Madridįorever praised as a city of summer, its bars and restaurants teeming with customers well into the small hours, the Spanish capital ( ) is also a splendid option for the first season of the year. But they should all deliver, to some extent, a dose of renewal, a surge in spirit – and, on a less ethereal basis, a night or three in an inviting hotel, with its fluffy pillows and decadent breakfasts. You don’t need to go far to collide with spring’s flirtatiousness. The following 20 escapes limit the rapture to a long weekend (or, go on then, a week) – and, with a handful of exceptions, to the European landmass and some of its most intriguing major cities. It is also, most certainly, a time for travel. The coming of spring is an annual reason to be cheerful the moment when we shrug off winter’s drab touch and embrace (in our case) the northern hemisphere’s return from hibernation, with its flowers, its bright bouquets, its perfumed petals – and its hint of something better around the corner. But you cannot say that he didn’t have a point. Such rare moments of elation were not enough to keep Keats from tragedy – he was dead at 25. In The Human Seasons (1818) – a musing on man’s emotional development over the course of a lifetime – he deploys the most positive quarter of the calendar as a metaphor for youthful exuberance: “His lusty Spring – when fancy clear/ Takes in all beauty with an easy span”. Still, even this most melancholy of poets could detect a joy of sorts in spring. Witness his Ode To A Nightingale, written in the fresh warmth of May 1819, but lost to an opening line of: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense/ As though of hemlock I had drunk”. John Keats was not a man given to giddy bursts of happiness.
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