A Guide to Eating and Drinking in Seville

  Tapas in Seville

There’s a popular expression, “En Sevilla no se come, sino se tapea”. Roughly translated this means: “In Seville, you don’t eat, you eat tapas.” And sure enough, right across the city’s various districts, tapas bars dominate.

Eating and drinking in Seville is very much like Spain as a whole: fantastic. All the usual tapas favorites can be found and, of course, a few local specialties make an appearance, too. But what really makes the city stand out is how each part of town seems – both during the day, and after dark – like a little universe unto itself.

For travelers on a really tight budget, however, Seville also has a couple of fantastic markets. One sits in a corner of the Plaza de la Encarnacion, another in the Macarena (on Calle Feria) and yet another in Triana on the river. All have fantastic produce, and all are very, very cheap.

But most people will find that (the expensive touristy places of Santa Cruz aside), Seville offers some of the best, most varied and most reasonable dining options in the whole of Spain…

To the south of the river, Triana is perhaps the best place to go for the city’s legendary fried fish. Mouthwatering battered ‘puntillitas’ (baby squid) or some ‘chanquetes’ (whitebait) can be washed down with a ‘caña’ (small beer) or a drop of ice-cold ‘fino’ (dry sherry).

The streets set back off Calle Betis, around the church of Santa Ana and towards Plaza de Cuba, have a number of scruffy little places where a couple of plates of good food are unlikely to set you back too much (and some not so scruffy restaurants where it might…)

Across town, the Alfalfa is full of noisy, atmospheric bars where people, spilling out onto the streets, eat from barrels or standing at windows. Indeed, a great way to start an evening is over a coffee or a quick beer under the trees in the Plaza Alfalfa itself.

To the north, there are several excellent places around the Plaza de los Terceros in Santa Catalina. Beyond there, from north to south, the Macarena is full of neighborhood bars until, down on the Alameda de Hercules, it ends in a joyful mess of plastic chairs, cheap food and seedy nightlife.

As the evening gets going, it’s all too tempting not to stop. And that’s the problem with Seville: the appetite for having a good time in the city is so intense that it’s difficult not to get dragged into one of the wildest, longest and most chaotic nightlife scenes in Spain.

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