Sean Hillen

More than 40 years ago, as a young reporter for the leading daily newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri in the flatlands of the American Midwest, I wrote a story about a visiting up-and-coming Scottish traditional music group called Capercaillie. Last week, in southern Brittany, France, I found myself in a packed hall listening to that very same group, still playing some of the tunes that made them famous and that I remembered so well from decades before.

Hard to find a more intriguing setting for a restaurant than an underground room steeped in a thousand years of history. That’s what you get when you enter the basement of the Caro Hotel in Valencia’s Old Town where Xanglot restaurant is located.

Friendly Englishwoman Mimi Gerrard-Morgan, 33, has made an annual visit to the Spanish island of Formentera for the last thirty years, ever since her parents bought a holiday property there on the advice of their local butcher in Lichfield.