The View From Here

Small-town Andalucia – those slightly run-down settlements you find on the road from Granada to Cordoba, for instance, places that are not on the tourist route, that are a little hard-scrabble, impoverished – still surprise, with their Moorish keeps, their sense of history. But it is a pre-democracy Spain you sense here – the Spain of Franco, perhaps – yet to be dragged into modernity.

We passed a number of these places along the road to Cordoba, stopping in one for a coffee, in another to use the bathroom. Here are some images: the first, which I took while Rob sipped her coffee at a little open-air cafe by the side of the road, are in colour.

The black-and-white images are from a little town quite close to Cordoba – our final destination for this trip, before we climbed on board the train back to Madrid, footsore and sunburned. But happy.