How Seville Became a Cycling City (And Why It Might Be Going Backwards)

I spent a coupe of days in Seville this week, and even joined a guided bike tour of the city.

Within about five minutes I understood something that no amount of reading had told me. Seville is one of those places where you can just get on a bike and go. You don't need to study a map first or keep checking Google Maps for the least terrifying route. The lanes are there, they're green, they're separated from the traffic and they go where you want to go. They make sense.

Later in the trip a friend came to visit, so I hired a couple of Lime bikes (a bit grubby and pricey, I'll be honest, but a good way to bounce around town) and showed them round, doing my best impression of the tour guide I'd followed earlier.

The thing is, Seville was never supposed to be a cycling city. Twenty years ago almost nobody rode a bike there. So how did it happen? And why are the people who built it now worried it's going backwards?

The riverside lane past the Torre del Oro.

The city where cycling would never work

If you'd drawn up a list of reasons why a city couldn't become a cycling city, Seville would have ticked most of them.

• The heat. The average July high at Seville airport is 36°C, according to Spain's weather agency, AEMET. In July 2022 it went over 40°C on 18 days of the month.
• The traffic. Car use had been growing for four decades. Thanks to the long lunch break, Seville had four rush hours a day rather than two.
• The streets. The old town is a tangle of narrow, cobbled lanes laid out long before anyone imagined a car, let alone a cycle lane.
• The image. "Only the poor people rode bicycles," as the planner Manuel Calvo later put it.

The numbers matched. In 1983, household surveys found 2% of trips in Seville were made by bike. By 1990 it had fallen to 0.6%. For years the figure the city's campaigners quoted was about 0.5%.

In 2003 Seville had around 12 km of cycle lanes, in disconnected bits that didn't join up.

Narrow, cobbled and full of parked cars. Plenty of Seville still looks like this.

The campaigners who wouldn't go away

The change started with a small group of people who refused to give up.

A Contramano, the Seville cycling association (the name means "the wrong way"), was founded in 1987 to demand segregated bike lanes. In 1993 it put around 10,000 people on the streets.

Ricardo Marqués, a physics professor at the University of Seville, first started arguing for bike lanes in 1992. "I've been doing this so long my hair was a completely different colour when I started," he told the Guardian in 2015. He's president of A Contramano again today.

For more than a decade, nothing much happened. Plans were drawn up and then forgotten. As José García Cebrián, the man who would eventually build the network, put it: "In Spain there's been a lot of planning about cycling, but then the plans get put into a drawer."

2003: the deal that changed everything

Seville's local elections in 2003 produced a coalition. The Socialist mayor, Alfredo Sánchez Monteseirín, governed with Izquierda Unida (IU), the United Left, and IU got a cycle network written into the coalition agreement.

The new council also tried something unusual: participatory budgets, where residents vote on what the city spends money on. In early 2004, the most popular proposal in the whole city was a connected network of bike lanes.

Work started on a planning document that defined a 77 km "basic network". The cycle lanes were written into the city's new master plan, and when that plan got final approval on 19 July 2006, the money was released.

Five weeks later, the diggers arrived.

80 km in about 16 months

This is the bit that makes Seville different from almost every other city that has tried to build cycle lanes.

Manuel Calvo, the consultant hired to design the network, proposed a sensible, gradual plan: about 10 km a year over eight years. García Cebrián, who ran the city's urban planning, said no. He wanted the whole basic network built in one go, before the next election. "All of this had to be built before the elections," Calvo told Streetsblog in 2018. "They had to sell something."

Works started on 26 August 2006, on eight routes at once. By December 2007, Seville had a connected network of about 80 km.

The speed was the point. A single lane on its own goes nowhere, and an empty lane is easy to rip out. A complete network, built quickly, gets used straight away. Once enough people use it, it has a constituency to defend it.

Some of García Cebrián's colleagues were so surprised that on the first day of building, officials from the city's own transport department (a separate department from his) tried to stop the construction crews. They didn't manage it.

