Cathedral, Alcázar and Archivo de Indias in Seville

Of the three buildings in the centre of Seville, the Alcázar has the oldest core. In 913 to 914 Abd al-Rahman III of Córdoba built a fortified enclosure about 100 m on each side in place of a Visigothic basilica, and the Abbadid and Almohad rulers later enlarged it into a complex of palaces. After Ferdinand III of Castile took the city in 1248 the palaces were rebuilt, and in the 1360s Pedro I added a palace in the Mudéjar style. Its upper floors are still used by the Spanish royal family when it stays in Seville.

The cathedral stands on the site of a great mosque that the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf ordered in 1172. Its minaret, begun in 1184 and finished in 1198, became the cathedral bell tower known as the Giralda. After the conquest the mosque itself served as the cathedral until rebuilding began in the early 15th century, and the new Gothic cathedral was completed in the early 16th century. It holds the tomb of Christopher Columbus.

In 1572 Philip II commissioned Juan de Herrera, architect of the Escorial, to design an exchange for the city's merchants, who until then had done business in the cool interior of the cathedral. Seville held the monopoly on trade with the Americas from 1503 to 1718, and in 1785 Charles III opened the General Archive of the Indies in the building. It now holds some 80 million pages, and the three buildings were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1987.