REVIEW ARTICLE Virtual 3D Tour Applied to the Paleontological Heritage of the Neogene of Sevilla (Guadalquivir Basin, Spain) A. M. Martínez-Graña 1 & I. Bajo 2 & J. A. González-Delgado 1 & J. Cárdenas-Carretero 2 & M. Abad 3 & P. Legoinha 4 Received: 7 February 2017 /Accepted: 16 July 2017 /Published online: 4 August 2017 # The European Association for Conservation of the Geological Heritage 2017 Abstract Eleven georeferenced sites of paleontological inter- est, representative of the Upper Miocene of Seville (Central Guadalquivir Basin, Spain), have been selected and their scien- tific, educational, and touristic cultural values assessed, ranging between 410 and 770. Most of them are very rich in benthic macroforaminifers, molluscs, large echinoids, ichnofossils, ceta- ceans, and sharks. Sites 5 and 7 also contain the stratotype of the Andalusian stage proposed in the ‘70s. Using geomatic tools, they can be viewed in free virtual globes, including virtual flight, containing diagrams, photographs, and informative sheets. Keywords Geological heritage . Virtual globes . 3D georoute . Neogene . Sevilla Introduction The Cenozoic Guadalquivir Basin, located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, is an elongated depression ENE-WSW, filled almost completely with unconsolidated Neogene sedi- ments. Stratigraphic architecture and depositional sequences have been described by Martínez del Olmo et al. (1984), Sierro et al. (1995, 2014), and González-Delgado et al. (2004). The basin is limited to the north by the Iberian Plate (passive margin) and to the south by the Betic orogen (active margin, resulting from the convergence between Iberian and African plates). For most of the late Miocene, it formed the so- called North Betic Strait, which together with the South-Rif Strait (located in the north of Morocco), connected the Atlantic and Mediterranean domains. The well-known late Messinian Salinity Crisis occurred in the Mediterranean do- main, when these connections closed. Seville province is located in the central sector of the basin and has an extraordinary record of sediments from the Late Miocene, which have been studied since the nineteenth cen- tury (see Bajo et al. 2009, with exhaustive bibliography from the authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Perconig and Granados (1973) proposed, in its passive mar- gin, and in the studied area, the Andaluciense stratotype, lo- cated between the Tortonian and the Pliocene. During the Tortonian, the region was the subject of a major transgression driven both by subsidence of the passive margin and eustasy (Abad 2007). Marine sediments, with a huge paleontological wealth, filled out the various features of the existing topo- graphic relief. These sediments consist of conglomerates, sands, and calcarenites deposited in fan deltas, beaches, and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12371-017-0247-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * A. M. Martínez-Graña amgranna@usal.es I. Bajo paleoalcala@gmail.com J. A. González-Delgado angel@usal.es J. Cárdenas-Carretero paleoalcala@gmail.com P. Legoinha pal@fct.unl.pt 1 Department of Geology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Salamanca, Merced Square s/n, 37008 Salamanca, Spain 2 Museo de Alcalá de Guadaíra, C/ Juez Pérez Díaz, S/N, 41500, Alcalá de Guadaíra, Sevilla, Spain 3 Departamento Geología, Universidad de Atacama, Copiapó, Chile 4 GeoBioTec, Departamento de Ciências da Terra, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal Geoheritage (2018) 10:473–482 DOI 10.1007/s12371-017-0247-y