HOST(ESS): Cristina is a charming and consummate hostess ... beginning with post-booking correspondence. In fact, she is the epitome of what a airbnb host should be – and then some. Born and raised in Sevilla, she knows everything about it and is eager to share her love for her city. Restaurants, museums, performing arts, shopping … whatever interests you, Cristina knows about it. She is a native Spanish speaker, but is also fluent in (at least) English and German. When we arrived at 9:30 pm, she met us at the apartment, buzzed us in, oriented us to the apartment and its fittings, and spent over an hour and a half with us, offering advice about things to do and answering every question we had. She offered to spend more time with us during the visit, but we were so busy we didn’t take her up on her offer until the end of our stay. After spending a few delightful hours over tapas and drinks on our last night, we wished we had seen more of her. We really felt that we had made a friend.

APARTMENT: The apartment is spacious, airy, and clean as a whistle, with extremely comfortable beds and linens, central heat & additional bathroom heater/towel warmer for winter, and excellent amenities. Cristina is an interior designer, and the flat is beautifully designed and decorated with excellent taste and a delightful sense of humor. There is a separate sleeping area and half bath on a lower floor. For our visit, she stocked the beautiful bathroom with top-flight toiletries, the living/dining area with fresh flowers and candies, and the kitchen with 2 kinds of bread, a package of traditional Andalusian pastry, yogurt, milk, cereal, a selection of marmalades, chilled water and fixings for coffee, tea, etc – and a welcome bottle of Copa de Cava. The kitchen is equipped with refrigerator, microwave and double hotplate for cooking, washer, drier, dishwasher, and necessary detergents. There are and ample (and attractive) dishes. A small back patio would be delightful for private breakfasts al fresco in season. We visited in the middle of winter, during an unusually cold, cloudy and rainy week … and the apartment was dependably warm, dry, and very comfortable. (Cristina even provided slippers for walking around on the marble floors … which would be deliciously cool underfoot in summer.) Good, reliable wireless internet, and a TV – in case you can imagine spending any time watching it in an incredible city like Sevilla.

The location is perfect, on a side pedestrian street, ground floor, in the back of the interior courtyard shown in the listing, so absolutely quiet for sleeping. It is walking distance to almost anything you would want to see, and is literally around the corner from the Flamenco museum which is fascinating and has superb performances daily. (We saw five, each different and absolutely top-flight.)

I could go on and on … but I’ve run up to the maximum word count for this review.