Of course, without the walk to the store this morning, I needed to do a little more walking after class. So, I wandered into a section of the city that I am pretty sure I have not been in before or at least not enough times that I remember it.
There were the usual highlights...
Lots of motorcycles...
A cute dog....
A statue (this one commemorating the May 2nd uprising in Madrid in 1808 of the French occupation):
People doing restoration work. I stopped to watch these guys for a while. The picture on the left shows a couple of guys doing restoration work on the crowns that need to be returned to the heads of the statues being restored by the man in the lift.
But the thing that I found most interesting was this bench and plaque.
It is called the Weeping Stone (or maybe Tearful Stone?...give me a break, I have only been in Spanish class for 7 weeks.)
The story is basically: In 1857 (during the First Carlist War), a group of young (some really young) liberals from Sevilla took up arms. They were on their way to Ronda when they were overtaken. Many died in the confrontation, but the 82 who lived were returned to Sevilla. They were sentenced to death. The mayor at the time begged, in vain, for their pardon, and when the boys were taken to the Plaza de Armas and shot - he sat on this nearby stone and wept for many hours.
In 2008 the City Council of Sevilla dedicated the stone with the plaque along the wall to the memory of the "exemplary civic attitude of that mayor and as a future reminder against the death penalty."
