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ANDALUCÍA - SEVILLA IN 2006

Not the least of the problems with air travel is that it isn't travel at all. You set off; you arrive. At least, you hope you do. After all these years I remain so unconvinced by flying that I have to remind myself of basic physics every time I set foot on a plane - and I still can't tell the difference between landing and slow crashing. But by getting around the planet in this manner, we miss out everything in between: we can see the change that's taken place between London and Sevilla, but we don't see the change taking place.

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We miss the experience of the Channel crossing (even by tunnel, there's an experience of sorts), we miss the changing landscapes of France, the rugged splendour of the Pyrenees and then the different phases of the Iberian peninsula - not to mention the towns, villages and people we've by-passed at so many thousand feet.


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But if you have only three or four days to spare, the plane's the thing - the cheap flight executives seem to have little difficulty buying off our concerns about the environment. However, it's still a total downer to leave Stansted in the bright light of a warm and sunny dawn only to touch down in the south of Spain next to no time later in grey, wet misery. It's no better when you leave the airport: the outskirts of modern Sevilla - in the rain at least - are depressingly redolent of Soviet-era East Berlin.

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Maybe the only good thing about our arrival, in late summer 2006, was the helpfulness of the city authorities, who tell you at the airport how much your taxi fare into the city centre should be - in Euros, of course: no pesetas any more in Spain, none of those 1950s one-peseta bills that were so black, filthy, faded and worn that any piece of dirty paper of the right size would have passed muster. The present-day British £5 note is pristine in comparison.

I can only assume that the taxi must have dropped us at the back of the hotel or that we were dead tired or both: nothing I had seen between the airport and our dropping-off point rang any bells or reminded me of anything I had seen in Sevilla in the 1960s. Nor did anything we saw from the taxi prepare us for the shock that awaited in our hotel room: this was in spite of the fact that I had booked the hotel specifically on the basis of its location, the Hotel Alcázar in Calle de Menéndes Pelayo, right on the edge of Sevilla's historic urban heart.