Cities and Surveillance in Spain and Beyond (1200–1500)

Climbing tall towers is an unmissable element of modern city breaks, rewarding breathless visitors with opportunities to survey the city below and capture it in photos. In this lecture, I consider the long history of surveillance and image-making. Focusing especially on the famous Giralda in Seville, and I will show how climbing towers were always implicated in the ‘imperial gaze’, and suggest that the growing popularity of tower climbing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be connected to the emergence of painted cityscapes and technologies of surveillance and map-making.