t is located on Resolana street , within the San Gil neighborhood , which belongs to the Casco Antiguo district of the city of Seville ( Andalusia ). In front of it is the Basilica de la Macarena , which houses the image of theVirgen de la Esperanza Macarena , one of the most characteristic images of Holy Week in Seville 1 and closely linked to the door.
It is the entrance of the wall located to the north of the city, and the largest in the whole complex, and is part of the few remains that remain of the city walls, together with the wall cloth that connects it. with the Puerta de Córdoba through a wall in which seven towers are preserved. Although the walled enclosure of the city was built in the time of Julius Caesar on the old Carthaginian defense , the door corresponds to the extension carried out by Sultan Ali ibn Yusuf in the twelfth century , and its current appearance is the result of a remodeling carried out carried out between the years 1723 and 1795, in which the Islamic architectural elements were replaced by the classicist air that it presents today.
It was the door used by the kings who visited the city for the first time, and before its walls an altar was erected in which they performed their homage lawsuit, and after which they were given the keys of the city, 5 and so on. Alfonso XI of Castile (1327), Isabella I of Castile (1477), Ferdinand II of Aragon (1508), Carlos I of Spain and his fiancée Isabella of Portugal (1526), ??and finally Philip IV (1624) did so .
The ensemble is crowned by a ceramic altarpiece by the painter Manuel Rodríguez representing the Virgin of Hope Macarena , inaugurated in 1923 by the Infanta María de la Esperanza de Borbón-Dos Sicilias .
The remains of the city's walled enclosure, including this gate, were declared a Site of Cultural Interest in 1985 .
Situation and toponym
The gate is located in what was the Macarena suburb , it was the access to the walled enclosure that was further north of the city and from where the old bridle path to Extremadura started . Its wall cloth joined to one side with the Carmona gate and to the other with the Córdoba gate , being located in this last section the White Tower . It is currently located on Calle Resolana , in front of the Basilica de la Macarena (built in 1941 ) and close to the Hospital de las Cinco Llagas (seat of the Andalusian Parliament).), in the San Gil neighborhood and Casco Antiguo district .
Regarding its name, there are various theories about the origin of the word Macarena, and historians do not agree when it comes to fixing a specific one. The most distant proposals attribute a Greek origin to the word , being linked to the name of Macaria , daughter of Hercules , founder of the city. There is also the hypothesis of its Roman origin , specifically a patrician named Macarius , who would have had large properties in the area, Finally, the closest and most common option among historians is that of its Arab origin, through a Moorish infanta who lived next to the wall, or of a Moor of the same name, as recounted in 1587 by the writer Alonso Morgado in his History of Seville:
that the Puerta de la Macarena took its name from a leading Moor called Macarena, because he used to go out through this gate to his estate half a league from Seville, where even today there remains a Torrezilla called Macarena named after this Moor, who built it in that your belonging. And for the same reason it is called or and also Collado de la Cabeça de Macarena, on the road to Rinconada, a town at that time a league from Seville.
This Arab option seems to corroborate the existence of qaryat Maqrana (the Macarena farmhouse), attached to the itinerary called Mamarr al-Sabila (the way of travelers) 11 which was made up of the farmhouse itself and a fortified tower, and was located in the current Huerta de la Torrecilla, next to the San Fernando cemetery .
History
12th–15th centuries
The walls of Seville were built in the time of Julius Caesar to replace the existing Carthaginian palisade, and enlarged during the rule of his son Caesar Augustus . Later, in the 12th century , the Arabs carried out a major expansion that doubled the walled enclosure under the rule of Sultan Ali ibn Yusuf . The Macarena gate corresponds to the Almoravid period of the city, so it must have been built in this last extension of the complex, although the historian Santiago Montoto de Sedas maintains that this is, according to tradition, the only gate that is preserved. one of those ordered to be built by Julius Caesar.
Legend has it that one night, during the siege of the city, King Ferdinand III of Castile , being in the camp installed outside the city walls, prayed to the Virgin of the Kings to ask for help, and that she called him by his name. and he told her: " You have a constant protector in my image of Antigua, which you love very much and who is in Seville ", and promised her victory; Later, an angel made him enter the city until he reached the main mosque , inside which he was shown the wall that hid it, which became transparent, just like glass, and the king was able to contemplate the image of the Virgin of the old onejust as it had been painted centuries ago. The chroniclers place the king's entrance through the Puerta de Jerez , and they say that when the Christians found out that the monarch was in the city , Diego López de Haro , VII Lord of Vizcaya , and Rodrigo González Girón , whose The camps were in front of the Puerta de la Macarena, and with six other knights they entered the city through it; When they arrived at the main mosque, they had to face the Muslims who discovered them, although they managed to leave the city and verify that the king was already in the camp.
Later, within the estates that Alfonso X of Castile granted to the two hundred knights, many near the door are included. In the year 1358 , the infante Don Fadrique , progenitor of Enríquez's lineage , entered through this door to die deceived in the city by order of his stepbrother Pedro I of Castile , and in 1413 he returned to his hometown Fray Diego de Sevilla , who had been in the Jerónimos of Guadalupe , and the following year carried out the foundation of the Monastery of San Jerónimo de Buenavistain a field outside the gate. Already during the reign of Enrique IV of Castile , the king had Rodrigo de Ribera gate , and the farce of Ávila caused it to be taken by the supporters of the infante Alfonso of Castile , although it was recovered by the enrichists shortly after.
