Tips for visiting the Seville Fair for tourists
Seville has two major annual events: Holy Week and the Seville Fair. April is a very special month for the city, and as the fair usually takes place during the month, it has ended up being known as the April Fair. Due to the vagaries of the calendar, however, there are years when it can be spread between April and May or even take place entirely during the month of May.
💎 Basics of the Seville Fair
Charming ideas and recommendations for visiting Seville in April, the explosion of spring and Seville’s festivities.
1. Fair by horse-drawn carriage
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Horse-drawn carriage hire. Rides for the fair. 🐴 By the hour or full days.
2. 🙋Guided tours in Seville
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Are you coming to Seville for the fair? Visit the great monuments
3. 💃Tablaos in Seville
Sevillanas at the fair and flamenco in tablaos
4. 🛎️ Hotel Offers
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5. 🅿️ Parking in Seville Reserve your place.
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It is undoubtedly a week marked on the Sevillians’ calendars. The average citizen has a perfectly organised plan and has access to a caseta either as a member or as a guest of a close friend or relative. They almost certainly have one day set aside for a business lunch and another for a reunion with old friends. Everything that happens in Seville that week is centred on the fairground, while the city centre is much quieter and many establishments are closed.
And it’s not just a party for locals, people from the surrounding area and many national and international tourists come to enjoy the atmosphere.
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Hotels near the Feria de Sevilla. With discounted prices and payment at the hotel. The best selection of hotels, hostels and apartments next to the Real de la Feria de Sevilla
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Seville dresses up for the fair
For a week in April, always after Easter, the city is transformed, it becomes a celebration and this can be seen throughout the city of Seville. The Real de la Feria, the site where it is physically located, is in the Barrio de los Remedios, the neighbourhood adjacent to Triana, occupying a large area, almost a city itself within the big city.
The Fair has two main attractions: the casetas and the attractions.
The casetas are a very important part of the fairgrounds. It is not only the construction itself, but also the atmosphere inside that is striking. Although most of them are privately owned and belong to certain associations, there are some casetas at the fair that are open to the public. At the entrance, very close to the portico, a work that is always an allegory of a theme of interest to the city and which you should stop to contemplate, you can get a map to find out which casetas are open to the public and enjoy the atmosphere.
Another option is to meet someone and go to their caseta, where we will have the opportunity to have fun in smaller environments.
The Fair’s other great attraction is the Calle del Infierno, the street where the attractions that accompany the fair are located, and which delight both young and not-so-young alike. Here we can find traditional attractions such as the bumper cars, the witch train and others that will take us back to our childhood, as well as other more modern ones where we can get our adrenaline pumping.
The stalls scattered around the fairground will allow us to buy typical sweets, including cotton candy, win prizes, buy something and end the day with some nice chocolate with churros.
What can we do
There are some very marked traditions in this week that have almost become law. One of them is to make the night when the lighting is switched on, the first Monday of the fair, into what has come to be known as the night of the pescaíto, when the casetas serve this fish delicacy that tastes especially tasty at the fair.
Another very interesting activity to see, and to take part in if you get the chance, is the horse-drawn carriage parade through the fairground, either to see or to be seen. We can find famous people who also enjoy the fair week a lot. Book a horse-drawn carriage ride in Seville.
On the last day of the fair, there is a fireworks show that dismisses the fair until the following year, while the Sevillians begin to prepare with care and attention for their great occasion next April.
Eating at the fair
The fair is a place where you eat a lot but not always well.
Delicious dishes are served at any of the casetas with delicacies such as Spanish omelette, ham, fried fish, seafood, etc., very well washed down with Manzanilla sherry and other wines that are at their prime during fair season. The combination called rebujito, a mixture of Manzanilla and Seven-Up, is highly popular.
Bullfights at the fair
The week of the fair is bullfighting season and during the days it lasts there is art and tradition of bullfighting at the Plaza de Toros de Sevilla, one of the great temples of bullfighting. It is highly recommended, if your taste and your pocket allow it, to see some of the great figures of this art that delight fans during this festive period. It is undoubtedly one of the best times to see bullfights in Seville.
How to get there
The fair is located in an area on the outskirts of the centre of Seville, next to the Barrio de Los Remedios neighbourhood. You can walk from the centre if you feel like it. You just have to follow people in flamenco outfits.
The municipal transport company TUSSAM enables a special bus, which departs from the Prado de San Sebastián and drops us at the stop arranged for this purpose at the fairground. Also, the metro line 1 at Blas Infante and Parque de los Príncipes stations brings us within a short walk of the fairground.
