Parque de María Luisa

Where it sits. The Parque de María Luisa runs for roughly a kilometre along the eastern bank of the Guadalquivir south of Seville's old town, wedged between the river, the university and the Los Remedios bridge approaches. It covers about 34 hectares and is the city's principal public garden — the green interruption between the dense medieval centre and the twentieth-century districts beyond. Its two monumental set pieces sit at opposite ends: the Plaza de España at the north-east corner and the Plaza de América at the south. Everything between is shaded, which matters in a city where summer afternoons routinely pass 40°C; the park is where Seville goes when the streets become unusable.

The story behind it. The land was originally the private garden of the Palace of San Telmo, and it takes its name from Infanta María Luisa Fernanda de Borbón, Duchess of Montpensier, who gave roughly half of it to the city in 1893. The transformation into a public park came two decades later, when Seville won the right to host the Ibero-American Exposition and hired the French landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier — then curator of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris — to redesign the whole tract from 1911. Forestier worked in an explicitly Moorish idiom: long tiled water channels, sunken parterres, clipped hedges enclosing small outdoor rooms, and tiled benches at every junction, all under a canopy of palms, plane trees, magnolias, orange trees and Mediterranean pines.

The set pieces. The Glorieta de Bécquer, dedicated to the Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, is built around a taxodium planted before the park existed, with marble figures representing love in three stages and a bronze Cupid fallen at the base. The Isleta de los Patos holds a small lake with a Renaissance-revival pavilion on an island reached by a bridge. Fountains recur every few hundred metres — the Fuente de las Ranas with its ring of ceramic frogs, the Fuente de los Leones modelled on the Alhambra. At the southern end, the Plaza de América opens into a formal square flanked by Aníbal González's Mudéjar Pavilion, now the Museum of Arts and Popular Customs, and his Renaissance Pavilion, now the Archaeological Museum of Seville, which holds the Carambolo treasure of Tartessian gold. Flocks of white doves work the square, and the horse carriages queue on its edge.

On screen. The park is the setting that makes Seville's most filmed monument possible: film crews stage in its avenues and shoot toward the Plaza de España, which forms the park's north-east boundary. The 2000 Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones unit based itself here while shooting the plaza as the exterior of the Theed Royal Palace on Naboo, and David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia crew worked the same corner in 1961 when the plaza played British headquarters in Cairo. Beyond that single frame, the park's own avenues have supplied period Spanish and Latin American settings to television for decades, precisely because Forestier's planting is now mature enough to hide the modern city entirely. It is worth understanding the geography: the "Naboo palace" and the "Cairo barracks" are the same building, seen from inside the same park, thirty-eight years apart.

What you actually see today. The park is free, unfenced and open through the day, crossed by a grid of gravel avenues wide enough for bicycles, pedal carriages and wheelchairs. Tiled benches and drinking fountains recur constantly. Two museums, a puppet theatre and several kiosks operate inside it, and the university's old tobacco factory — the setting Bizet used for Carmen — stands immediately north. Birdlife is unexpectedly good: ring-necked parakeets have colonised the palms, and the ponds hold ducks and terrapins. The mature jacarandas flower violet in late April and May, overlapping with the orange blossom that scents the whole southern city.

Getting there and timing. Tram line T1 and Metro line 1 both stop at Prado de San Sebastián on the park's northern edge, a ten-minute walk from the cathedral; several city bus lines run along Avenida de María Luisa. Mornings are quiet and cool; late afternoon brings families and the light that photographers want on the tilework. Holy Week and the Feria de Abril, held on the fairground across the road in April, fill the whole district — atmospheric, but the park stops being restful. Winter is mild enough for the gardens to stay green, and January and February are the emptiest weeks of the year here.