A two-way lane across one of the river bridges, with a railing between the bikes and the cars.

How they built it

The design choices were practical rather than perfect:

• Two-way lanes, mostly 2.5 m wide, all painted the same green. In a city with no cycling tradition, the planners reckoned people would ride the wrong way down a one-way lane anyway, and two-way lanes take up less room.
• Space taken from cars, not people. Most of the room came from parking lanes, and some from traffic or bus lanes. Nearly 5,000 parking spaces went. A 50 cm buffer was left next to parked cars so riders don't get doored.
• Raised to pavement level, with a kerb and often a fence. That gave riders more protection, and Calvo admits there was a second reason: "This also made it harder to give the space back to cars if a new government changed their minds."
• No segregated lanes in the very centre. In the historic core, bikes share the space, including alongside the tram on Avenida de la Constitución.
• A bike office inside the planning department, the Oficina de la Bicicleta, kept the project out of the hands of the transport department.

Calvo is honest about the compromises. "I'd do a few things differently next time, maybe try and make the lanes a bit wider. But they work. People use them."

Avenida de la Palmera in 2010, three years after the first network was finished. Photo: Frobles, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What it cost

Remarkably little, by the standards of transport infrastructure.

Phase	What	Cost
Basic network, 2006–07	About 77–80 km on eight routes	€18m
Complementary network, 2009–10	Another 43 km, paid for by a national stimulus fund	€12m
Improvements	Junctions, signs, fixes	€2m
Total	About 120 km	€32m

Source: Ricardo Marqués, Hábitat y Sociedad (2011). Marqués and colleagues put the average at about €270,000 per km.

Marqués likes to compare it with Seville's metro line, which cost around €600m. By his figures, the bike network was carrying about 70,000 trips a weekday, more than twice as many as the metro.

Sevici: bikes for everyone

In 2007, as the lanes were finishing, Seville launched Sevici, a public bike-share scheme run by the advertising company JCDecaux and paid for through advertising contracts. The plan was 2,500 bikes at 250 docking stations across the city.

It took off. By December 2009, Sevici had 59,455 subscribers.

A Sevici dock in June 2008, the scheme's first full year. Photo: Coops456, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

The backlash

None of this was popular with everyone.

García Cebrián thinks the fact that nobody believed it would happen actually helped. "There was no opposition during the planning process, as everyone thought the same thing would happen," he told the Guardian. "The opposition only started when the infrastructure was being built, and by then there was no way back."

When it came, the opposition came from almost everywhere. Marqués lists opposition parties and council candidates, most of the local press and its best-known columnists, shopkeepers' and taxi drivers' associations, some residents' groups and the companies that ran the city-centre car parks.

The complaints will sound familiar to anyone who has followed a bike-lane row in Britain: the disruption of the building works, the lost parking, the cost, the harm to trade, lanes eating into pavements, reckless riders. And, underneath it all, the idea that cycling was old-fashioned and for people who couldn't afford a car.

About a dozen lawsuits were brought against the city's cycling rules, mostly over riding on pavements. Andalusia's high court ruled partly against the city. Spain's Supreme Court later found in the city's favour.

The polls were hardly a landslide either. In December 2009 only 51.7% of residents approved of the second phase of routes.

The lanes stayed anyway.

"Where have all those cyclists come from?"

Then people started riding.

"As soon as the building work was finishing and the fences were removed the cyclists just came," García Cebrián told the Guardian. "The head of the building team, who'd been very sceptical about the process, called me and said, 'Where have all those cyclists come from?' That's when I knew for sure it was going to work."

Every November since 2011, Estudio MC (Manuel Calvo's consultancy) and A Contramano have counted the bikes at the same points on the network, using the same method, and checked the count against Sevici's own rental data. The figures for earlier years were adjusted afterwards to match. It's the most consistent record there is of how many people actually use the lanes.

The headline: about 1,300 bike trips a day on the lanes in 2006 became 72,500 by 2011. Other sources put the 2006 figure higher, at anywhere from 6,000 to 13,000, but even on the most generous number, cycling in Seville grew more than fivefold in five years. On the counters' own figures, it was more than fifty times.

