I am in Spain. Unlike last week, this is not armchair travel. I am drenched in sweat, the Spanish sun beating down on me as I wheel two suitcases through the cobbled streets of Málaga, streets that might have been atmospheric had I not been dragging my bags over them.
My “studio in the historic district” won’t let me check in before 3 pm, never mind that my flight landed at eight in the morning. Instead, someone styling themselves “Málaga Muse” directs me to a luggage locker. Twenty euros and two hours later, liberated from my possessions, I collapse into a chair in the Plaza de la Constitución.
“These chairs are only for people who order food,” a waitress with an East European accent and a strappy black dress informs me. So I order croquettes and open my murder mystery.
Richard Osman has moved on from The Thursday Murder Club to We Solve Murders, introducing a new cast: ex-cop Steve, his daughter-in-law Amy, and successful crime writer Rosie D’Antonio. It is witty and sharp and, perfectly for me, takes its characters to Málaga and the Costa del Sol.
Why Málaga? At the local Librería Luces, I spot a Spanish translation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling. And suddenly the Málaga connection clicks.
In a story that investigates crime in London, Keefe explains how, until the late 20th century, the lack of an extradition treaty between Britain and Spain made this region a notorious sanctuary for British fugitives lying low under the Andalusian sun. The Costa del Sol acquired the nickname “Costa del Crime”. It’s a history our GuruWalk guide will confirm the following morning, gesturing towards the hills where sprawling villas overlook the sea.
“Many British people used to come, but now it is Russians and people from Eastern Europe; they live in big houses on the Costa del Sol,” he will tell us.
But for now, sitting at the pavement café, reading about the Costa del Sol, I glug my chilled Coke and look around at the crowds of tourists sitting under umbrellas, drinking ice-cold Cruzcampo and eating gelato — nothing remotely criminal.
But there is another Spain, one that has nothing to do with tourists drinking Cruzcampo or even expatriate crime. Ted Hughes writes of this in his poem You Hated Spain :
“Spain frightened you. Spain
Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.”
I begin to see glimpses of this other Spain in the architecture: the patterned tiles, delicate latticework and wrought-iron grilles, all bearing traces of centuries of conquest and conversion. At the Church of Santiago, a doorway with an Islamic horseshoe arch, believed to have belonged to the original mosque, is visibly bricked up. Next to it, other doors with Christian iconography function as entrances.
Early the next morning, I pick up coffee and a napolitana barbacoa and walk up toward the fortress of the Alcazaba. It’s still cool and I climb through the tree-lined archways to stunning views of the city and the sea. The barbacoa is delicious, with pastry that’s light and flaky and a smoky barbecue-flavored filling.
Below me, the Mediterranean is a sheet of cerulean blue, the same sea across which Phoenicians, Romans and Byzantines arrived as traders and conquerors. Somewhere beyond this sparkling water lies North Africa, across the Strait of Gibraltar.
In the afternoon I step out of the sunny streets and into the Hammam Al Ándalus, with its azulejos, its dappled light and pools of warm and cold water. After a morning spent climbing through centuries of history, it feels blissful to spend the afternoon submerged in it.
The next morning, I haul my bags to María Zambrano station for the train to Seville.
Time for a change of scenery, if not a change of subject. Andalusia glides by my window, whitewashed cottages with red roofs, olive trees, scrubby, sun-bleached hills and, eventually, the broad Guadalquivir valley.
I open An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart, a British musician turned sheep-shearer who bought a farmhouse in the hills. It is lively and funny, entirely in the tradition of A Year in Provence : an expatriate’s Spain of water shortages and eccentric neighbors. But it is not the Spain I am looking for. I close it and open España: A Brief History of Spain by Giles Tremlett instead.
In the sunny streets of Seville, history is everywhere.
The cathedral occupies the site of a former mosque, whose minaret survives as the Giralda tower. The cathedral’s Patio de los Naranjos, with its orange trees and fountain, was once the ablutions courtyard of the great mosque that stood here. Across the plaza stands the Royal Alcázar, where Islamic and Mudéjar architecture survives in a palace expanded and remodelled by Christian rulers.
At the old tobacco factory, surrounded by a moat, our guide Rubén has another story to tell.
“The tragic opera Carmen was inspired by the women in this factory,” he says. He traces the story to Cuba, then a Spanish colony, which supplied tobacco to Spain and to the women who worked in its tobacco factories, where, he says, they were considered better at rolling the fine cigarettes. But to take on paid work, women needed permission from their fathers or husbands, as well as certificates of good character. Once hundreds of women were gathered in one factory, men began congregating outside its gates. Romantic entanglements and tragic love stories, Rubén says, inevitably followed.
Rubén moves on to Seville’s Semana Santa Easter celebrations and the Feria with its bullfights. But my thoughts keep returning to a different Seville.
I have been reading Robert Wilson’s The Blind Man of Seville, the first in the Inspector Falcón series. This Seville police procedural deals with crime scenes that sit on top of centuries of history, the same way the cathedral sits on a mosque. At its centre is Javier Falcón, the flawed detective, whose investigation of a gruesome murder leads him into his own family history.
As our tour group walks the streets of Santa Cruz, past the Alcázar and the Giralda, I am thinking of Falcón, and of how his murder investigation becomes an investigation of his own father, of Franco’s Spain, of the colonial sins that were never fully buried.
Next on my reading list are books 2–4 of the Falcón series. If they are anything like the first, they will be racy, and they may give me something history books cannot: the emotional texture of a past that refuses to stay buried.
I arrived in Málaga with Richard Osman and the Costa del Crime. I leave Seville with Inspector Falcón, in a Spain where even the sunniest streets have their dark times, when the shadows move.
Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist, Founder of Sonya’s Book Box, and a teacher of Storytelling in Business. Got a knot in your life, a dilemma at work, or a reading slump you can’t shake? Send your questions and book requests to sonyasbookbox@gmail.com, and she promises to give each one her most earnest consideration.
