With a new introduction by the author that shows how much has changed since Franco died in 1975, this book now stands as a tribute to a place that no longer exists: the Spain of the plains with their "brown but magnificent monotony", and of villages with their old-fashioned manners.

Morris summons up the country so evocatively that you can almost smell it. If it were possible to pin down exactly what makes her writing so compelling, then every travel writer would be copying it. But Morris is still in a class of her own.

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