The Orange-Blossom Issue

We begin the year, and this magazine, in Seville, and we do it on purpose. April is the month when a difficult city becomes an easy one. The bitter-orange trees that line its streets come into flower, the weather is warm without punishing, and the two events that define the local calendar arrive within weeks of each other. It is the most crowded month and the most expensive, and it is still the one we would choose. A magazine about where to stay has to start where the timing matters most, and here it matters more than almost anywhere.

This issue is built around a single practical truth: Seville has a season, and it is short. By June the same streets that charm you in spring turn into a test of endurance, with summer temperatures that regularly pass 40°C and an afternoon habit of emptying out entirely. So we have written the guide as a piece of timing advice first and a list of rooms second. Where you sleep, whether you catch a procession or a fairground, whether you queue for the Cathedral or walk in — all of it turns on the weeks you pick.

We are wary of the way spring in Seville gets sold. Semana Santa and the Feria de Abril are real, enormous and genuinely local, but they are not a single festival you drop into for a weekend, and most of the fair's tented casetas are private family affairs you cannot simply wander into. This issue tries to be clear about that. It tells you what each event actually is, when it tends to fall, and how to enjoy the city in the ordinary April days on either side of them, which is the version we like best.

So this is our charter-year opening: a compact river city you can cross on foot, a palace and a cathedral worth timed tickets, a quarter across the water with a working flamenco tradition of its own, and a smell of orange blossom that lasts a fortnight and then is gone. We have kept the advice specific — which neighbourhood earns its price, which day trip earns the train fare, which month earns the trip at all. Book early, come in April, and eat late.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief