The Giralda is the cathedral's most recognizable feature, but it began life as something else entirely. In 1184, the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf commissioned architect Ben Ahmad Baso to build a grand minaret for Seville's new mosque, modeled on the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh. By 1198, four gilt bronze spheres crowned its summit. A powerful earthquake in 1365 shook them loose, and they were never recovered. After Ferdinand III conquered Seville in 1248 and the mosque was converted for Christian worship, the minaret stood largely unchanged for centuries. In the 1560s, architect Hernan Ruiz the Younger added the Renaissance belfry that hides the original Almohad lantern, and in 1568 a bronze weather vane called El Giraldillo -- representing the triumph of faith -- was installed at the very top. The tower reaches 104.5 meters. Rather than climbing stairs, visitors ascend a series of ramps, wide enough that the muezzin once rode a horse to the top.

The royal chapel holds the remains of Ferdinand III, the warrior-king who took Seville from the Moors, alongside his son Alfonso the Wise and their descendant Pedro the Cruel. But the cathedral's most visited tomb belongs to Christopher Columbus, whose elaborate 19th-century monument depicts four allegorical figures representing the kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Navarre, and Aragon bearing his coffin aloft. Columbus's remains traveled almost as much after death as in life -- from Valladolid to Seville, then to Santo Domingo, to Havana, and finally back to Seville in 1898. DNA analysis in 2006 confirmed that the bones in the cathedral are indeed his, though perhaps not all of them.

The cathedral contains 80 chapels and was once said to host 500 daily masses. Among its treasures is Bartolome Esteban Murillo's The Vision of St. Anthony, painted in 1656. In November 1874, thieves cut the figure of Saint Anthony out of the canvas and vanished. Months later, a Spanish immigrant walked into a New York City art gallery and offered the fragment for sale, claiming it was an original Murillo. The gallery owner, Hermann Schaus, negotiated a price of $250, then contacted the Spanish consulate. The stolen piece was shipped back to Seville via Havana and Cadiz, and restorer Salvador Martinez Cubells stitched the saint back into his vision in 1875. The altarpiece behind the high altar is equally staggering -- Pierre Dancart's carved retable, begun in 1482 and completed in 1526, is considered one of the finest in the world, depicting scenes from the life of Christ in gilded wood across an enormous wall of carved figures.

Fragments of the original mosque survive in plain sight. The Patio de los Naranjos -- the Court of the Oranges -- was once the mosque's ablution courtyard, where worshippers cleansed themselves before prayer. Its fountain still flows, and orange trees still shade the flagstones. The Door of Forgiveness, opening onto the courtyard from Calle Alemanes, retains its horseshoe arch from the Almohad era, later adorned with Renaissance terracotta sculptures by Miguel Perrin. Walk through and you cross a threshold between two civilizations that shaped this city. The mosque was built in 1172 by order of Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf; the cathedral replaced it beginning in 1402. Both were, in their time, statements of power made in stone. One was covered over by the other, but never entirely erased.