Dan Brown: Seville smells and is corrupt. City: You come here and say that
By Elizabeth Nash in Madrid
Published: 28 August 2005
The curse of Dan Brown has darkened the Spanish city of Seville, whose reputation receives a drubbing in the author's first code-breaking thriller, Digital Fortress. The novel, published in 1996, will shortly appear in a Spanish translation following the successes of Spanish editions of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.
Seville, proud of its beauty, has been so stung by Brown's contemptuous remarks in Digital Fortress, which is partly set in Spain, that the town hall this week invited the writer to visit the city to "renew his knowledge and revise his opinion".
The American author accuses the Andalusian capital of having hospitals that stink of urine, hopelessly inefficient phones and corrupt policemen. Most wounding of all, Brown attacks Seville's best-loved monument, the international symbol of its Moorish heritage: the 12th-century Giralda tower.
The Giralda, Brown sneers, "has stairs so steep that tourists have died here. This is not America, there are no warning signs, nor banisters, no advice about insurance policies. This is Spain. If you are stupid enough to fall, it's your own fault, independently of who built the steps."
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article308609.ece