(cont.) At first glance, the Costa Blanca (the name given to the coastline of the province of Alicante) does not seem to represent the most appealing prospect for a holiday given its tendency fill up with tourists during the summer. Unless you wish to spend a week cooking yourself on a beach, though, a car is an essential. Renting a car in Spain is relatively cheap and the new lease of life it gives is priceless. Though most of the coastal towns on the Costa Blanca are overrun with tourists during the high-season, there are one or two, like Denia (about forty-five minutes north of Calpe by car), that repay a visit with a vibrant fish market and an impressive Moorish castle.

Getting away from the sea, though, takes you somewhere else entirely. The Jalon valley (30 minutes from the coast) is famed for its wine which is rustic, fruity and unsophisticatedly delicious. The many “bodegas” which can be found in every town and village in this area each have a local speciality, decanted directly from barrels into empty water bottles. This is also the territory of the “typico” restaurant. You can easily spot these places. Often slightly run down or with a hint of 70’s chic, you hear them before you see them; this is where the locals go to shout at each other over generous plates of the day’s speciality. Still, there is no sense of you as an outsider: like everywhere else in Spain, you’re one of the crowd regardless of who you are or where you come from. You are seated and then given a choice of chicken, rabbit, beef or fish. Choose wisely, because throughout the afternoon plate after plate of food will be brought to your table, accompanied by more wine (the wine list gives you the choice of red, white or beer) than you believed could possibly exist in one place. The food itself is like everything else in this part of the world: unpretentious and vivacious. The real joy of it all is that the gas you used to get there and back will probably have cost you more than the meal.

The final leg of my Spanish trip took me to Granada in the south of the country. Famous for the Alhambra palace and the magnificent architecture that sprang up to mirror it, Granada is only a few miles away from the port city of Malaga and just north of Spain’s most popular summer destination, the Costa del Sol. Given it’s location, during the height of summer it’s inundated by daytrippers. Set against the background of the Sierra Nevada national park, this place is set in some of the most dramatic country in Europe; the town itself, not to be outdone by its surroundings, boasts the Alhambra -- Granada’s undeniable centrepiece -- which is without question one of the most glorious building in all of Europe. A Moorish stronghold until the fifteenth century, there is a peculiar collision of styles here: Moorish domes and mosque-like structures mingle with gothic and baroque turrets giving Granada an almost theme-park-like quality.

The many gift shops that can be found around the city do nothing to detract from the sublime quality of Granada; if Santiago was the pinnacle of Christian achievement in Spain, then Granada represented the height of the Muslim power which once ruled much of this country. There is hardly a row of buildings, line of pavement or sweeping vista that is not graceful and striking. Even the municipal buildings are subtly beautiful; even the way in which the different architectural styles vie with each other for superiority is something special.

As with everywhere else, the food is memorable. Plates of tapas are unavoidable wherever you go. Even in the oppressive heat of southern Spain (Granada is barely two hundred miles from north Africa), eating and drinking is an essential pastime. Thankfully, though, chips are off the menu here.