Walks in the Gardens

Walks in the Gardens of Spain

by Di Attenborough

Many people will be familiar with the great gardens of Andalucia in Spain that are on every tourist’s itinerary – the Alcazar in Seville, the orange tree court outside the great mosque in Cordoba, and the Generalife gardens of the Alhambra in Grenada. However, there are many lesser known gems which are well worth the effort to seek out and explore. Most pf these gardens belong to private, or once private palaces which are unremarkable from the outside as they hide behind high walls in the heart of cities., but once inside the gates and you enter another world.

One such typical Andalucian palace is the Casa de Pilatos in Seville, built by a certain Marques de Tarifa following a three year pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 1520’s Mudejar-style architecture combines happily with Roman statuary collected from Italica a Roman town outside Seville, to decorate a house based supposedly on Pilate’s house in the Holy Land. The garden consists of a series of interlocking courtyards. High walls support great curtains of bougainvillea, roses and jasmine. The courtyards are intersected with paths, and in the centre of each is a low fountain. The noise of traffic is completely excluded.

Another palace in the city, the Palacio de las Duenas, is still owned by the Duke and Duchess of Alba. Again courtyards lead one to another like mini-Oxford quadrangles. Each corner is punctuated by a tall palm tree geometrically positioned, their trunks swathed with roses. Amongst them formal lines of orange trees provide shade and are under planted with perennials and annuals. The central fountains are massed with arum lilies.

In Cordoba the Viana Palace boasts no less than twelve courtyards together with a garden – so called because it contains a rare expanse of grass, although the design is strictly formal and the areas of grass are bordered by neat box hedges. Each of the courtyards is different and some are quite tiny, but much use is made of the wall space, with sweet scented climbers clambering up every available inch.

Finally, a totally different garden. La Moratalla (the Moor’s Lookout) is the Centre of a large agricultural estate deep in the Andalucian countryside not far from Cordoba. The garden was started in the 19th Century in the Romantic/Picturesque style. In 1915 Forestier, a French landscape gardener, who had much influence in Spain, started work on it, and the result is a combination of French formality and Moorish elements. The house overlooks a large area of formally planted plane trees of great size under planted agapanthus, which stretches down to a brickwork rill with luxurious plantings on either side of shrubs and roses, much in the style of an English garden.

This tour was arranged by James Bolton Garden Tours.

For details of this and other Garden Tours both in the UK and abroad see www.jamesboltongardentours.co.uk

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