Pressed against the flank of Seville's Gothic cathedral — the largest in the world by area — a cluster of seventeen adjoined historic townhouses in the Barrio Santa Cruz was stitched together and converted into EME Catedral Mercer Hotel, which opened in 2008. The project, undertaken by Barcelona-based Donaire Arquitectos, preserved the whitewashed Andalusian facades with their ornate ironwork miradores and wrought-iron balconies intact, while the rooftop was cut away to reveal one of the most direct sightlines to the Giralda tower available from any hotel in the city. The resulting building carries four floors of guest accommodation across 60 rooms and suites, with the upper-level penthouse rooms gaining private terraces that look directly across limestone coping to the cathedral's illuminated buttresses at dusk. Inside, the interiors navigate a deliberate tension between Moorish decorative tradition and a cooler, more contemporary Iberian minimalism. Guest rooms feature laser-cut plasterwork headboards and patterned ceiling reliefs that echo the geometric arabesque of Mudejar craftsmanship, set against polished concrete floors and restrained dark-stained timber bed frames. The restaurant takes a lighter direction — chevron oak parquet underfoot, sage-green walls with arched wine niches in natural ash, brown leather banquette seating, and pale bentwood dining chairs that suggest a Scandinavian influence filtered through Sevillian warmth. The rooftop terrace, with its small pool framed by glass balustrades and black steel railings, delivers the defining image: the cathedral's Gothic silhouette flooding gold against the evening sky.

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