How many steps to the top of La Giralda, Seville Cathedral?

The useful correction in this list: the Giralda has almost no steps. It is climbed by 35 gently rising ramps, built wide enough for the muezzin to ride a horse to the top when the tower was a twelfth-century minaret, with only a short flight of about 17 steps at the very end into the bell chamber. That makes it by far the easiest of Europe's major tower climbs and the only one a wheelchair user might in principle manage, though the surface and the crowding still rule it out. Publications that quote a step count for the Giralda are usually counting the ramps.

The numbers

Steps

17

Reaches

the bell chamber at 70 m — the rest of the ascent is 35 ramps, not stairs

Public access

Open to climb

Where

Seville, Spain

Height climbed

70 m — 230 ft

Average rise per step

4118 mm

What the climb is like

About 20 minutes on a continuous ramp. No spiral staircase; much easier than any comparable tower.

Published counts for the same structure routinely disagree by five to ten per cent, and nearly always for one of three reasons: whether intermediate landings count as steps, whether the final platform step counts, and where the climb is deemed to start. The figure here says what it reaches.

How it compares