Ancient Rome's Spanish outpost

The theatre was full of cables and lights, and Spaniards in T-shirts lumping scenery around.

There was a performance that night — I assumed of a classical play, since the theatre was a 2,000-year-old Roman ruin, until I saw a poster advertising a work by one of Spain's leading living dramatists.

It must have been so reassuring being an Ancient Roman. Everywhere you went there was the same town with its forum, its temple, its circus, its amphitheatre for gladiatorial games, its bath house and the same grid of streets.

All the signs were in Latin and shops sold the same food; it was only the local wine — and the natives outside — who changed. It was their own stupid fault if they couldn't understand you saying "Stop, or I'll shoot" in English I mean, Latin. So it was a bit like being an American today, or a Briton a hundred years ago.

This particular bit of Ancient Rome is in Mérida (pop 51,000), once Augusta Emerita (pop 40,000), capital of the Roman province of Lusitania, built in 25BC for veterans of the North African wars, from the same kind of kit as Jerash in Jordan, or Pompeii, or Bath.

It has a perfect amphitheatre, in which Russell Crowe could have electrified the mob on his provincial gladiatorial tour.

And a fabulous museum, built by one of Spain's leading architects, Rafael Moneo, in the proportions of a Roman bath house and from the Romans' flat red bricks. And a café opposite, where we dipped almond cakes in coffee while we took it all in.

Extremadura, where I was staying with a friend, lies between Portugal and Madrid. The Romans weren't the only conquerors to come this way. Visigoths and Arabs, too, until they were kicked out by Ferdinand and Isabella. Then Napoleon's armies came through and, a decade later, Wellington, with our armies pushed back the other way — they were about the last Englishmen to visit. Hemingway's heroes, though, talk wistfully of blowing up trains in long-gone Extremeños guerrilla campaigns.

As a result of all the conquests there is a wonderful breadth of things to see: we were only an hour or so from the Gothic splendours of Toledo and an hour-and-ahalf from the Islamic beauty of Seville.

We seemed to do culture every second day. The other days were spent lying by the pool of our palacio in Trujillo, a creamy hill town. Now it's the secret weekend retreat of the Spanish intelligentsia but it has a much more violent past. It was the home of Francisco Pizarro, leader of the Conquistadors, who'd found the climate so unforgiving (Extremadura means extremely hard and the climate veers from grilling sun to icy winds) that he took his chances instead conquering South America.

We ate jamon belota (local ham from pigs fattened on acorns, so delicious that I wondered what acorns might do for me) and melon, watched bullfights and recovered from dancing till dawn, which wasn't even propelled by the thrill of being different — everyone in Spain seems to dance till dawn, including the toddlers who swarmed Trujillo's Plaza Mayor in the early hours.

On our culture days we wandered round Cáceres, another hill town 28 miles away, where we admired the fortifications and ate an enormous lunch at the local Parador hotel.