Tag Archives: covid

My latest article in The Telegraph: The European countries with the strictest lockdowns have come out no better

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THE TELEGRAPH

 

COMMENT

 

The European countries with the strictest lockdowns have come out no better

I’ve been under different lockdowns in Spain, Austria and the UK – and still, there are no clear winners

 

(The full length and slightly edited version can be found by subscribers at The Telegraph online here.)

 

Since the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic I have written in these pages about the European countries in which I have suffered their various countermeasures.

I witnessed Marines patrolling the streets in one of the hardest lockdowns in Europe, Spain, where I ran a half-marathon inside a small apartment in an attempt to stay sane and fit while they locked their physically vulnerable elderly and psychologically vulnerable children away from all sunlight and exercise, despite the measurable protection these two factors offer against the virus.

I returned to England when I was allowed, and was invited to bear witness to the catastrophic collapse of the hospitality industry, with hotels and restaurants desperately trying to outweigh the off-putting countermeasures of the odour of bleach, enforced hand-sanitisation, masks, and social-distancing, by practically begging customers – and travel writers like myself – to visit.

(Thank you to the lovely Gilbeys Restaurant & Townhouse in Eton, the splendid Old Parsonage Hotel & Grill in Oxford, the comforting The Winning Post pub in Windsor Great Park and the splendour of Mossiman’s at Guards Polo Club – I hope you all make it: you certainly deserve to.) Continue reading →

My postcard in The Telegraph: While Britons are imprisoned, Austrians are encouraged to get out, stay fit, and soak up vitamin D

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While Britons are imprisoned, Austrians are encouraged to get out, stay fit, and soak up vitamin D

Cases have plummeted 90% in Austria, and without the sort of draconian rules Britain has adopted

 

(The original article can be found by subscribers at The Telegraph online here.)

With the snow piling thick on the ground in Salzburg, I am amazed at two things in Austria which I do not think are unrelated.

The first is that neither temperature nor lockdown has in any way affected the average citizens’ visibility in the streets.

When I walk out of my front door on the Nonnberg, adjacent to the ancient convent where Julie Andrew’s portrayed a novitiate in The Sound Of Music, there are invariably locals tramping up and down the stairs and slopes, wading through drifts and sliding across ice, to stare at alpine mountain ranges in the middle distance.

As they say here, there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.

The second striking fact about living in Austria is that during this ‘lockdown’ – their third – in which you may leave your house at any time of day or night for any reason, psychological or physical, they have reduced the contagion of this novel coronavirus by 90% since mid-November.

Yes, it is true that bars, restaurants and hotels are all closed, and only one person from a household may visit “close family members” or “important contacts with whom contact is maintained several times a week” in another household.

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My postcard in The Telegraph: Salzburg is well-suited to lockdown – scenic, old-fashioned and healthy

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Scenic, old-fashioned and healthy – Salzburg is well-suited to lockdown

Fresh air, regular exercise and a diet of moderation are all we have here until the vaccine comes

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

(The original article can be found by subscribers at The Telegraph online here.)

When that great Austrian author, Stefan Zweig, left Vienna for a house he had bought in the hills that rumple the otherwise flat land of Salzburg, he did so to flee the consequences of war and influenza in 1919.

When I followed in his footsteps one hundred and one years later to the month, it was to flee terrorism and coronavirus, as I wrote about in these pages.

Although, that was not the whole truth: I had always had a plan not to be in a great city during the inevitable second – and third – wave lockdowns which will flow across Europe like questionable trends in fashion. My favourite capitals – London, Madrid and Vienna for example – are too impersonal to feel at home in if one cannot step into the street, too vast to police politely, and too expensive to rent the space necessary to make house-arrest, however light, tolerable.

Regional capitals, though, like Oxford or Seville, have all the beauty of former wealth and powerful minds to direct it into buildings that please the eye, but also, within an hour on foot, you are in the countryside. In Salzburg, even in the heart of the city, the countryside stares back at you.

Der Untersberg, The Mystic Mountain

My own residence, a perfect little 700-year-old apartment at the foot of Salzburg’s castle-hill, a charming little apartment rented from my new friend Marco, via AirBnB, is faced by the formidable 6,000-feet of the Untersberg massif, a terrifying wall of mountain that make appearances at my study window, and then disappear just as quickly, whatever the weather. Continue reading →

My postcard in The Telegraph: From Vienna, where common sense reigns supreme

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A postcard from Vienna, where common sense reigns supreme – ‘No hysteria, no virtue-signalling’

 

In Austria, Alexander Fiske-Harrison found a completely different atmosphere to the UK

The Hotel Imperial, Vienna’s grand dame which is still open during the pandemic CREDIT: Nuriel Molcho

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

(The original article can be found by subscribers at The Telegraph online here.)

