Carmona

Overview

Carmona is a walled hill town 30 km east of Seville, built along the last high ridge of Los Alcores at 253 m above the farmland of the Vega del Corbones. Two things pull people up the hill: a Roman cemetery of more than nine hundred rock-cut family tombs on the western edge of town, and a compact walled quarter of gates, churches and convents you can cross on foot in twenty minutes.

The necropolis was found in 1881 and its tombs run from the 2nd century BC to the 4th century AD. Most are hypogea, family chambers cut into the soft rock and reached by a shaft or a stair, with niches for cremation urns and, in several cases, surviving wall painting. A Roman amphitheatre sits in the same protected zone, roughly eight hectares in all.

Walking the town costs nothing and the monuments are cheap rather than free: €2 for the Alcázar de la Puerta de Sevilla, €2.50 for the town museum, €3 for the parish church of Santa María, and free entry to the necropolis for EU citizens who show ID, €1.50 for everyone else. Budget under €10 to see everything that charges.

Just over 30,000 people live here, and the place works as a town rather than a museum: a market, a Holy Week of eight brotherhoods, a May feria whose licence dates from 1466.

History

The gate you walk through to enter the old town is the oldest thing in Carmona. Material found under the Puerta de Sevilla dates to between the 14th and 12th centuries BC, and the tower at its core is 9th century BC. Carthaginians built a heavy quadrangular bastion over that tower to face the Roman advance, which is where the gate got its blunt, top-heavy shape.

Under Augustus the Romans reworked the Carthaginian bastion into the double-gate system still standing, and put a temple on top, of which part of the podium survives. The same prosperous 1st century produced the Puerta de Córdoba on the far side of town, a three-opening gate built as much for show as for defence. The town was Carmo then, a stronghold of Hispania Baetica in the years of Julius Caesar.

The cemetery outside the walls started earlier than the Roman town. The first burials are Tartessian funerary monuments of the 7th century BC, earth mounds over a central pit. Roman inhumations follow south of the amphitheatre from the 2nd century BC, the bodies laid flexed with the head to the east. At the start of the imperial period the ritual switched to cremation and to the rock-cut family chamber, and by the end of the 1st century AD those chambers were giving way to individual burials in the same pit where the body had been burnt.

After the Caliphate of Córdoba broke up, Hammudid Berbers took the town and Qarmuna became capital of its own taifa. The Islamic centuries survive in gate arches rather than whole buildings: a Caliphal horseshoe of the 10th century and, outside it, a pointed Almohad horseshoe of the 12th. The Puerta de Marchena, on the quieter southern side, is Almohad work throughout.

Castilian rule added the towers and the churches. Pedro I reworked the interior of the Puerta de Sevilla in the 14th century, and the palace attributed to him at the top of the town was wrecked by an earthquake in 1504. San Pedro went up in the 15th century over an older hermitage, on the three-nave plan typical of Sevillian mudéjar, and got its Baroque interior in the 18th. The top three storeys of its tower were finished in 1783 by Andrés Acevedo Fariñas on a 17th-century base, which is why locals call it the Giraldilla.

The necropolis reached the modern world through two men. Systematic excavation began with Juan Fernández López and Jorge Bonsor, who kept every scrap of paperwork they generated; the site opened in May 1885, and two days beforehand they founded the Sociedad Arqueológica de Carmona to study the archaeology of Los Alcores. Their archive moved to the Convento de Santa Clara in 1888 and finally to the site museum, where it still is.

Visiting

Start at the Puerta de Sevilla, on Plaza de Blas Infante, where the ticket desk and the tourist office are the same counter. Entry is €2 for adults and €1 for children, students, over-65s and groups of 25 or more, free on Mondays. It opens 10:00 to 18:00 Monday to Saturday and 10:00 to 15:00 on Sunday, last entry half an hour before closing.

Inside, the route takes in the Salón de los Presos Bajo and Alto, the Patio de los Aljibes and the Torre del Oro, all opened up in the 1973 restoration after the houses packed against the gate were cleared in the 1960s. The tower is the viewpoint over the white roofs. Look for the intervallum too, the walled space left between the two facing gates so attackers who got through the first could be shot at from above.

