Plaza de Santa Cruz is a Seville square organized around a large wrought-iron cross, on the site of a church burned by the French. In the novel it gathers several histories at once: the place where Ana once danced, the route she avoids after her heart illness, and the setting where José helps Frank recover a crucial part of her identity.

Setting and History

The square is described as a little plaza encircled by streets and marked by a large Baroque iron cross. José tells Frank that the old church which gave its name to the square and neighborhood was burned by the French. Its visible monument thus stands in for a vanished building, making the location a place where absence is physically present.

The square lies close to the wall separating it from the gardens of the Alcázar, specifically the Jardín de los Poetas. When José brings Frank there, the nearby boundary and the cross give the place a particular dramatic shape: Frank is asked to look around, and his attention moves from the setting’s history to the person whose past it contains.

Ana’s Avoidance

For Ana, Plaza de Santa Cruz is tied to her years as a flamenco dancer. She had danced there nightly in the last years of her career, and on the final night she performed, an ambulance took her away from the plaza. Afterward, during a visit to Seville with José, she would not return to it.

Ana and José spent several days in the city, walking through María Luisa Park, Plaza de España, the Alcázar gardens, and Santa Cruz. But whenever they approached the square’s old wrought-iron cross, Ana took José’s arm and diverted him down another alley. She did not explain this avoidance or speak about her heart condition. The detour makes the square a silent boundary between the life of performance she had lived and the illness she could not bring herself to discuss.

The Square and Ana’s Public Image

The square’s significance is not limited to Ana’s dancing. Her resemblance to Goya’s La maja desnuda had made her conspicuous in public: in Madrid, people stopped to point at her, and some reacted with near-horror. José says that she sometimes preferred the Botanical Garden as a refuge, as if hiding from the stigma attached to her appearance. Against that public identity, Santa Cruz recalls a different one: Ana as a famous Sevillian bailaora, known for her work on the flamenco stage.

That contrast shapes Frank’s recognition. After dinner in Seville, José leads him through narrow lanes to Plaza de Santa Cruz and points out the iron cross. Frank initially fails to understand José’s suggestion that he is looking without seeing. As they circle the cross, he suddenly remembers that Ana was not only associated with Goya’s paintings: she was also one of Seville’s most famous flamenco dancers. José’s gesture redirects Frank from the image that has absorbed his attention to the living person and her artistic past.

Narrative Significance

The square connects avoidance, loss, and recognition without resolving them into a single meaning. For Ana, it is a place she cannot approach without recalling the last performance and the ambulance; for José, it is part of the city’s shared history with her; and for Frank, it becomes the setting for a delayed recognition of who she was. Its cross marks not only a burned church but also the threshold of a memory that Ana and José have approached indirectly, while Frank reaches it only when José makes him look again.