The city's household surveys tell the same story from a different angle. The share of all trips made by bike went from 0.6% to an estimated 5.6%.

That might not sound like Amsterdam, and it isn't. But for a hot, car-dominated southern European city with no cycling culture, it was extraordinary. In 2013 the Copenhagenize Index, which ranks the world's best cities for cycling, put Seville fourth, behind Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Utrecht.

Who was riding

The most telling change might be who was on the bikes. In 2006, women made up 25% of the people counted cycling. By 2021 it was nearly 40%. In the 2019 count, women outnumbered men on upright city bikes and folding bikes.

Women riding is one of the best signs a city's cycling infrastructure feels safe. And the numbers suggest it was getting safer. Between 2006 and 2011, the accident rate per cyclist fell from 0.17 to 0.05, according to Marqués and his co-authors. The 2015 count report found that the risk per million trips had roughly halved.

Riding past the cathedral on the tour.

The network keeps growing, slowly

Look at the shape of that line. Almost all the growth came in a few short years. After that, it flattened.

In 2011, the Popular Party's Juan Ignacio Zoido became mayor. A Contramano called what followed a "total involution": traffic restrictions in the old town were scrapped, a lane on Calle Asunción was closed and the bike office was dismantled. By 2015 García Cebrián admitted cycling had "reached something of a plateau". In the 2015 Copenhagenize Index, Seville fell to 10th.

The Socialists returned under Juan Espadas in 2015, partly restored the bike office and set a target in 2017 of 15% of mechanised trips by bike. Usage recovered to about 70,000 trips a day by 2019. The network kept creeping up, to 190 km by 2023 and past 200 km by April 2026, the third-longest of any Spanish city after Barcelona and Zaragoza, according to the city council.

Timeline

Year	What happened
1987	A Contramano founded to campaign for segregated bike lanes
1990	Bikes make up 0.6% of all trips
2003	Socialist–United Left coalition takes over the city; about 12 km of disconnected lanes exist
2004	A bike-lane network is the most popular proposal in the participatory budget
Jul 2006	City master plan approved, releasing the money
Aug 2006	Work starts on eight routes at once
2007	Sevici bike share launches; about 80 km finished by December
2009–10	Complementary network takes it to 120 km
2011	Bike trips peak at 72,500 a weekday. Seville hosts the Velo-city world cycling conference. Zoido (PP) becomes mayor
2013	Fourth in the Copenhagenize Index; network at 164 km
2015	Down to 10th in Copenhagenize; Espadas (PSOE) becomes mayor
2019	About 70,000 bike trips a day, plus 11,000 on e-scooters
2023	José Luis Sanz (PP) becomes mayor
2025	Bike trips down 15% on 2023; plan to remove the Avenida de la Constitución lane
2026	Network passes 200 km. Monteseirín, the mayor who built it, dies on 26 October

Is Seville going backwards?

This is where the story gets uncomfortable.

Since José Luis Sanz of the Popular Party became mayor in 2023, campaigners have watched a series of cuts. A traffic-reduction plan was scrapped. The lane on Luis de Morales was turned into a shared path on the pavement. The Asunción lane is being moved to another street. Separators have been taken off the San Telmo bridge. Some Sevici stations have gone, including the one in Plaza Nueva, outside the town hall.

The Sevici station in Plaza Nueva in 2021. It has since been removed. Photo: Francisco Anzola, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The biggest fight is over Avenida de la Constitución, the grand avenue between the cathedral and the town hall, where bikes share the space beside the tram. In September 2025 the mayor proposed taking the bikes off it and sending them round via Paseo Colón instead. A Contramano says it's the busiest stretch in the whole network, with up to 5,000 riders a day. Even OCU, Spain's main consumer organisation, called the plan "un error", a mistake.

The mayor's position is that "la prioridad es el peatón, no la bici": the priority is the pedestrian, not the bike.

