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Four hundred years ago it would have been the smell of grilled heretics rather than croissants wafting to my nostrils in the Zocodover Plaza. Times have moved on of course, but even these days in Toledo some of the darker aspects of Spain's exotic some might say benighted imperial past cling to the older buildings like the smoke and ashes from an Auto da Fe, and the spirit of the Holy Office has never really left the place.

In fact, take away the tourists and the souvenir shops and you could easily be back in the glory days of Felipe II, whose haughty visage sneers down from innumerable Velasquez canvases in Madrid's Prado museum, surrounded by bejewelled Infantas, priests and court dwarfs.

Toledo is one of those neat medieval towns whose boundaries are clearly delineated within the ox-bow bend of a river in this case the Tagros with a fairy-tale cluster of castle and cathedral at its centre, and minor dwellings clinging to them like retainers. It is relatively easy to get your mind and feet around, leaving more time to ferret out places of interest and soak up a truly unique atmosphere.

After an hour spent crossing the vast and featureless northern plain from Madrid by coach, I was grateful to foot-it up the Calle de la Carrera, keeping the Moorish city walls to my left, and stand at last before the Puerta Nueva de Bisagra, built by the emperor Carlos V in 1550. There are many gates into Toledo, but this is the natural entrance from the plain, and it is suitably magnificent. Cut into its stone blocks is the huge imperial coat of arms of the city, a great double-headed eagle that looks like a prop from an old Hammer film, tantalisingly hinting at obscure dangers ahead.

The road beyond the gate curves downwatds into a maze of narrow streets that would have impressed King Minos, past the thirteenth century Church of Santiago del Arrabel. This is the most important of the Mudejar churches those that remained after the Moorish occupation and were rebuilt during the Christian Middle Ages of the 12th to 15th centuries. Such churches show a mixture of Visigothic motifs and architectural elements which have been enriched with Moorish decorations, to produce that unique blend of heavy gothic leavened with Arabic elegance that is found across Spain.

The labyrinth of narrow streets into which I subsequently plunged turned out to conceal something less exotic but just as lethal as a Minotaur. I was made rudely aware of this when screeching brakes and an angry horn forced

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