Hemingway Adventure

Madrid, Spain (fourth day)

We head south-east towards the Mediterranean leaving behind the huge housing blocks of Madrid's new suburbs and crossing the dry, parched plain of La Mancha. It stretches wide and flat and almost treeless to the horizon, marked by the outline of a range of mountains that never seems to get any closer. An occasional farm, drifting smoke, a gypsum plant, a grain store, a line of white-washed windmills, a castle on a hill, everything seems detached, distant, as if reluctant to be on this great exposed plain at all.

After three hours the line cuts down through the edge of the plateau and in amongst the mass of orange groves from which Valencia has made its money.

Valencia Norte is the loveliest, least rugged, least bombastic of stations. The way out takes you through a turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau concourse, across a brown and white chequered marble floor, beneath a ceiling of coffered wood and walls of multicoloured mosaic tiles to a low white exterior, decorated with stucco oranges and orange leaves.

The next thing I notice is a huge frankfurter driving by, passing a twenty-foot-high brightly coloured statue of a bare-breasted lady, and a long line of women and children in eighteenth-century costume walking behind a vigorous, if discordant band.

We have arrived at the time of year when Valencia goes crazy. The festival of Fallas. The time when, we are told ominously, nobody sleeps.

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PALIN'S GUIDES

Series: Hemingway Adventure
Chapter: Madrid, Spain (fourth day)
Country/sea: Spain
Place: Valencia
Book page no: 116

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Hemingway Adventure

Madrid, Spain (fourth day)

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