Avenida de la Constitución, where bikes share the space beside the tram. The city wants to move them elsewhere.

The council points out that it's still building. It finished more than 8 km of new lanes in April 2026, paid for with EU recovery funds, and says it plans about 18 km over its term. But Manuel Calvo says some of the new lanes are being built to standards "from 15 years ago". Ricardo Marqués accuses the city of "total submission" to bars and restaurants, whose terraces are spreading onto the streets.

And the latest count is the worst in years. In November 2025, bike trips on the network were down 15% on 2023, to about 53,500 a weekday. That's the lowest of any count since 2008, lower even than 2021, when the city was still coming out of the pandemic. E-scooters, meanwhile, now make about 34,500 trips a day on the same lanes, so the lanes are busier than ever, just not with bikes.

The counters list their suspects:

• the cuts above
• roadworks for the metro and a new bus-tram line, with no diversions for bikes
• motorised vehicles allowed to use the lanes
• a council that, in their words, keeps blaming cyclists for incidents with pedestrians

Sevici is at a crossroads too. JCDecaux's 20-year contract ends in 2027 and can't be extended, so the city is preparing to tender a replacement. Subscriptions are down to about 20,000, a third of the 2009 peak.

In February 2026, around 750 people joined a protest ride against removing the Constitución lane. 101TV Sevilla reported that another, under the slogan "Ni un carril bici menos" (not one bike lane fewer), was called for 8 November.

Alfredo Sánchez Monteseirín, the mayor under whom all of this was built, died in Seville on 26 October 2026, aged 69.

Into María Luisa Park.

What Seville teaches everyone else

I've written before about how Paris became a cycling city over 15 years, about Barcelona's cycling numbers, and about the motorway Valencia never built. Seville is the most dramatic of the lot, and I think it has four lessons.

1. Build a network, not a lane. Twelve kilometres of disconnected lanes did almost nothing for years. Eighty connected kilometres changed the city in a year. People need to be able to get from where they are to where they're going.
2. Build it fast. The speed meant the argument was over before it had properly started, and by the time the backlash came there were tens of thousands of people using the lanes every day.
3. Make it hard to undo. Raised kerbs and fences protect riders, and they also make a lane much harder to quietly take away.
4. It doesn't defend itself forever. Seville shows what a network can do, and also what happens when nobody keeps investing in it. The growth stopped when the investment did, and the latest count shows it falling.

Back in 2018, Marqués, García Cebrián and Calvo wrote that "it is impossible to dismantle infrastructure that is used by more than 70,000 people daily". We're about to find out whether they were right.

It's a debate that will feel familiar to anyone who has watched bike lanes become an election issue in London, or a high street argue about whether lanes are good for business.

End of the tour, Plaza de España.

For what it's worth, as a visitor, Seville is still one of those places where you can just get on a bike and go.

Have you cycled in Seville? Or is your own city having the same argument? Leave a comment below.

Sources

• Estudio MC / A Contramano, annual cycle counts 2006–2025 (A Contramano)
• Ricardo Marqués Sillero, "Sevilla: una experiencia exitosa de promoción de la bicicleta", Hábitat y Sociedad 3 (2011)
• Marqués, Hernández-Herrador & Calvo-Salazar, "Sevilla: a successful experience of bicycle promotion in a Mediterranean context", The Sustainable City IX, WIT Press (2014)
• Peter Walker, "How Seville transformed itself into the cycling capital of southern Europe", the Guardian, 28 January 2015
• "Six secrets from the planner of Seville's lightning bike network", Streetsblog USA, 7 May 2018
• Marqués, García-Cebrián & Calvo, "Seville: how a small Spanish city became a cycling hub for all", Euronews, 12 October 2018
• eldiario.es, reporting on Seville's bike lanes, 2015, 2017, 2023 and 3 October 2024
• OCU Sevilla, press release, 3 September 2025
• Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, new cycle-lane sections, 13 April 2026
• AEMET, climate normals for Seville airport (1981–2010) and July 2022 summary