Nearly in the centre of the city is the Convent of Santa Inés, with a beautiful and tastefully restored chapel. The façade is ancient and graceful. This church contains the remains (said to be uncorrupted) of the foundress, Doña Maria Coronel, one of Don Pedro’s numerous victims. That monarch had conceived a violent passion for her, in the hopes of gratifying which he put her husband to death in the Torre del Oro. The widow, far from yielding to his solicitations, took the veil, and at last, to secure herself from his persecutions, destroyed her beauty by means of vitriol--a species of self-immolation much applauded by the devout in the ages of faith. Her sister, Doña Aldonza, was less successful in resisting the ardent monarch, but died, in the odour of sanctity, Abbess of Santa Inés.
Among the secular buildings erected under the Castilian _régime_ was the existing Tower of Don Fadrique, standing in the gardens of the Convent of the Poor Clares. It was named after the son of St Ferdinand and Beatriz of Swabia, who was put to death by Alfonso el Sabio in 1276. The tower is a fine square structure of Roman workmanship, seemingly, in its lowest floor, and showing a mixture of Moorish and Gothic architecture in its upper half. It formed part of a sumptuous palace erected in 1252, and bestowed in 1289 on the Poor Clares by King Sancho the Brave.
In the Calle Guzman el Bueno is a mansion called the Casa Olea. It contains a fine hall, 8½ metres square, the work of Moorish artisans of the time of Don Pedro. The beautiful inlaid and gilded _artesonado_ ceiling was removed about a century ago; light is admitted through windows of the horseshoe pattern, and the decorations consist of the characteristic stucco-work, latticing, and _ajaraca_ or trellis-work, as fine as any to be seen at the Lindaraja of Granada. The dado of coloured tiles has almost completely disappeared. The Palacio de Montijo, near the church of Omnium Sanctorum, reveals many traces of Mudejar workmanship, as also does a hall in the _Casa morisca_ of the Calle de Abades--not to be confounded with the Casa de Abades, belonging to the Renaissance.
Seville in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries possessed no doubt many palaces and private dwellings of magnificence; but it was in ecclesiastical architecture that the spirit of the age found its truest expression and noblest monuments.