Statues

I love statues. I love them because they put beauty and dignity in public spaces, because they become playgrounds for children, because they tell stories and also because most people don’t care about the stories. They live just their lives around the statues that provide their spaces with height and focus.

The City of Seville takes great care of its statues. It cleans them regularly and repairs them when needed.

This statue is in the square local to us, Plaza Gavidia.

It is Luis Daoíz, an artillery captain, and a hero of the Madrid uprising against French occupying forces on May 2^nd, 1808. The people wanted their king returned. ( Napoleon had him and his siblings under house arrest in France). The rebellion was suppressed and Daoíz was killed in the fighting. French reprisals on May 3^rd were ferocious (see Goya’s famous painting). But the combination of rebellion by army officers and popular indignation instigated the War of Independence that eventually drove the French occupying armies out of Spain.

Notice the ironwork. It‘s the tools of an artillery officer’s trade.

If you know Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books, or the TV series starring Sean Bean, or have studied history in an English school, you probably know this war as the Peninsular War and regard the Spanish as ungentlemanly guerillas who would be better off behaving like the noble Duke of Wellington. Such is the distorted nationalistic lens through which we, often unwittingly, view history. (Not that the Sharpe stories aren’t good. They’re great.)

So why is Daoíz here, in Plaza Gavidia, in Sevilla? Well, he was born in the area, before it became a nineteenth century square. He’s a son of Seville.