Vienna is at, indeed perhaps just is, the very heart of Europe. It was capital of the Holy Roman Empire for the majority of its thousand-year existence – until it confronted Napoleon at the Battle of the Three Emperors at Austerlitz. It was the “city of music” that made Mozart; it was the “city of dreams” that bred Freud. In 1938 the French author Albert Camus wrote, “Vienna stands at the cross-roads of history. Around her echoes the clash of empires. Certain evenings when the sky is suffused with blood, the stone horses on the Ring monuments seem to take wing.”

And yet, less than a decade later, Graham Greene would write, “I never knew Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its easy charm; to me it is simply a city of undignified ruins.”

There was dark romanticism even in the ruins, as Greene knew, hence he made the city the third character in his and Carol Reed’s film The Third Man (although the great Orson Welles added a few lines of his own, including the famous one about the Borgias and cuckoo clocks.)

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My column in The Telegraph: Gaucín – A postcard from Spain’s most picture-perfect town

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THE TELEGRAPH

TRAVEL

A postcard from Spain’s most picture-perfect town

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

For the original article, available to subscribers only, please click here.

With thanks to the Spanish media, from my friends at ABC to those at ¡Hola! magazine among many others including television and radio, for picking this up, along with the Mayor of Gaucín and the President of the Junta of Andalusia for reading the article live on television. 

I finally left Seville, from where I sent my last postcard, as Spain entered what the government are calling the new normal. However, passing through Ronda I saw that the people do not necessarily agree. The term ghost town has, by necessity, been vastly overused in these pages, but what else can one say? The lovely old historic restaurants like Hermanos Macías, opposite Spain’s most historic bullring, and the classic Almocabar, named for the gate in the Moorish battlements it sits beyond, are both closed.

Similarly shuttered is my favourite Hotel La Reina Victoria. Built by the Algeciras Gibraltar Railway Company at the end of the 19th century to house British Army Officers on their holidays, and designed by the same architect as London’s Savoy, its combination of anglicised comforts and epic backdrop has relaxed and inspired guests for over a century, including the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gaucín, the most picture perfect of white-walled Spanish towns (Photo: Jennifer Collins)

So, I push on through the wild and vertiginous mountain roads to stay with friends in the most picture-perfect of white-walled Spanish towns, Gaucín, the birthplace of opera’s most famous heroine, Carmen.

The Notting Hill of Andalusia, Gaucín has long been a favourite of English visitors, with the great travel writer Richard Ford writing 175 years ago: “Gaucin is most romantically situated on a cleft ridge… Ascend the Moorish castle [and] the view is glorious. Gibraltar rises like a molar tooth in the distance, and Africa looms beyond. In the hermitage of the castle was a small idol, El Niño Dios, [‘The Holy Child’] which, dressed in a resplendent court suit, was held in profound veneration far and wide.”

With all the sun of its latitude, but a heat much reduced by its altitude, and surrounded by great rolling cliffs and forests, valleys and rivers – the Río Genal is the cleanest in Europe – it has long attracted artists and has a vibrant resident community of them to this day.As with the real Notting Hill, the professional artists moved there for its authenticity, and bohemians of a richer class soon followed with their greater wealth, pushing up prices, but also gentrifying in not entirely unpleasant ways for the visitor.

My friends – a financier and his photographer wife – live in a beautiful, vine-shaded sanctuary of a home which used to belong to Princess Diana’s favourite dress designer, Victor Edelstein. The billionaire Lord Sainsbury bought a house just outside the village, the CEO of Sothebys within, and some other friends of mine, the actors Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes, spent some of their honeymoon here as well.

(Photo: Jennifer Collins)

The best hotel to stay in, suitable to both the surroundings and the clientele, is the exquisite little boutique La Fructuosa, owned and run by a Belgian couple, Daniel and Catherine. They also have one of the best restaurants in town, with frequent guest chefs and musical accompaniment. While I am staying our food is provided by that innovative and individualist maestro, Guillermo Jacob Lorenzo, whose own famed restaurant in Ronda, De Locos Tapas, reopens this month, while Rocío Sánchez Ruiz played guitar.

Of a similar level of excellence is Platero & Co, run by Hellen and Barry from the Netherlands, whom the Michelin Guide called “a perfection… of rustic ambience.”

(Photo: Emma Cornish)

As a getaway, Gaucín is just as well served by taking one of idiosyncratic range of apartments available, from the Romano-Moroccan glories of Casa Mosaica, designed and run by Emma Cornish and decorated with work by her ex-husband, Mosaicist Stephen Windsor-Clive, to the more relaxed and easy-going hillside villa run by jazz singer Elizabeth Zeder and her husband Jonas.

This would better allow one to take advantage of the amazing local produce available at little shops like the organic groceries of La Tienda Verde, or the wines and cheeses of La Posada.

