Sevilla

That mix of peoples did not last. Seville was where the massacres of 1391 began before spreading across Castile and Aragon: some 4,000 Jews were killed here, many more were forced to convert, and every synagogue became a church. In 1478 the Inquisition opened its first tribunal in the city, and in 1481 it burned six people at its first auto de fe. Yet the same city built on a grand scale. Peter I raised a Mudéjar palace in the Alcázar in the 1360s with the help of craftsmen from Granada, and on the site of the Almohad mosque rose a cathedral begun after 1401 and finished in 1506, the largest Gothic church in the world.

In 1503 the Casa de Contratación was placed here, making Seville the gateway to the Indies even though ships had to sail some 80 kilometres up the Guadalquivir to reach it, and in the 16th century it grew into one of the largest cities of western Europe. Then the river turned against it. Silting in the 1620s made the harbor harder to use, the plague of 1649 killed almost half the people, and in 1717 the Casa followed the trade downstream to Cádiz. Seville turned to industry instead, and the Royal Tobacco Factory, begun in 1728, was on its completion in 1771 the largest industrial building in the world.