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It was some while after entering the Alcázar - through the Puerta del León - that I began to realise there was something wrong - wrong with me, that is to say. The first attraction to catch the attention in the Alcázar during the summer of 2006 was a most impressive exhibition devoted to the great Ibn Jaldún (or Ibn Khaldun or Khaldoun), the fourteenth century Arab Muslim polymath whose life and work - as historian, sociologist, philosopher and more - linked El-Andalus to other Mediterranean cultures, especially to Algeria. Part of the exhibition in fact subsequently relocated to Algeria.

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Only after spending time in this exhibition did I move on towards the central part of the complex, the Palacio Pedro I with its entrancing mudéjar ornateness. Although himself a Christian king of Castille, and although building on Moorish foundations, Pedro employed Moorish craftsmen to produce results all too easily confused with a one hundred per cent Moorish structure of the kind you might see in Granada or Córdoba. The sort of structure, in other words, which over the years I had frequently seen in images of those two towns: I would experience a frisson of recognition that would suddenly be tempered by the fullest possible knowledge that I had never visited either Granada or Córdoba.

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So somehow or other between the mid to late 1960s and the summer of 2006 the Alcázar of Sevilla had allowed itself to be erased from my memories of Sevilla and removed to my memories of I didn't know where... I was standing musing on this phenomenon by the basin of water in the Patio de las Doncellas when our two friends suddenly rushed round a corner with 'you've got to come and look at this' written all over their faces: they had just stumbled, totally without expectation, into the gardens of the Alcázar and they were - quite understandably - amazed.

I was even more amazed than they were. As soon as I turned the corner with them and looked at that great comforting pleasure-space of plants, trees, flowers and vegetation, separated from the outer Murillo gardens by a wall - which wall either totally blocked or hopelessly confused the view from our hotel window - I knew that, in addition to mentally losing the Alcázar, I had in my mind remade the jigsaw of Sevilla's gardens. Totally reshaping the city's topography, I had succeeded in giving the lie to a favourite passage of Baudelaire's most evocative verse -

…la forme d'une ville / Change plus vite, hélas ! que le coeur d'un mortel.