sevilla....the stage is set for flamenco

Seville's Metropol Parasol, or The 'Mushrooms of Incarnation', located in Plaza de la Encarnacion, at a cost an eye-watering 90 million euros, is officially the world's largest wooden structure.

It takes less than two hours by train from Cordoba to Seville, but the temperature jumps by at least ten degrees. It may be hot outside but the senora in the tourist information centre at the Santa Justa station responds icily  to our request for a map.
 
This is followed by a chaotic journey through a tangled web of narrow one way streets with an impatient taxi driver. He scowls, disappointed with our tip, when he unloads our luggage in front of the small, historic Hotel Abril.   But the hotel receptionist is welcoming. And she can speak English.

This is another two star hotel, but it has a fridge in the room. Luxury! For 5 euros each, we eat buffet breakfasts in a tiny dining room, which is crammed with tables and chairs; to move from your table to the coffee machine or buffet involves such complicated manoeuvres that it looks as if the guests are dancers or toreadors as they circle and turn and criss-cross the room.

Out in the streets the routes are similarly circuitous. Maps are useless. There is no logic to the layout, and a twist in the road, a wrong turn, another plaza to cross, and we are lost again. After the first day we toss the map away and just roam until I internalise the spatial layout of the city. Soon we can be lost and I can navigate my way back, not by street names or by recognising landmarks but through some kind of homing instinct. I must have been a pigeon in a previous life.

On our first night in Sevilla, we wander out from the hotel, only to find that we are just around the corner from the Plaza Mayor with its anachronistic latticed artwork, the "mushroom", arching over it.

We stop for tapas and see a group of young girls dressed in flamenco costumes in the plaza. Musicians carrying instruments gather nearby.

So we grab a table and a couple of chairs in front of a temporary stage in the centre of the square and buy a bottle of the local regional manzanilla, "La Guita", a kind of dry white sherry, which tastes of apples and turpentine.
We are treated to an evening of la musica d' Espanol a free concert by the  local municipal symphony orchestra.

The "flamenco" girls carry baskets, smile at us and hand us white carnations. 

A Spanish man joins us at our table and tries to converse with me. He tells me that the music is Paso Doble, pushes a carnation behind my ear and gestures for me to dance with him. His wife and grandson appear. From her stern looks I gather that he fancies himself as a Don Juan.

With the warm night, the drama of the music, the manzanilla, the family groups laughing and chattering, the paper lanterns strung from the trees, my spirits soar. 

The city seemed cold at first, but now she is flirting with us, full of promise.