Legendary ways

Don Juan meandered through Seville, leaving his mark on arts, cultures, and a golden city

May 27, 2007|Indira A. R. Lakshmanan, Globe Correspondent

SEVILLE, Spain -- True to the legendary Don Juan who prowled its cobbled streets, this city seduces at first sight.

Plazas blossoming with orange trees intoxicate with their heady aroma. Palace windows covered with Moorish latticework beckon with the promise of secrets within. Moonlit nights illuminate a soaring cathedral tower into a setting for storybook romance. Like its immortal fictional son, Seville has it all: looks, charisma, wealth, pedigree, an air of mystery, and passion.

A living monument to the Golden Age of Spain, Seville offers all the history and poetic inspiration one wishes. At every corner, timeless pleasures await: people-watching at sidewalk cafes, lingering over garlic-drizzled tapas, surrendering to the charms of coal-eyed flamenco dancers and the mournful, gypsy-inspired ballads of throaty baritones.

One of the most enchanting cities of old Europe, Seville has the irresistible allure and easy confidence of an experienced lover.

And so it feels fitting to step back in time in the footsteps and mindset of a libertine. Here in the prosperous port where galleons loaded with gold poured in from the New World, the iconoclastic ideas of the Renaissance clashed with the iron fist of the Inquisition.

Obligingly, the city recently kicked off a three-year celebration of the world's most famous lover featuring costumed street parades through the end of this month, open-air theatrical performances in the gardens of the Alcázar royal palace through July 1, operas in September and October, and a film series highlighting Don Juan in cinema in November.

Don Juan debuted as a callous nobleman who despoiled well-born Sevillian ladies in an early-17th-century morality tale "The Trickster of Seville" by the Spanish monk-playwright Tirso de Molina . Over the centuries, the seducer reprised his role in dozens of memorable incarnations -- comic and tragic; literary and musical; despicable, incorrigible, or redeemed -- in the works of Molière, Mozart, Pushkin, Lord Byron, George Bernard Shaw, and Ingmar Bergman, to name a few.

Popular lore has it that the best-known Spanish version, the 1844 play "Don Juan Tenorio" by José Zorrilla , was probably based on a real-life 17th-century Sevillian nobleman named Miguel Mañara who reputedly seduced young women and dueled their affronted fathers before repenting and endowing a charity hospital shortly before his death.