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The plan was to go up to the Alhambra next morning, making the earliest possible start - so we had pre-booked tickets through the BBVA, the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. We therefore had dinner early, on the pavement outside a little restaurant near the cathedral, where the meal itself was worth the journey to Granada.

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The great experience of that evening, however, was seeing the people of the town: this clearly was part of what our Kurdish bar-owner in Sevilla had meant when he told us Granada es más moro que Sevilla - Granada is more Moorish than Sevilla. With experience of Spain going back over fifty years I was accustomed to the paseo and to seeing huge numbers of people out strolling in the evening: it still grates with me when I see the streets of English towns deserted and dead even when there is warmth and light in the air. But nothing I had ever seen had prepared me for that evening in Granada - everyone was out. The whole town must have been there, mothers, father, grand-parents, sisters, brothers, the halt, the lame, the sick and even the dead joined that endless procession, now sauntering, now limping, now gambolling, frequently dancing and now and then stopping to make impromptu music. Perhaps there was nothing worth seeing on the telly that night...

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The next morning turned out to be one of the most memorable experiences imaginable - fortuitously, as we had not actually planned to see the Generalife before the Alhambra: things merely developed that way.

There is no need for me to add significantly to the words and images that abound elsewhere on the subject of this glorious site. Nor do I intend to ponder to what degree the Generalife we see today reflects the place abandoned by the Moors several centuries ago. There is no need to check the authenticity of the garden designs, nor to pore over old prints to discover what structures have arisen and which fallen away: it takes no effort to perceive the unique blend of superlative natural advantage and human genius that this glorious piece of heritage represents. It is like listening to the tale of Byzas' founding of Byzantium, only in reverse.

According to the tale, Byzas was advised by the Oracle at Delphi to build his city opposite the 'land of the blind': he sought out this land, and finally he built on the western side of the Bosphorus, being of the opinion that those who lived on the eastern shore must have been blind not to see the advantages of the western.