The Charco de la Pava car parks have shuttle buses for those who arrive at the fair in their own private car.
All roads lead to the fair and the signage is very good.
How to behave if we are invited to a caseta
If you go to a caseta sponsored by a Sevillian you will have a great experience. You will surely be invited to eat and drink and you may find yourself embarrassed by it, depending on how well you know your host. The people of Seville are generally welcoming and treat visitors well, as long as they do not hang around forever.
The casetas are small private clubs formed by members who pay a considerable fee each year to have the right of entry. It is logical, therefore, that they value privacy and the controlled environment, hence the fact that not everyone is allowed in.
There are casetas that function as bars where you can go to the bar, order what you want and pay for it, but other more familiar ones do not work with money but with vouchers that members buy in advance. In this second case, you will not be able to order anything unless you have vouchers, which you will have to ask the host for. As in everything, act with moderation.
Apart from that, the caseta is nothing more than an enclosure where you eat, drink, dance and chat with family and friends. The members usually hire groups of Sevillanas singers to give atmosphere and people wear their best finery.
The super plan
Enjoying the fair to the maximum means getting up late, arriving at the fairgrounds for lunch, then going by horse and carriage to the bullfights, enjoying a good bullfight, returning to the fairgrounds by horse and carriage and starting to eat, drink and dance until the early hours of the morning, finishing with a chocolate with churros or some fritters.
This is the perfect plan for the affluent and authentic Sevillian fairgoer.
Let us summarise with a few tips
– If you are not from Seville and you do not have anyone from here to invite you to their caseta, you will have to make do with going to the public ones (less attractive) or simply stroll around and enjoy the atmosphere, which is no small thing. There are plenty of places to eat in the rides area or you can go into the neighbourhood next to the fair. The further away from the fair, the less hustle and bustle.
– At the entrance, next to the front page, there is a small tourist information office that can be very useful to organise your visit.
– Mind your wallets. As in any crowded place, there is some danger of pickpockets. Nevertheless, police surveillance is high and the compound is secure at all hours.
– There are many municipal services: lost children, medical care, public toilets …
– It is said that the authentic and most comfortable fair is that of weekdays. There are a lot of tourists and visitors from outside the province at the weekend, so many Sevillians prefer to go to the beach if the weather is good.
– Dress as you want, nobody is going to look down at you, but it does not hurt to at least add some flamenco detail such as a flower or a shawl. The women of Seville take their looks very seriously at the fair and it is wonderful to see the models on the streets. The flamenco dress is tremendously flattering.
– To experience the fair with charm, you can take a horse-drawn carriage tour. It will cost you a fortune, but it is undoubtedly a unique experience in the world. At your hotel or at the fairgrounds, if you ask the people in the sector, they will be able to guide you.
The origin of the fair
At the fair, the mornings are for the horses, recalling the cattle-breeding origins of the fiesta. Seville is the capital of an extensive agricultural region where horses and farmhouses and country people abound. The citizens who can, bring their horses and their best carriages to this city to stroll around the fair and recall the rural atmosphere of the 19th century, the origin of this fair.
The history of the Seville Fair is to a large extent an inevitable reflection of the recent history of the city itself, to which it is intimately linked as a manifestation of the collective spirit and also in terms of its own formal, functional and organisational evolution.
It was created in 1847 by a Royal Decree by Isabel II which established a three-day “April livestock fair” in the city, located in the Prado de San Sebastián, on the initiative of the councillors José Maria Ibarra and Narciso Bonaplata, Basque and Catalan, adopted Sevillians, to recover the ancient fairs of Seville, the origins of which date back to 1254.
The porticos have always had an ephemeral character and lasted for the duration of the festival itself. In 1847, a large green vegetal arch was installed, which is considered to be the first Feria portico. Throughout the years there has been a single exception to this rule: La Pasarela, a metallic structure that presided over the Fair from 1896 to 1920, had gas lighting and even some electric lights and was decorated with banners and pennants.
As time went by, the porticos increased in quality and size until, in 1980, now in Los Remedios, they began to take on a much more monumental character, recalling characteristic monuments of the city.
The Prado Fair maintained its original location until 1973, when the enormous size of the fair, the large number of casetas and the development of the area where it was traditionally located in Calle del Infierno, meant that it had to be moved to the land reclaimed from the river in Los Remedios, a place it still occupies today, although in recent years there have been many problems of overcrowding and lack of space – the number of casetas now exceeds a thousand – which have again raised the need for a new relocation.
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