Smellscapes
Written by Maya Eashwaran
Sevilla, Spain
Las Setas — translated, the mushrooms — are rightly named. From afar, they appear to be massive mushroom caps floating above Sevilla’s Plaza de Encarnación.
A towering honeycombed pergola, Las Setas de Sevilla or the Metropol Parasol project was completed in 2011. It is the largest wooden structure in the world, designed by German architect Jürgen Mayer.
The anatomy of Las Setas, rife with fan-like patterning and cloud-shaped elements, bears a strikingly similar look to its ecological namesake.
From the platform at the top of Las Setas, the traveler is met with one of the most breathtaking views of the city. This lookout point at sunset is crawling with couples and sweaty backpackers alike, careening necks and elongated selfie-stick arms all reaching to catch a glimpse or a snapshot of the golden city below.
Sevilla is not a hidden gem. It’s one of the most visited cities in Spain, making my love of the city clichéd but real nonetheless. It’s not a large city either, and most streets are so narrow that cars can hardly squeeze past without grazing against the mustard yellow and rust-red buildings. The sidewalks themselves force groups to walk single-file, one foot placed right in front of the other. The trees are heavy with sagging bitter oranges and limes with skins thick and oily to the touch. It is a city that begs for gratuitous description.
Unlike our small-town home base of San Luis de Sabinillas, Sevilla is a proper city with thousands of inhabitants and thousands of smells to boot. The city’s smell is varied and pungent, each street corner or neighborhood featuring its own special cocktail of sweat, food, perfume, beer, trash, grass, paint, urine — the list goes on and on. Smell reminds us of the humanity found in each street corner. The people of Sevilla are, at the end of the day, people—they shower, they smoke, they travel, they drink, they eat, they may vomit. The smell of a city is what makes it so human, so overflowing with life.
According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning author of Americanah, Philadelphia smells like “history,” New Haven of “neglect,” Baltimore of “brine,” Brooklyn of “sun-warmed garbage.” Each city has a dominant smell, one that lifts off the smell-map and characterizes both the city and its people (for better or worse).
What does Sevilla smell like? The answer to this question is deeply contested.
American author Dan Brown had a few things to say about the city’s smell when he wrote his debut novel, Digital Fortress. The book is set in Sevilla; according to the Independent, Brown claimed that Sevilla was full of “hospitals that stink of urine, hopelessly inefficient phones, and corrupt policemen.” In response, the local government invited Brown to speak in the city he so intelligibly bashed in 2005, hoping to draw tourists and refute Brown’s harsh judgements.
Other bloggers also suggest that Sevilla, despite its well-known beauty, smells of “horse piss;” others say that the city’s only smell is the quintessential orange blossom (“Not even in the best of perfumeries! I’m talking about the orange blossom, the smell of smells”).
Smell is contested because of its role in memory recall — it’s a sensory documentation of emotion that is logged in our brains without us even knowing it.
Smell-mapping, or taking smell-walks, have become somewhat of a phenomenon. A group of researchers (or, as the Washington Post calls them, “a group of brave people”) hailing from Bell Labs, Yahoo Labs, and the University of Cambridge to name a few, have created smell-maps of London and Barcelona using social media data.
One such researcher, the late author and academic Victoria Henshaw, led hundreds of “smell-walks” throughout cities and towns around the world. Henshaw’s work also shows that we’re actually losing smells. In Wired magazine, she claimed that this “eradication of aromas is eroding our sense of place.”
She’s right — smell and sense of place are inextricably connected. And it all boils down to biology.
Here’s how it works. Our olfactory bulb, the part of our brains that processes smells, is closely linked to the amygdala, a set of neurons that are responsible for processing emotions. This relationship explains why smells often surface certain memories and the strong emotions related to them.
It’s the reason why people who lose their sense of smell experience a “strong sense of loss,” as reported by the BBC. Smell allows us to access feelings like homesickness, anger, longing, fear, love, happiness. It is an integral part of how we process, manage, and express our emotions.
Henshaw’s 2014 opinion piece in the New York Times urges us to embrace the smelliness of life. “The pervasive whiff of trash is a visceral reminder of what the seething masses leave behind that no amount of Sanitation Department activity or hosing down of streets can hide,” she wrote. “But don’t hold your nose. Teach yourself to parse the city’s odors and you will find a new dimension of urban experience opening up before you. Accept the olfactory.”
Henshaw’s blog, aptly named Smell and the City, references Marcel Proust’s famous “madeleine scene” from his novel, In Search of Lost Time, in order to demonstrate how the senses aid memory recollection. Proust wrote:
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”
Distinctly and purely Proustian, it is. But it’s also a fascinating look into how we’re able to access this flood of memory from a simple act — like drinking a cup of tea — through the senses.
Similarly, smell can awaken memories that are seemingly dormant, revealing why documenting smell and their associated memories is so crucial in preserving “sense of place” of a city. Projects like Henshaw’s “smell-walks” as well as Natalie Bouchard’s “smellstories,” which seek to archive stories and their corresponding smells into the Theater of the Olfactory Memory, attempt to save smells before they’re gone for good.
High above the city from Las Setas, Sevilla looks empty. It’s quiet, and the smells are dim, diluted. Down below, teenagers gather over bottles of beer and gossip with animated hands. A woman attempts to hang her laundry in the fierce wind. Couples walk hand in hand as they share a cigarette.
What does Sevilla smell like to me? It is this smell — all salty sweat and sunscreen and lipstick and something unidentifiable burning — that will remind me, years into the future, of this scene.
