El Cid Campeador
El Cid Campeador stands in Seville as a bronze equestrian statue by American sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. You see Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the legendary medieval hero, mounted on his muscular horse Babieca. His bearded figure raises a pennant above a stone base near the Glorieta de San Diego, on an avenue named after him since 1920.
Huntington completed the sculpture in 1927 after studying and revising the design from 1924 onward. The Hispanic Society of America gave the first cast to Spain for the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, while Vicente Traver and Mariano Benlliure created the Seville pedestal. An inscription by historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal connects the monument with the city, and the gift reflects cultural ties between Spain and the United States.
Several versions stand elsewhere, including New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Buenos Aires and Valencia. This Seville casting also appeared in Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane, while artist Olek covered it with a crochet suit in 2013.
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- Seville
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Spots like this one are the stops myTuur strings into tours through Seville. In the app, each story begins where you stand: walk up to a spot and it starts, read it on screen or listen as you go, then follow the route to the next one.
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myTuur is a free city-guide app. Its tours are built from spots, and each spot carries a story that starts when you get there, to read or to listen to as you like.