Edd's Travels: Ávila, Spain

I made a last-minute decision to come here from Salamanca, saving Madrid for later. It's nice to have the option of being spontaneous. Spontaneity can be an expensive habit while travelling, as anyone who's ever paid rack rate in a UK hotel can testify, but right now I'm getting cheap travel and accommodation at short notice pretty much everywhere in Spain.

In 1960 Orson Welles was asked where in the world he'd most like to live, and his answer was here, Ávila. It wasn't necessarily a compliment. He described it as 'a strange, tragic place', and probably what he meant was that it appealed to him more for its theatric and cinematic qualities than for its inherent quality of life. His words reminded me of the Brazilian footballer Emerson, who signed for Middlesbrough in 1996, prompting his wife to describe their new home as 'a strange and terrible place'.

The air is clearer in most places than it is in Middlesbrough, but it's especially clear here, because Ávila is 1,132 metres above sea level. (The highest mountain in England is 978m.) As soon as you enter the Roman walls and wander around the old town, you begin to see where old Orson was coming from. It doesn't have the comforting sun-dappled sandstone yellowness of Salamanca: it's bleak and grey and windswept, even the cathedral. When the sky is overcast, it's almost like being in a black-and-white movie, with two millenia's worth of ghosts from the Roman occupation to the Spanish Civil War loitering glumly behind you. And right now it's especially ghostly and empty, thanks to Covid.

I took a break from the general Ingmar Bergman aura to pop into a little bar and watch Barcelona 1 Real Madrid 3 on telly. It was the first ever crowd-free El Clasico. One of the many annoying aspects of Covid is that it's depriving me of the opportunity to attend Spanish football in person and thus inflict my match reports upon you all. I reckon I'd have been to at least three games so far, had this been a normal year. But I do at least get too see live footy on the TV, because plenty of second-division games and indeed some from the top-flight are shown free-to-air. This compares very favourably with paying £10 a match to watch somebody filming Sunderland's hapless Third Division exploits on a hand-held camera. Strangely enough, in Spain, showing football on free-to-air TV does not appear to reduce either clubs or players to penury, and nor does it lower the quality of the football in question. There's a lesson in there somewhere.