The necropolis and amphitheatre

The archaeological site is on Avenida de Jorge Bonsor 9, downhill on the Seville side. You walk in on your own, with no booking, inside opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 09:00 to 18:00 and Sundays and public holidays 09:00 to 15:00 for most of the year, cut to 09:00 to 15:00 every day from 21 June to 20 September, and extended to 21:00 on Fridays and Saturdays between 1 April and 20 June. Mondays are closed unless the Monday is the eve of a holiday, the rooms start clearing 15 minutes before closing, and EU citizens with ID get in free while other passports pay €1.50.

The signed route runs in numbered order and takes about an hour. Point one is the museum and reception building: an introductory film, Bonsor’s finds, and a terrace over the town, the line of the Vía Augusta, the burial fields and the amphitheatre. From there you drop to the Mausoleo Circular, a vaulted underground chamber entered through a shaft, then the Tumba del Elefante, named for the stone pachyderm dug up in it and linked to eastern cult by carvings of Attis and Cybele.

The amphitheatre is the catch. The oldest surviving entertainment building in Baetica, arena 58.80 m on the long axis, it can only be entered on a guided visit on weekend and holiday mornings; otherwise you look down on it from the museum terraces.

Back inside the walls

The Museo de la Ciudad, in the Palacio del Marqués de las Torres, opens 11:00 to 19:00 daily at €2.50 for adults and €1.20 for students and groups, free for over-65s and under-18s and free for everyone on Tuesdays. The Prioral de Santa María charges €3, or €1.80 for over-65s and groups, closes Mondays and splits the day into a morning slot from 10:00 and an evening slot from 18:00, so mid-afternoon arrivals find a locked door. Its patio holds a column with Visigothic epigraphy.

The Puerta de Córdoba at the other end of the walls carries an 18th-century painting of the Virgen de Gracia, the town’s patron, on the underside of the main arch; the visitor centre inside needs a booking. San Pedro holds a glazed green font of around 1500 and a sacramental chapel drawn up by Ambrosio de Figueroa in 1760; a 1984 fire took the painted decoration and the main retablo. The Alcázar del Rey Don Pedro at the top of the hill, 257 m up, has been a state-run Parador since 1976, and the terrace is open to non-residents.

Tips

• The tourist office is inside the Alcázar de la Puerta de Sevilla, open Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 18:00 and Sundays and holidays 10:00 to 15:00, dropping in July and August to 09:00 to 15:00 on weekdays and 10:00 to 15:00 at weekends. It shuts on 1 January, 25 December and the third Friday of May.

• That third Friday in May is the feria, when the town’s own office takes the day off. Come for it deliberately and book a bed, or avoid the week entirely.

• Between 21 June and 20 September the necropolis closes at 15:00 every open day, six hours from opening. In that window it is a morning site or nothing, which is just as well because the burial fields have no shade.

• Fridays and Saturdays from 1 April to 20 June are the only evenings the site stays open to 21:00. Low sun across the rock-cut courtyards is the best light you will get there.

• Backpacks, large bags, pushchairs and umbrellas go in the necropolis lockers, not around the site. Photography for private use is fine, but no flash, no tripod and no selfie stick.

• The site is closed on 1 and 6 January, 1 May, and 24, 25 and 31 December, but open on most other holidays, 15 August, 12 October, 1 November and 6 and 8 December among them. Check the calendar before travelling on any Spanish public holiday.

• Without a car, take the Casal bus line M-124 from Seville’s Prado de San Sebastián station. Driving from Seville or Córdoba it is the A4, and the nearest public car park to the archaeological site is on Paseo del Estatuto.

• The Convento de Santa Clara sells its own sweets at the door, 11:00 to 14:00 and 17:00 to 19:00, closed Tuesday and Wednesday; the visit is €3, or €2 for children, students and over-65s. Its nuns are the town’s main convent bakers.

• Order from the vegetable end of the menu. The local cooking is built on market garden produce: alboronía, tomato soup, wild asparagus with set egg, chickpea potaje, cocido with tagarninas. For pudding, torta inglesa or bollos de aceite. The local spirit is Anís Los Hermanos, distilled and bottled in the town in three grades of dryness.

• The Puerto de Indias gin distillery runs tasting tours by appointment, 10:00 to 14:30 and 15:30 to 18:30, closed Mondays, Sundays and public holidays. The basic tour is €15 and the premium €25, with 30% off for over-65s, 50% for under-17s and free for under-4s.

• The town hall shows a Roman floor, free, 08:00 to 15:00 on weekdays and closed at weekends. Five-minute stop.