Old Port of Seville

The Old Port of Seville is a waterfront where the city’s vanished maritime past intersects with the family legend of Carlota Bruner and Manuel Xaloc. In the present, its dark, quiet quays prompt Macarena Bruner to reconstruct the crowded harbor that once stood there; in her account, it is also the place where Xaloc departed for the Americas and eventually came back rich, carrying twenty pearls for his wedding to Carlota.

The modern waterfront and the vanished harbor

At night, the shore appears deserted. Tourist boats lie dark and still at their bollards beside concrete pontoons, while black water reflects the lights of Triana across the river. Headlights trace the bridges of Isabel II and San Telmo. The surviving waterfront offers a quiet, reduced image of the port whose history Macarena describes.

She recalls a time, only a century earlier, when steamships and sailing vessels docked here. The harbor was part of Seville’s great trade with the Americas: ships traveled downriver to Sanlúcar and then Cádiz before crossing the Atlantic. Brigantines, schooners, and smaller craft once filled both banks; fishing boats and white-canopied boats bringing tobacco-factory workers from Triana shared the water. Port sheds, cranes, and warehouses occupied the quay.

The contemporary scene is framed by reminders of the city above it: the Arenal promenade, the dome of the Maestranza theater, modern buildings that interrupt the view of the distant Giralda, and the concealed district of Santa Cruz. Macarena’s account makes the old harbor present through a landscape that no longer contains it.

Carlota’s view from the dovecote

Macarena imagines the former harbor as a forest of masts and sails—the prospect Carlota saw from the dovecote tower. That remembered view gives the port a personal scale: it is not only a center of commerce but also the setting from which Carlota watched the ships and the life moving along the river.

The walk makes the difference between memory and direct experience explicit. Macarena speaks nostalgically of a Seville she never knew, reconstructing it from old photographs and family history. The harbor she describes is therefore at once a real historical place and an inherited landscape, preserved through stories rather than personal memory.

Xaloc’s departure and return

The quay becomes the point of departure in Macarena’s account of Carlota and Manuel Xaloc. After Xaloc was found lingering around the barred windows of Casa del Postigo, Macarena’s great-grandfather Luis caused him to lose his job and used his influence to prevent him from finding work elsewhere. With no prospects, Xaloc decided to seek his fortune in the Americas; Carlota promised to wait for him.

Xaloc sailed from this very quay aboard a schooner called Nausicaa. Carlota was not allowed even to say goodbye. From the dovecote she watched the ship go downriver and later insisted that Xaloc stood at its stern, waving a handkerchief until the vessel disappeared—though, Macarena acknowledges, it would have been impossible for her to see him from so far away.

Xaloc’s absence lasted six years. He gained command of a ship and traded contraband among Mexico, Florida, and the Cuban coasts. Macarena relates that he was also reputed to have turned to piracy: some ships that crossed his path were found mysteriously plundered or sank without trace, and the Americans put a price on his head. The harbor that had marked his departure is also where he unexpectedly returned, carrying bank drafts, gold coins, and a velvet bag of twenty remarkable pearls for his wedding.

A landscape of departure and return

The Old Port links the city’s historical decline to the lovers’ separation and reunion. Its empty nighttime quays stand against Macarena’s crowded account of ships, workers, cranes, and Atlantic commerce; its role in the family story turns that lost maritime world into the setting for Carlota’s vigil and Xaloc’s long absence. The distance between what Carlota could see and what she later claimed to see preserves the legend’s uncertainty, while the harbor itself remains the fixed point connecting departure, waiting, and return.