Air conditioning may have cut into the need for a folding fan, but you wouldn’t know it in any of the tourism-destination cities, where they’re always available as soon as the weather pokes its head above winter; Seville, in southern Spain is no exception as you can see below.
I actually have a sizable collection of them; my wife always brought hers home to have for the next trip, and then we’d forget to pack them and had to start over. I have a significant collection of lightweight cheap fedoras for the same reason.
But as colorful and beautiful as many of the cheap fans are, they’re not much of a match for those on display in the royal palace in the Alcazar of Seville, collected over the years by succeeding queens of Spain, who did not have to worry about remembering where they were.
Unlike the paper-printed fans for sale in the streets, these are true works of art, made one by one of costly materials—silk, fine rice paper, lace, and in a few cases lacquered wood or exotic feathers.
In many cases, the artwork is hand-painted onto the fan or onto the cloth that is then attached to the blades; in some later cases, fans were made from pattern-printed fabrics.
Unanswered question (asked by a friend): would a room full of ladies using these fans have made the whole room cooler? And did the queen fan herself or have a fanservant standing by?
