Narrow, chaotic streets

Narrow, chaotic streets hide a multitude of secret places – squares, fountains, gardens, churches, palaces, bars _ allowing everybody to discover and claim for their own , some favourite hidden corner. Mine is a bar just around the corner from the Bridge of Triana. Here at, a shiny stainless steel counter, a team of hard-working waiters served stewed bull’s tail, tomato soaked in oil and herbs, cubes of marinated, battered dogfish and glasses of cold manzanilla sherry. Also, though, there is the chapel at the Hospital de la Caridad. The prior, and chief benefactor, here was the infamous, if reformed, seventeenth century philanderer Miguel de Mañara. This prototype of Don Juan asked for the following words to be inscribed where his ashes were put to rest: ?Here lies the bones and ashes of the worst man the world has ever known.’ The dark, cruel painting here by Juan Valdés, with their disintegrating corpses of finely dressed bishops, seem to accuse this overstuffed city of being obsessed with mundane brilliance. The chapel is so full of saints, virgins, tubby, winged cherubs and the inevitable, in Seville, paintings of Murillo that as one local writer told me, ‘There is simply no room for anything else, ‘ Then there is the broad boulevard known as the Alameda de Hercules at night, with its bohemian, slightly shabby air. Around the corner, prostitutes sit out on chairs in the street, fanning themselves in the heat. Even they are not in a hurry to hustle. Once you start making the list pf personal jewels, in fact it is hard to stop. Seville, like a haughty
Andalusian Beauty, simply demands your attention.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Seville is the most seductive

Seville is the most seductive, sensuous city in Spain. Some complain that nothing of great import has happened here since the city lost its near monopoly on trade with Spain’s colonies in the seventeenth century. Drenched in New World wealth – in silver and gold from Peru and Mexico or Caribbean pearls and precious stones – Seville must have been one of the riches places on the planet. Visitors do not generally, care that all this came to a rather abrupt halt. They may in fact, like the idea . For they have been left with the sixteenth and seventeenth century baroque architecture, the slow, charming pace of life, the broad Guadalquivir river lined with the terraces of bars and cafeterias, and the white and ochre painted charm of the old Jewish Santa Cruz district.
Everything here – from the perfume of the orange blossom to the lisping, lilting Andalusian accent – seems to insist that you acquiesce and give yourself up to its charms. ‘Don’t fight it,’ Seville commands, as you are lulled into a sensual stupor. ‘ You are here to enjoy’
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

The main corrupting power

The main corrupting power in Spain is what, generically, has become known as ‘the brick’ . The phenomenon is by no means restricted to the coast. As Spain’s economy booms, towns and cities have been turned into vast building sites. The building of new homes. Office blocks, EU-funded motorways or other public works is being done on a scale unthinkable in cluttered northern Europe. Everywhere you look in Spain, the city skylines are crammed with cranes. Vast new boroughs appear almost overnight in Madrid, complete with their shopping malls, sports centers and underground stations. Tiny satellite villages become, in the space of just a few years, busy new towns. Massive bulldozers push new motorways through olive groves as bewildered elderly villagers look on, and their grandchildren calculate whether they can go now for nights out in the nearest city.
Catalonia, Madrid, Seville and the Sun Coast account for much, if not most, of Spain’s new building work. Where politicians are builders, as they often are in the Sun Coast, corruption seems inevitable. Where they are also football club owners, as some also are, then corruption, for some reason, seems even more likely.
Thing could be a lot worse, however. Compared with the deep institutionalized corruptin in , say Italy, Spain is a clean country. For while corruption – or the popular belief in it – floats freely around regional and local government, it has not settled in the core of the Spanish state.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet

Driving north from Almería

Driving north from Almería I am reminded, once more that this is Spain’s driest, dustiest corner. Every time I come here, I am shocked by the harsh, unforgiving nature of the landscape. Even Old Castile, with its parched, yellowed plains, has nothing on it. Water is the local gold, fought over by neighbours, villages and towns. The politicians in Madrid invent, and then scrap pharaonic systems for diverting the rivers of northern Spain down to this parched corner of the country. Ancient irrigation systems, Roman or Moorish in origin, allow the soil to perform the miracle of growing things., The plants traditionally grown here give an idea of the almost biblical nature of the place. There are acid – sweet meddlers, almonds, carobs (which supposedly kept St John the Baptist alive in the wilderness) and, inland at Elche, ancient plantations of date palms that transport you straight to the Arabian desert. The mountains here are all rock. They rear up in great, glinting shards or loom, hazy, grey and menacing, in the distant, pulsating heat.
From the book 'Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet