
Guided monuments, the Córdoba and Cádiz day trips, cooking classes, the white-village run.
Private guides, chartered cars into the sierra, and the long doubles that take in two cities in a day.
Four things in Seville that will not wait for your hotel wi-fi.
Most of Andalusia can be arranged the night before. These cannot: they run on timed slots, protected access and fixed show days, and they are the ones people arrive to find sold out.
- 01Royal Alcázar Entry TicketEntry is by timed slot and the daily allocation is finite. In spring and autumn the good hours are gone days ahead.
- 02Caminito del Rey Hike Day TripThe walkway takes a capped number of walkers a day on timed entry, and there is no ticket office to argue with at the gate.
- 03Doñana National Park Day TripThe interior of the park is reached only on an authorised vehicle with a permit. There is no way to drive yourself in.
- 04Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art AdmissionThe riding school performs on set show days rather than daily, so the date decides the trip and not the other way round.
Three things Andalusia has and the rest of Spain does not.
Cathedrals and tapas bars you can find anywhere in the country. The dancing horses, the emperors’ home town and the lynx marshes belong to this corner of it.
The Dancing Horses
Jerez keeps the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art, where Carthusian-bred stallions perform the high-school movements — levade, piaffe, the courbette — to orchestrated music in a nineteenth-century arena. It is a riding academy first and a performance second, which is why it runs on set show days and why the stable tour is worth as much as the seat.
- 1Equestrian Show General Entry★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 2,333 reviews
- 2Andalusian Horse Dance and Museums★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,289 reviews
- 3Yeguada de la Cartuja Carthusian Horses Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 970 reviews
The Emperors’ Home Town
Twenty-five minutes north of the city, Itálica was the first Roman settlement in Spain and the birthplace of two emperors, Trajan and Hadrian. Its amphitheatre held around twenty-five thousand and still has its floor, its tunnels and its mosaics — most visitors now arrive knowing it as a Game of Thrones location and leave talking about the mosaics.
- 1Italica Roman City & Medieval Monastery Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 1,051 reviews
- 2Historical Italica: Half-Day Guided Tour from Seville★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 416 reviews
- 3Game of Thrones and Roman Empire Italica Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 372 reviews
The Lynx Marshes
Where the Guadalquivir finally reaches the Atlantic it spreads into Doñana: dunes, cork woodland and shallow marsh that hold flamingo colonies, imperial eagles and the last strong population of Iberian lynx. Access to the interior is by permitted vehicle only, which is exactly why there is anything left to see.
- 1Doñana National Park Day Trip★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 380 reviews
- 2Donana National Park: Guided Day Tour from Seville★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 372 reviews
- 3Donana National Park and El Rocío: Guided Tour from Seville★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 240 reviews
By place — the city and the day trips
The Alcázar58 tours
Cathedral & Giralda57 tours
Santa Cruz & the Judería14 tours
Córdoba172 tours
Cádiz83 tours
Jerez de la Frontera34 tours
The White Villages18 tours
Granada11 tours
Gibraltar7 tours
Tangier6 tours- Every day trip out of Seville →
By kind of day — what are you actually doing?
The newest Seville reviews.
All recent →
Private guided tour of the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos
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Exclusive visit to the Mosque with official guide. Small groups
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Tour to the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba with admission included
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Visit Cathedral Mosque with official guide. Small groups
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Cordoba’s Authentic Patios: 2-Hour Tour with Tickets
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Mosque-Cathedral Cordoba Guided Tour with Priority Access
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Mosque-Cathedral, Alcazar & Synagogue with Skip the Line Tickets
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Úbeda and Baeza private tour in a day from Córdoba with tickets.
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Private 3-hour Walking Tour of Cordoba with official tour guide
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