Sacred Embroidery Workshop

After pickup from your hotel in Seville, you drive to Jerez, where your host takes you to a working embroidery atelier in Jerez that makes mantos, sayas, and palios for the city's brotherhoods. You are received into the workshop, where a bordadora (embroiderer) shows you the piece they are currently working on — one of several multi-year commissions the atelier has in progress. Gold and silver thread on velvet, worked entirely by hand at the bastidor (the wooden frame that keeps the fabric taut). If you wish, you can sit at the bastidor and try a stitch yourself.

Arte sacros and embroidery workshops in Andalusia — like this one — do not receive visitors as tourists; they work on real pieces for the brotherhoods, over years — a single manto can take three to five years to complete. The technique (bordado en oro y sedas) has been passed down since the Sevillian guild of embroiderers formalized in 1433. What Reyes has arranged is a private welcome into a working atelier that would otherwise be inaccessible behind unmarked doors.