Is a Month in Seville Worth the Splurge?

As soon as we arrived in Seville, we knew that we’d be going over budget. This is an exciting city with so much on offer. There are so many historic sights to visit, flamenco shows to see and a seemingly endless number of tapas restaurants to discover. All of these things are an essential part of the Seville experience and none of it comes cheap, with the possible exception of the tapas. 

With our month in Seville coming to a close, this is the time when we look back at our experiences and put a price tag on it: how much did we spend and what did we get for it?  And in the case of Seville, by how much did we end up going over budget?

We knew that a month in a city like Seville was going to add up very quickly. As soon as we arrived, we were almost overwhelmed with the entertainment options. However, for those of you sticking to a budget, there are a number of free entertainment options. Of course, it’s free to enjoy the overall atmosphere of the city; you can spend hours or even days getting lost in the historic centre. 

We were also happy to find that the Rick Steves app has a free audio tour of Seville. These are only available for a few cities and Seville happens to be one of them. So we followed the tour and learned the history of Seville’s most important sights: the Cathedral, the Giralda Tower, Plaza de Triunfa and the Santa Cruz neighbourhood, which was the former Jewish quarter. This tour was the perfect way to kickstart our time in the city.

For more free experiences, if you love walking as much as we do, there’s a wonderful walk by the river, where all the cyclists, joggers and rowers come to get their exercise. And you can pop over to the other side of the river to explore the neighbourhood of Triana, which is just hopping with tapas bars. There’s also the Parque de Maria Luisa, which is Seville’s largest green space. It has a really ornate building and beautiful water features. 

And that’s as far as we got with free stuff. The rest was very spendy.

In fact, we ended up doing much more than we could cover in our video and blog post. First, we went into the Seville Cathedral, which is a must see if you like tall ceilings and a whole lot of gold. Its most famous treasure is the tomb of Christopher Columbus. The other big ticket sight is the Alcazar, an incredibly beautiful medieval palace with a blend of Spanish Christian and Moorish architecture. And we couldn’t miss a live flamenco performance, which was one of the highlights of our trip.

We didn’t just see the sights in Seville; we also spent a day in the city of Cordoba. This city has a historic centre that’s a maze of charming little alleys and beautiful buildings. We loved Cordoba so much that we decided right away that we have to come back and spend a full month there sometime.

Of course, heading out to Cordoba meant that we needed some sort of transportation. We could have taken a train but it turned out that renting a car was actually cheaper in this case. For getting around in Seville, we also gave electric scooters a try for the first time. My father was visiting us here for a couple weeks and he really tried his best to get me on a scooter; he was totally unsuccessful. But Gillian managed just with the scooters just fine and used them for short trips around the city.

The next important part of travel is, of course, dining out. And we did most of our dining out right in our own neighbourhood of Alameda de Hercules. This is a pedestrian area famous for its trendy bars and restaurants.    

To be honest, we really struggled with the Spanish hours for dining out. In fact, during our two months in Spain, we didn’t end up having a single dinner out. This is just because the locals eat dinner at the time when we normally go to bed. But this wasn’t a problem because we focused all our dining out during the afternoon tapas hours, between 1 and 4pm. 

Of course we couldn’t eat tapas for every meal of the day; we still needed to do some cooking at home. In our first day in Seville video, you saw Gillian doing a big shop at the Mercadona. In between those big stock ups, we would just pop across the street and grab a few essentials at the Carrefour Express, which has a very impressive selection of groceries despite being so small. It might cost slightly extra to shop at the Carrefour but we couldn’t argue with the convenience since our apartment was less than a minute away.

Through lots of trial and error, we’ve found that having a great location is really critical to enjoying our stay. And for us that means being close to the main sights, great restaurants and — just as important — having a green space for a walk.

Our Airbnb in Seville hit all the right notes. We’re just a 20-minute walk away from the main attractions, which was perfect for working off all the tapas. We had trendy restaurants right around the corner and we’re minutes away from the river, which was a perfect place to walk the dogs.   

The inside of our Airbnb was equally appealing, with charming old fashioned wooden shutter windows and vintage chic styling in the living room. The kitchen was modern with lots of counter space and all the appliances we needed. We did end up paying more than usual for this place, since it has two bedrooms. With my father along for the trip, we needed the extra room. If you want the full in-depth tour, you can check it out in our first day in Seville video. 

Now for the costs. In some cities that we’ve visited, it’s easy to get pretty far on a shoestring budget. We found that Seville just wasn’t one of those cities. Sure we could have had fewer tapa or not seen the inside of the cathedral or not gone to a flamenco show. However, we would have missed out on some pretty essential experiences; these are the reasons to come to Seville in the first place. 

We did end up with our most expensive month to date but we’re not worried about it because we know that we’ll balance out our expenses over the course of the year. That’s the beauty of slow travel and going from low cost countries to high cost ones and then back again. 

With that, let’s see what the damage was for a very splurgy month in Seville. First, entertainment came in at $118 USD; those flamenco shows do not come cheap. Transportation came in at $85 USD and that was to rent a car for a couple days, get a couple Ubers and even try out scooters. Dining out was $365 USD and we felt that was surprisingly affordable for dining out every other day. Groceries came in at $426 USD. Finally, our Airbnb; this was the item that really sent our budget over. It came in at $2,206.

The total amount we spent for a full month was $3,200 USD, which we thought was a worthwhile spend. In fact, we knew right from day one that Seville was going to be a very memorable place to spend the month. It may have been high cost but it was also high value.