On July 24, 1477, Queen Isabella the Catholic arrived in the city riding under a crimson brocade canopy with vermilion fringes, of greater magnitude and richness than those used by her in her royal entrances to date in other cities. Arriving at the Puerta de la Macarena at ten o'clock in the morning, she swore respect to the privileges of the city on a silver altar and made her triumphal entrance through the door. The arch was adorned with a brocade and crimson cloth, and hundreds of people attended the ceremony, not only the civil authorities of the city, but also the ecclesiastical ones, the aljama of Jews and Muslims, and common people; King Ferdinand did not accompany his wife because he was absent inAragon . The Catholic Monarchs ruled in 1491 that the cereal that arrived at the walled enclosure of the city from the outside, entered only through this door and through those of Triana and Carmona , as stated in their regulations « And that the bread that so it is brought from outside, that it enters the city of Seville through the gates of Triana and Carmona, and Macarena, and not through other gates ».
16th-18th centuries
In the year 1508 Fernando el Católico would enter the city through the gate , accompanied by Germana de Foix , and for which triumphal arches were installed for the first time in Seville; in total there were thirteen, which covered the victories of the monarch in scenes. His grandson King Carlos I of Spain would arrive on March 10, 1526 , took an oath and paid homage to the city at the same gate, which came to her to celebrate his wedding with Isabel of Portugal . Seven triumphal arches were erected in the city to adorn the city on the occasion of the lavish reception, and the first of them was located behind this gate. It was dedicated to prudence , and on it appeared the emperor dressed in blue, a Latin inscription on the front and another in Castilian on the opposite, which read: " Honor that the Regiment and People of Seville do to Prudence, virtue imperial, first among all, because everyone flattened the virtues that accompanied it, and showed in a short time done what was before incredible ». The empress entered the city the next day, the day the wedding was celebrated, and she also did so through this gate, and she was accompanied under a canopy to the cathedral. ?
When the monarch Philip II of Spain was going to make his first and only visit to the city in 1570, without everyone's agreement, it was decided that, although historically his predecessors made their triumphal entrance through this gate, it would be through the Puerta de Goles , due to the inconveniences, general view and state of the adjacent streets around the Macarena, so it was the only time that a monarch did not enter through it, and Goles since then, has been called the Royal Gate . His grandson Philip IV of Spain resumed the tradition of his predecessors, and on March 1 , 1624 , after spending the night in Carmona, made his public entry into the city through the gate, crossing the city to the Reales Alcázares, being the only entry a Spanish monarch made into the city during the entire 17th century . On July 5 of the same year , Luis Fernández de Córdoba Portocarrero , recently appointed Archbishop of Seville, entered the city through this gate .
The Seville council carried out purely aesthetic works in the Puerta de Jerez and in the Macarena, for which it sent a report to the king in 1561, who responded satisfactorily, insisting on the general tidying up of the same and its surroundings. Thus, that same year Pedro Hernández, inspector of the work of the Puerta de Jerez, received from Pedro Milanés, a marble worker, a slab for the Puerta de la Macarena, which cost 28 ducats. The door was also modified in 1630 , when a tombstone was installed on an ordinancedestined to the guards of the door, so that they did not carry out their functions outside it; The slab, which is currently preserved embedded in the wall of the arch, says: « By provision of the king our lord of September 20, 1630, the guards were prohibited from going out to the roads or any other place to fulfill their obligation , nor depart from his door, whose surveillance is committed to the assistant, Mr. D. Diego de Ulloa being a deputy. Year of 1630 ». Shortly after, during the plague outbreak that devastated the city in 1646 , six cemeteries had to be created in which to bury so many deceased, one of them being installed outside the door. The door must then have been one more object of the popular culture of the city, as evidenced by the fact that the playwright Juan Pérez de Montalbán (1602-1638) wrote in the 17th century a comedy in two parts entitled " The door Macarena ”, represented in the Corral de la Cruz in Madrid in 1717 , and which is inspired by this door.
In 1723 it underwent a renovation by order of Alonso Pérez de Saavedra y Narváez , Count of Jarosa , while he was mayor of the city, and in 1795 it was rebuilt by the city architect José Chamorro , eliminating the Almohad aspect and giving it the air classicist that it has today.
19th-21st centuries
In 1836 , due to the invasion of Andalusia by the Carlist forces , a moat with a drawbridge was built in order to fortify the complex. Possibly it suffered damage during the conflict, and once it was finished it was reformed and painted, and an altarpiece dedicated to the Virgen de la Piedad that was guarding its interior was removed, all of this prior to 1849 , and it was one of the doors that So they didn't close at night. On July 17, 1854 , General Leopoldo O'Donnell entered the city through this arch .
Beginning with the 1868 revolution , the city wall began to be demolished, and the work was completed in 1873 . This measure did not affect the walls of the Macarena, which were saved thanks to an allegation by the Monuments Commission about their historical value that made them different from the rest, but the city council continued with the intention of making them disappear. In 1907 a file was started on the opening of communication routes in the section of the wall between the Puerta de la Macarena and that of Córdoba, and on November 1 , 1908 it was declared a National Monument: «Official letter of transfer from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts in which the Royal Order is communicated declaring the section of the wall between the Puerta de la Macarena and the Puerta de Córdoba a National Monument ».Despite this official declaration, in 1909 the city council continued to maintain its idea of ??widening and redeveloping the neighborhood, for which it presented the following determination regarding its demolition.
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