Navigation Pavilion

This guide to the Navigation Pavilion in Seville begins inside the Sea of Souls, a dim room where recorded voices read real letters from sailors who crossed the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beneath a ceiling of shifting amber light. It traces how Seville won a crown-granted monopoly on trade with the Americas through the Casa de Contratación, and what that monopoly asked of the sailors who left from these riverbanks. The ship-hulled building itself was raised for the 1992 World's Fair by architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra, its ribs of curved laminated wood spanning more than forty meters.