When Torcuato Alcázar Minguillón, a sailor and soldier in the Spanish fleet, wrote his memoirs, no one noticed the passage in which he recounted how, as a child, he and his sister and two of his cousins ​​would explore the courtyard house on Calle San Roque. This former inn remained very active until 1834, when the owner had to abandon it to leave for the Carlist Wars. In this passage, Torcuato Alcázar recalled the mysterious house where they used to play and which, as he described, had served as lodging for travelers from distant and exotic worlds. There, seated in the courtyard, numerous curious people would gather around the riad to listen to the adventures and adventures that both travelers and merchants of the Sociedad Mercantil Hispalense would recount throughout the afternoons, and which continued on the rooftop during the long summer nights under the Seville sky. Among all these characters, the author made reference to the figure of Don Manuel Vizcaíno, better known as "the water walker," whose presence was always awaited at the end of the silk campaign and who each year arrived laden with unimaginable stories and landscapes. Despite the disappearance of these memoirs, lost in the 1924 fire at the Archive of the Indies, Carmen Minguillón, Don Torcuato's granddaughter, could not forget the presence of that enigmatic house where her grandfather had spent his childhood. Everything was recorded in her diary, in a sheet corresponding to May 7, 1925, currently preserved in the Annals of the House of Silk.

Years later, in the mid-sixties, when work began on the renovation of the house on San Roque Street, a sealed bottle containing a letter appeared between a false wall of the cellar. It was a manuscript signed by M. V., undoubtedly “the water walker,” who, for whatever reason, sensed that this was his last return to Seville. There, as if it were a farewell letter, he left his last legacy, in which he recalled the opportunity that the riad house had given him to recount everything that life had allowed him to experience. He ended with an ode to water, the water of navigation and the water of his rest, describing both its gurgling as it fell from the riad and the large jars placed on the roof in which he would immerse himself for long hours. There he would begin his rest, and with his eyes closed, he would travel once again to other worlds, this time through the realms of the imagination. "Imagine paradise from paradise itself," the author recounted. "Water allows one to dream," he later concluded, "and people who dream the same thing end up walking together."

If you, dear reader or lucky guest, have the opportunity to enjoy the riad, don't forget to imagine all the stories that have shaped this place, which, like life itself, is interwoven through narratives, journeys, and desires.