ECIJA, a town of southern Spain, province of Seville, on the Cadiz-Cordoba railway. Pop. (1930) 29,884. Ecija on the left bank of the river Genil, which is navigable to this point, is the centre of a fertile district producing olives, cereals, wine and some cotton. The heat in summer is so great that the spot is known as El Sarten, or the "Frying-pan" of Andalusia. Long famous for its shoe-makers, Ecija also manufactures olive oil, soap, candles, wine, starch, straw-hats, cloth and pottery. The city, once en closed by walls, now in ruins, is chiefly remarkable for its Moor ish gateways, its church towers studded with glazed tiles, its many fine balconied and decorated mansions and its chief square surrounded by colonnades and planted with acacias. It also pos sesses 20 convents, now mostly secularized. Ecija, called Estadja by the Arabs, is the ancient Astigis, which was raised to the rank of a Roman colony with the title of Augusta Firma and became so flourishing a centre that Pliny and Pomponius Mela, writing in the 1st century A.D., described it as the rival of Cordoba and Seville. Local tradition maintains that it was visited by the apostle Paul, who converted his hostess Santa Xantippa ; and, according to one version of his life, it was the see of St. Crispin in the 3rd century.