Estación de Plaza de Armas (Spain)

This time the Railway Heritage World blog went to Seville in Spain. On March 10, 2016, we visited the building Estación de Plaza de Armas, also known as Estación de Córdoba, it was the first railway station of the city and currently it is used as a market and a recreation space. The building won a honarable mention and it is listed in the Andalucía Built Heritage, so if you want to know more, you can go to this website:

http://www.iaph.es/patrimonio-inmueble-andalucia/resumen.do?id=i21890.

All the old images were collected in loco.

The History

The first building of this terminal station dated of 1859 as a temporary infrastructure. The permanent one was designed by the engineers Nicolás Suárez y Albizu, M. Lionnel and José Santos Silva in 1889 and it got ready in 1901. It has a Neo-Mudéjar style, a kind of Morish style mixed with an ibero style, which uses arabesques tiling, hourseshoe arc and decorated bricks. The main buiding was used to receive the trains, the perpendicular building was used as workshops and an administrative center.

In 1982, the building was renovated by the architect Antonio Barrionuevo and the engineers Damián Álvarez and J. Cañada. Their work got the Seville City Honorable Mention in this same year. After the inauguration of Santa Justa Station in 1992, the Plaza de Armas Station was deactivated and all the railway tracks were removed. The building was used as the Seville Pavillion during the Universal Exhibition in 1992 and, after that, it started to be used as a market and a recreational space.

The Building

Its roof was influenced by the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867, thus on the outside there are corrugated iron sheets and on the inside it is used a wood covering. These elements are still a part of the current building, as the same as the iron supporting, the front façade made by an iron and glass structure and all the façades apart the back one are made by an iron and glass structure that differs from the old structure.

The whole façade seems to be well concerved, as a matter of fact, half of it was covered, because they are rebuilding it. Just one corner seems to be once totally destroyed and rebuilted in a different style, because it became an iron and glass infrastructure breaking the symmetry of the back façade.

In the inside there is an underground connected by escalators and a lift; this new area connects the building with an underground parking lot. Besides this new part, in the center of the main building, there is a structure that connects the first floor with the second one, where they opened some movie theaters, a coffee shop and a exhibition space.

The building is full of restaurants, coffee shops and stores. Apart the building infrastructure, there are some old photos exhibited on the wall. They don't have any kind of historical review or date, but they helped us to understand a bit of the old use.

The Railway and the City

Currently, the old railway station is a part of a square constituted by a hotel and another small market. As it is mentioned in the data base of the Andalucía Built Heritage list, the small market was planned as a big circular tower, which would probably overlap the old building presence, but currently it is shorter than the holtel. The services provided by the old railway station are oppened to the inside and to the outside of it, thus the building is integrated to its surroundings, people can stay in or out of it as the same time as they can just use it as a passage to the other side of the square.

During its golden ages, the railway was built in parallel with the Guadalquivir River, which desconnected the city and the river. After its deactivation, a big avenue was built and some new urban infrastructure were built right beside the river, like the bus station that took place beside the old train station. Like that, the connection to the other side of the river got stronger.

Final Considerations

Unfortunately, the façade of the building was almost totally covered in the day of our visite, but one of its side allowed us to see a part of it. The building is very well preserved, but its history is not that obvius to its users. The pictures are there, but currently people seem to just pass by. That does not mean that the population do not know about its history; as a landmark of the iron era and of the universal exhibition, the building was never neglected and it can not be separeted from the city history. The building is preserved, it is used as a part of the urban life. The new use and the new enviroment avoid the abandonment of it.

If you want to know more or to see more, just watch this video of the CanalSur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzdWNU20zzg