The pavements of Seville are littered with oranges - marmalade oranges, we were told. We tried one. "Aaaargh!" we said; we had never tasted such bitter oranges before. Later, outside town, on our way to the Coto Donana, the largest wilderness left in western Europe, we stopped to buy some eating oranges by the roadside. Two hundred and fifty pesetas for a 25 kilo bag - in other words, £1.50 for half a hundred weight.
They were the most delicious oranges I've eaten in years, probably fresh from the tree. Orange groves, olive groves and vineyards stretched away in every direction over the rolling Andalusian plains.
The early spring weather is sharp and clear, warm in the sun. They call Seville "the frying pan" in summer. The heat is the main reason evergreen orange trees line the pavements, and whole squares, cathedral grounds and Moorish gardens are given over to serried orangeries. Shade is the difference between heaven and hell, even life and death. So, between the verdant streets, the parks are full of stately eucalyptus, palms, banyans and a dozen other tall, shade-giving vegetables-of-mercy.
Paradise, for a Sevilliano in summer, is to be in a cloistered corner of the Alcazar Gardens, within earshot of running water, and within reach of its deep, dark, cave-cool rooms, decorated with a million blue and white tiles. The Alcazar was built by the Moors (anything in Spanish with an "al" before it is Moorish: Almeria, Alhambra) during their 500 years conquest. It is a flowering of Moorish art, much of it commissioned in the 13th century by the Christian re-conquerors. It is as memorable as the Taj Mahal.
Beside it is Seville Cathedral, third largest in Europe, soaring over the Moorish palace, for it was built after the Moors were expelled and was a huge, crowing monument to Christian victory. It is enormous. The stones would build a sizeable town. I have been privileged to have seen the Notre Dame, St Mark's in Venice, St Paul's and Chartres. I have never felt more overwhelmed, more brought down to human ant-size, than within the walls of the gothic cathedral in Seville.
"We will build a cathedral so large future generations will call us madmen . . ." the city fathers said, and they did. It would take years, even with modern dynamite, to shift it. It was built, of course, on the blood, and with the gold, of other cultures, levelled to feed the ambitions of Spain. Aztec, Toltec, Inca, all contributed to the building of the churches and palaces of Seville.
Below Seville, to the south, lies the Coto Donana, a wilderness of marshes at the mouth of the great river, Guadalquivir. A triangle of delta, 25 miles by 15, it is bounded to the east by the river, to the west by the dunes of the Atlantic coast. There are miles and miles of dunes, held together by umbrella pines and grasses, and miles and miles of beaches, but the sea is cold.
It is home to 250 different bird species, to wild deer, wild horses, and lynx. Almost more interesting than the fauna is the flora. Nine hundred plant-species thrive there. Weather, location and sub-soil has resulted in a dozen diverse zones. One goes from bare Saudi Arabian dunes to swampy flood plains.
I have never seen so many coots. Coots on the march is a novelty.
Over the flooded fields, outside a village with a white-spired church, a black tide of bald coots was picking and scratching across the land. Out beyond them were flamingos, pink, graceful, and declining. Tall, white storks, with black wings and scarlet beaks, stood around like loiterers with their hands behind their backs. A red kite drifted overhead. A day-light owl stood on a post, far off. Through the trees flitted a flock of azure-winged magpies. But better than all the coots and hoots was my first purple gallinule.
It is an extraordinary bird, the gallinule. A chicken-size coot ("gallina" is Spanish for hen), it is vaguely dodo shaped and sports a brilliant red bill. This joins a crest, which lies on top of its head like a well-licked raspberry lollipop. The feathers are shiny-purple, the legs red. It is a fantasy bird and Donana is one of its four tenuous footholds in Europe.
Donana has had its recent troubles. Two years ago, when sudden deluges and flash floods killed many people in Portugal, in Andalucia, above Donana, they broke the dams. Down into the wetland the size of the London Basin with its million birds, its myriad wild life, flowed a huge wave of toxic mud.
In the first 24 hours, an army of JCBs diverted the muck into the Great River, the Guadalquivir, whence the rank tide flowed into the long-suffering sea. That has been followed by a lengthy clean-up operation. The problem is, the residues are left, locked into millions of hectares of land, seeping into the subsoil, seeking the lowest level, the marshes where the birds feed, the lynx hunt and the turtles swim. The fear is that, in years to come, it will surface. Is Donana, the greatest and last stronghold of nature in Western Europe, to be another victim of man's hand? Will nature cope? Nobody knows. My informant, a senior scientist in the policing of EU nature policy, says there is no precedent. Weary with human greed, he shrugs and says: "We hope it is a lesson. But how many lessons can we afford?"