Dawn Collinson

It’s rare that a total stranger cares about your travel arrangements. And rarer still for them to care so passionately that their response to your poor planning is a firm slap.

But maybe that’s because not every revelation involves a woeful failure to pre-book for a world-renowned site, featuring on at least two million other tourists’ to-do lists every year.

Our Airbnb host in Seville could barely disguise her frustration. In fact, she made no effort to disguise it at all.

“So,” she said, on hearing our plan to visit Granada. “You’ll already have your tickets for the Alhambra...” There was an awkward pause. “Of course,” she added, by way of driving home the point that anyone who didn’t have tickets 12 days before they hoped to see it was an idiot.

We’d considered it, obviously. It’s very much the kind of thing you think of when you book flights and a hotel. But then somehow it had fallen by the wayside.

Surely it would be fine. And if we had to queue, then we’d queue. That is, after all, what we Brits do best.

But we were wrong. Because at the Alhambra palacefortress, queuing is not an option. No tickets, no entry and since this is an ancient monument, considered by some to be one of the wonders of the world, they don’t just let endless numbers trample through it.

A quick glance at the official ticket booking website (tickets. alhambra-patronato.es/en €14) revealed they were booked up for weeks in advance, clearly by people far better organised than us.

Luckily, having delivered her sharp slap – wrist, not face (she ANCIENT A bridge over the Rio Darro in Granada