Basilica de la Macarena

Basilica de la Macarena tickets: which one to buy

The basilica is free to enter. The museum of the brotherhood beside it charges a modest ticket and holds the embroidered mantles, the silver and the processional floats, which is where the money and the craftsmanship of Seville's Holy Week actually live; it is the part worth paying for. Guided tours of Holy Week traditions include the Macarena and cost several times that, and they are useful because the whole subject is opaque to outsiders.

The basilica stands beside the Macarena gate in the old northern walls, twenty minutes on foot from the cathedral or a short tram and bus ride. Nothing needs booking except during Holy Week itself, when the neighbourhood is impassable and the church is open through the night. The brotherhood's shop sells candles and medals and is where most local visitors stop before leaving.

Visiting Basilica de la Macarena: what to see

The Hermandad de la Macarena, founded in the sixteenth century, built this church in 1941 in a neo-baroque manner to house an image that had been kept in a nearby parish. That image, the Virgen de la Esperanza Macarena, is a wooden bust of the Virgin with glass tears on her cheeks, carved in the seventeenth century by an unknown hand and dressed in embroidered velvet and a crown of gold; for many sevillanos she is the most beloved object in the city, and the affection is closer to family feeling than to art appreciation.

She stands above the high altar under a canopy. Beside her is the Christ of the Sentence. The bullfighter Joselito, killed in 1920, left the brotherhood a set of emeralds, and the church holds his funeral portrait. The floats are kept in the museum between processions, and the gold and silver work on them represents generations of Sevillian craft. The basilica keeps the brotherhood's records going back four centuries, and its membership runs to thousands of sevillanos who inherit it from their families.

Basilica de la Macarena opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from morning to evening with a break in the middle of the day, and the museum keeps shorter hours. Holy Week is the point of the year: the Macarena leaves the basilica in the early hours of Good Friday and returns around midday, and the crowds along the route are enormous and immovable. Seville is extremely hot from June to September. Dress modestly. Photography is allowed in the church and restricted in the museum.

Allow half an hour, an hour with the museum. The Macarena walls, the last significant stretch of Seville's medieval defences, run along the street outside, and the Alameda district with its bars is ten minutes south. Access to the basilica is restricted on the Thursday before Good Friday, when the brotherhood prepares for the night procession. Outside Holy Week the neighbourhood is residential and quiet, and the basilica sees more local worshippers than visitors.