Sail 7Cs

Kinda fun, sailing to Seville. Its 50 miles inland!

Seville lies miles up the wide and gentle Rio Quadalaquivir. We navigated the shallow river mouth and enjoyed sailing when we could, and motoring when the wind died. We took our time, moving up river with the flood, which ran, surprisingly, all the way to Seville. We anchored early evening, just before dark, when the flood turned to ebb, and stayed the night in the delicious peace of the Spanish country side. When we reached Seville, we could have locked into the eastern river branch and entered the downtown harbour. We opted instead to anchor in the free river about four miles from the city centre near a small yacht club. We were glad we did - we enjoyed celebrity status for being one of the rare cruisers to come to town. It was lovely to have goats on one river bank and a small town on the other. We did day excursions by bus into the city centre.

We were interested to learn that at the peak of the Spanish empire, Seville was the only centre in Spain where the King allowed new world goods brought in from the off shore colonies to be traded. This preserved the region and protected the main trading centre from attack by other nations, as they were otherwise wont to do. It would have been a sight watching the square rigged Spanish ships, with no engines, working their way patiently up and down 50 miles of river with the tides!

We hung out about a week in the heat before catching the ebb back out to sea. Very hot in Seville, away from the ocean, we discovered. We scooped a huge sunken tree when we weighed anchor which slowed us down a tad. As on the way up river, we anchored about mid way down river to wait for the next day’s ebb. Again, we had another delicious night in the Spanish country side quiet, though we were hiding below decks from the hungry hordes of mosquitos. Next day we ran down to the sea and made our way down the coast to Caciz then Sancti Petri, where we find ourselves again up a lovely river.