Plaza Nueva sits at the heart of old Seville, but its name is a little misleading. There is nothing particularly new about it. For three centuries, this ground was occupied by a vast Franciscan monastery, until the Napoleonic Wars left it badly damaged and the city tore it down in the 1800s to create the square you see today.

At its centre stands a bronze equestrian statue of King Ferdinand III, the man who seized Seville from its Muslim rulers in 1248. Below him, almost as an afterthought, his son Alfonso X holds a book. Ferdinand, known as El Santo, was declared a saint; his mummified body is still opened to public veneration four times a year in the cathedral nearby.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use Plaza Nueva as their starting point into Seville's historic centre, tracing the city's transformation from a Moorish capital to Spain's gateway to the Americas.