However, it is the views and the landscape that make this village what it is, and there are endless walks around the area, well described in person or in his books by Patrick Elvin, or the wider area, from Ronda to the coast, there is the famed Guy Hunter-Watts. For the equestrians among readers, there is the horseback option – by Klarina Pichler with Riding Andalusia, or you can even learn to play polo just down the road from Gaucín with its sister organisation Polo Andalusia.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

 

My column in The Telegraph: Seville Rises Again

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Europe’s most sensuous city in a time of social distancing

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Six weeks ago I wrote about a dream of wandering the streets of Seville, far away from my prison quarantine in Jimena de la Frontera in the forested wilds of central Andalusia.

But no imagining could have been quite as dreamlike as finally stepping off the bus at the Prado de San Sebastián, where they once burned heretics, but now welome tourists.

Photo by Nicolás Haro

The Sevillian sunlight in late June has that perfect golden slant, between the chilling white of winter or the infernal yellow of true summer which comes at the end of July. The temperature here is already mid-30s in the shade and a coronavirus cleansing 40 degrees in the sun.

I am met by my old friend, Nicolás Haro, a native of the city, who I have not seen since the pandemic began.

“It has been strange, mi amigo, to be locked away because the government lacked the hospitals and personal protective equipment to allow us to be together. After all, we will all catch this virus.”

I agree with his fatalism, but, for the moment at least, Seville is one of the clearest places on Earth, with a mere seven Covid-19 hospital patients in a city of over a million, and just two in intensive care.

Photo by Nicolás Haro

Despite this, we drive down almost deserted streets and those people we do see are masked and separated. The bars and restaurants for which the city is famed are shuttered.

I hope so as well, but also I cannot help feeling that I have never seen Seville so alluringly peaceful. With its bustle and feverish heat, rendered in purified form by its twin emblems of bullfighting and flamenco, Seville has always struck me as an overwhelming sensuous city. Now it is its grandeur that is on show, the remnants of a wealth that once outstripped all other cities on Earth.

In over 20 years of visits, I have never seen it look so striking.

“It is waiting,” says Nicolás simply.

It will not have to wait for long, for all the signals are that by the end of June quarantine-free travel will occur between Seville and the rest of Europe, possibly even the UK. For now I have the city to myself and am determined to take full advantage.

I decide to retrace the steps of my usual pilgrimage, as described in these pages, and am delighted to find Bodega Antonio Romero open, even if I begin the evening as the only customer there.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison at Bodega Antonio Romero – Photo by Nicolás Haro

However, my other favourites – Casa Matías, Casa Morales, Las Teresas – we find shuttered, and I retire to bed.

Even that is trickier than usual: the owners of my two mainstays, the Hotel Inglaterra and Las Casas de la Judería, had both told me they were closed. So I reach out to an old friend, Patrick Reid Mora-Figueroa, whose family owns the exquisite boutique Hotel Corral del Rey. To no avail. “Sorry my friend, I’m in Marbella – we’re closed until September.”

Deciding to put to an end to further exchanges I contact Marriot International, which runs the largest, grandest and most historic of all the hotels in the city, the Alfonso XIII. Closed until July 1.

Luckily, Nicolás’s brother Kinchu owns the nicest short-stay apartments in town, Almansa 11, a series of rooms carved out of the Marqués de Villamarta’s former mansion in the old El Arenal district of the city, so I finally find my rest.

El Rinconcillo – Photo by Nicolás Haro

The next day, Monday, Spain begins to reopen, including the Balearic Islands to certain forms of foreign tourism. But in Seville, where the Alcazar welcomes visitors for the first time in months, hearing the exclusive use of the Spanish language in the streets and bars has its own charm.

“It is as though the Sevillanos have reconquered the old city centre, where once it was so filled with tourists many locals stayed away,” says Nicolás.

We start the day at the usually packed El Rinconcillo, the oldest tapas bar in existence (founded in 1670) where Javier de Rueda, whose family have owned it for the last seven generations, greets us at the bar.

Javier de Rueda Santiago – Photo by Nicolás Haro

From there we crisscross the city, from the taurine characters who prop up the Bodega San José next to the bullring, to Casa Cuesta over the river in old Triana, at each stop meeting with more and more people – although all distanced, all protected, all obeying the measures which finally brought the virus in Andalusia to its knees.

And as the day draws to a close, and we sit down to dine at the finest white table cloth restaurant in the town, Casa Robles, with its perfect chuletón steak and its exhaustive list of riojas, I once again quote to myself the motto of the city which is engraved on every lampost and manhole cover, and which occurs to me each time I visit: Sevilla no me ha dejado, “Seville, she has not deserted me.”

Bodega San José – Photo by Nicolás Haro

 

Casa Cuesta – Photo by Nicolás Haro