Cartagena turns out to be a pleasant Spanish city, like Portsmouth with sunshine and good food. But the ruins of the medieval cathedral aren’t up to much. As ruins, they’re no Fountains Abbey.

One trouble is that the cathedral wasn’t ruined by Henry VIII closing it down but by Franco bombarding it. That was in 1939, by which time Britain had recognised his regime. He had no particular hatred for the cathedral, but it was in the wrong place, overlooking the magnificent harbour during a failed uprising. In the same action, 1,476 Nationalist reinforcements drowned as their ship was sunk by the docks.

If the cathedral ruins are aesthetically unsatisfactory, the excavated Roman theatre next to it is worse. Some Roman theatres are lovely. One from the second-century at Mérida in Extremadura catches the imagination because below the tiers of seats stand two storeys of Corinthian columns backing the stage. They were reconstructed in the 1970s. Old photos from the nineteenth century show seven bare wedges of the stepped auditorium in a semicircle, like giant chairs, standing in a field of beans. Anyway, in Cartagena, the Roman ruins look even duller than the Christian ruins.