The main square in Zafra isn't particularly big, and is overrun by cars, but it's very nice in the morning sun.
The church there in the background is quite famous and important and ... uh ... I totally forget why.
This is the castle that is now a Parador.
The downtown core does, of course, have tonnes of narrow alleyways and cobblestone streets.
After hopping back in the car, we continued southwards into Andalusia.
The scenery is quite gorgeous with towns clinging to hillsides everywhere.
Just don't look down right where you stopped to jump out of the car and snap a photo.
This town actually has a cool castle at the top. We'll add it to the list of places to come back to.
We finally got situated in Seville, and started walking around. We quickly found ourselves strolling past the bullfighting ring, which is a madhouse every Saturday in the summer, apparently.
You can walk along the river here, which is worthwhile.
This is a statue of sume dude's butt.
The river is quite large, and Seville, quite a bit inland, used to be a major port and trading town -- it was, at one point, granted a monopoly on trade with the New World.
This is the Torre del Oro, an ancient Moorish and later Christian lookout tower (there used to be another on the other side of the river). It's now a museum.
This is funny. It says "cold, very cold, water".
Cool architecture as you wander around here.
The huge cathedral in town is one of the more famous sites in town.
You can take a horsey ride if you want.
Somebody was being a dork and jumping into photos.
This is the Alcazar, the ancient Moorish/Christian castle in town that was very closed on Monday.
The tower of the cathedral here is pretty cool.
You can look inside a lot of the buildings here, and they're quite spectacular.
This is a very swanky hotel.
This is the front entrance of the Palacio de San Telmo. Designed by Leonard de Figueroa and finished in 1734, the figures represent sciences and arts.
We continued on through Parque María Luisa, landscaped by the man who also did the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.
At the end of it is the Plaza de España, which has a huge semi-circular building.
Being Andalucia, everything is tiles and mosaics.
Here is a crappy panorama I took of the place. Excuse the slanty looking buildings but I wasn't very careful with the camera it seems ....
Lots of ceramic tiles, railings and all sorts of other goodies here.
Along the whole length of the building are these little monuments to each of Spains provinces (usually centred around an individual capitol town).
They're pretty elabourate, and you could probably spend days analysing and taking in each of them.
Our next stop was the huge ferris wheel we stumbled into in town.
We paid the 16€ (ouch) to go up it, and see the city. It was a little wobbly, which was kinda freaky.
The views of the city are pretty cool, though.
Back on terra firma, we continued our strolling.
This is some French quarter where there are french language academies and friendship societies, etc.
We headed back to the hotel, found a nice local bar for some sangria and tapas, and called it a night.