The Sounds of Andalucía

          The driver reverses the coach down a slight incline then pulls up beside the bus station in Olvera. ‘Fifteen minutes’, he says, ‘to have a coffee’. With that, he gets out. We descend the steps and walk fifty metres over to the station bar. 

          The noise inside the dingy bar is almost beyond description. It's like being in a nightclub, but at three in the afternoon, and with no music playing. As for the customers making this astonishing racket, they are not boozed-up twenty-somethings looking to score, but impoverished old men jovially shouting at each other. And there are no more than about fifteen of them.

          It's truly a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. We buy a couple of beers, sit down at one of the cheap metal tables, and conduct a conversation by shouting at one another. The locals continue their mysterious game, barely noticing our presence. After 15 minutes, we get back on the bus. 

 

Arcos de la Frontera

          After leaving Olvera, we continue to the dramatic hilltop town of Arcos de la Frontera, or 'Arco', as the locals call it. It's here that we discover Andalucía is also the province of silence. As we walk its atmospheric yellow and pencil-thin streets in the cold winter night the absence of sound is uncanny. Occasionally a scooter roars past, otherwise the empty streets resound only to the rhythmic beat of our footsteps and the eternal din of crickets that drifts up from the plain below. 

 

Málaga

          Even the large cities of the south, like Málaga and Seville, are at times remarkable for their tranquillity. On a Sunday morning in Málaga the bells of the superlative cathedral break the quiet of the city’s main thoroughfare, the Alameda Principal. From the open top deck of a sightseeing bus it is the sigh of the wind and the mad jabbering of birds that resonate. 

 

Cádiz

          Then, at night, you take to the alleys and squares of the city centre. The air hums with the voices of young Spaniards drinking tiny bottles of beer from ice buckets, children talking to their parents, and foreigners – Germans, Dutch, Brits – conversing in their own tongues. Go inside an expat bar and your ears are assailed with the more familiar racket of lousy music and middle-aged men encouraging each other to drink themselves into a coma. 

          Other sounds linger in my memory: the rain that pounded down on the awning above us as we ate outside a tapas bar in Sevilla, so intense that I feared it might give way; the rooster that woke me in Arcos de la Frontera and another one, invisible, somewhere on a street in the centre of Cádiz; the guy on a quad bike tearing through the deserted streets of Arcos.

           There's a Calle Silencio in Cádiz, or 'Silence Street'. It's about a hundred metres from the Plaza de la Catedral, the city's tourist focal point. Andalucía is truly the land of incredible noise and quiet.