Maria Luisa Park, Seville

by Travel Andalucia | May 19, 2023 | Gardens, Jardines, Naturaleza, Nature, Parks, Parque, Parques, Sevilla, Seville

We are in 1914 and Seville opens a public park that until 1893 formed part of the private gardens of the widowed Duchess of Montpensier, Luisa Fernanda de Borbón. In these gardens her children ran and died. Only two survived. And among her gazebos her husband, Don Antonio de Orleans, Duke of Montpensier, conspired, trying to occupy the throne of her sister-in-law, Elizabeth II. In these gardens of nineteenth-century conspiracies, a park was created that would serve as a background landscape for an event that brought Seville into modernity: the Ibero-American Exhibition of 1929.

We are in 1914 and Europe is at war. Landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier tries to cross France and reach neutral Spain. His destination: Seville. There he is creating a minimal paradise in which he has devised games of shadows and lights, of water and fabulous flowers.

The park designed by Forestier was inaugurated on April 18, 1914 with the name of María Luisa in homage to the duchess.

It will take a year for Forestier’s diplomatic efforts to come to fruition. At last he can contemplate his creation: a fabulous landscape of rose bushes that smell of velvet and that mix with the aniseed smell of the oleanders; of vegetal galleries with architectures of geraniums, lilies and carnations, and of green avenues of elms, ash trees and palm trees.

Forestier had sent his assistant Chevalier to the Côte d’Azur to look for species that he will introduce into a garden that he has only dreamed of. Because Forestier’s dreams when he fabs about this park are strange and almost impossible. They are blue dreams that smell like laurel and jasmine.

Forestier had seen the gardens of the Montpensiers, which surrounded the Palace of Saint Elmo. He walked many times through Mount Gurugú and the Isleta de los Patos, which was reputed to be the place of the idyll of Alfonso XII and his cousin María de las Mercedes, daughter of the Dukes of Montpensier.

All this world is taken into account by Forestier to include it in the park that he draws in his dreams. But also prints from other historic gardens in Seville slip through. See the Andalusian gardens of La Buhaira, the Renaissance spaces of the Alcázar and even the missing gardens of Patín de las Damas or the mysterious garden of the poet Francisco de Rioja which, according to tradition, must have been in streets near the Monastery of San Clemente. In fact, Forestier is convinced that he knows exactly what the yellow roses in that garden smelled like, which no longer exists except in a few poems.

Forestier will try to make the María Luisa Park something new but also an old reflection of Seville. There will be the sets of pumps from the Islamic gardens and even fabulous details such as a version of the concentric fountain of the Hospital de los Venerables. The park is Seville, even if it is another new Seville, different, modern, with wide perspectives and vegetal avenues.

They are no longer the shady gardens through which the dead infants of the Montpensier family walked, but rather a setting in which the sun shines as in an impressionist painting. A place that Forestier will try to reproduce in the last of his gardens, the one in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris where he will die one day in November 1930, when the palm trees in his Sevillian park had already reached the height that he imagined in one of his dreams.

Websites of interest

Parque de María Luisa

Nombre: Parque de María Luisa