Malaga: City of Seduction by Brian Johnston

Let's be honest: Malaga's main attraction is its airport. Get in your rental car like everyone else and off you go – it's a right-hand turn to the playgrounds of the Costa del Sol. Turn left and you're sucked into the tangled freeways that lead towards the city. Before you know it you're being tailgated by impatient Spaniards, belched upon by buses and assaulted on all side by urban chaos. Steady your nerves and keep driving, because Malaga is a gritty working city that hides a delightful little secret. Eventually the road tunnels under interlocking fig trees. Along the pavement flower kiosks seduce you with roses and voluptuous chrysanthemums. Look up: baroque saints wave from rooftops and an Arab fortress broods on the hill behind. You come for a couple of hours and end up staying days. Malaga is the real deal, a slice of everyday Spain that seduces you by stealth.

Malaga suffers from the misconception that it's little more than the gateway to the Costa del Sol, that notorious stretch of Mediterranean coastline overrun by Brits and Germans. That may be so – it's busy airport siphons millions of passengers a year – but few visitors bother with the city itself, leaving it with a genuine Spanish feel and a people full of casual goodwill. Malaga also lies within the province of Andalusia, whose chief characteristics are a flamboyant culture, sumptuous food and lingering Islamic heritage. It has the same foot-stomping festivals as Seville and some of the Moorish grandeur of Granada, but none of their pretensions or shuffling crowds. In recent years the city has also undergone an overhaul, with vastly improved gardens, castle ramparts and buffed-up facades. Better yet, much of the delightful old centre has recently been pedestrianised.

Put on your walking shoes, start clicking your castanets and spend a few days in one of Spain's most charming workaday cities. Start off with the new Museo Picasso, which traces the evolution of the great painter from his birth, right here in Malaga, to his long career. The museum, set in a magnificently renovated sixteenth-century palace, holds some two hundred Picasso pieces, from paintings and drawings to sculpture and ceramics. Nearly all come from the family's own collection; some have never been exhibited before. This is one of Europe's finest small museums, and proof that culture and the Costa del Sol can happily coexist.

If you think the Little One-Armed Lady might be a Picasso painting, think again. In fact, this is the affectionate name locals give to Malaga's cathedral, whose second tower was never built. The whole project was a bit muddle, leaving the cathedral with Gothic foundations, Renaissance walls, baroque decoration, superb organs and wooden carvings galore – a worthy place, perhaps, to ponder the vagaries of art after the Museo Picasso. In the shade of the cathedral's orange walls ladies sell linen and handmade tablecloths, smiling as serenely as queens at a garden party. Across the street, patrons slump on sequined cushions, playing backgammon and sipping mint tea in Moroccan inspired teahouses.

The Arabs, of course, made Andalusia their own for centuries. Moroccan immigrants might be relative newcomers, but the fortified Alcazaba on the hill has been around since the eleventh century, and is probably the most important Islamic military fortification left in Spain. Forget its dusty artefacts; much better are the vantage points it gives over the town, its crumbling port and the grand sweep of the bullring. On event days the ring resounds with the throaty murmur and feet stomping of an Andalusian crowd intent on the bloodthirsty spectacle, while the Mediterranean glitters in the distance as if winking its approval.

Below the castle lies another of Malaga's treasures and one of Europe's oddest parks: part green space, part meeting place, part highway. The Paseo del Parque really starts off at a roundabout presided over by a grinning statue of the Marquis of Larios, who first mooted the idea of a botanical garden right in the heart of the city. The authorities seem to have taken him literally. Exotic plants burst through the asphalt, Mexican fan palms sway in front of the town hall as if practicing flamenco, and fine plane trees blanket the road in cool shadow. Ducks quack on ponds as if trying to outdo roaring public buses, and jacaranda drop purple flowers onto the windscreens of impatient traffic at red lights. On the left, couples get married in the registry; on the right, Malaga's waterfront tangle of hot metal is abandoned to the heat. Not far away are beaches of grey gritty sand. Locals come down to the promenades for an afternoon constitutional or a drink at one of the many bars, some of which sink into the sand itself.

But Malaga isn't really a beach town, nor even one of grand monuments; it’s a working city with a surprisingly intimate town centre. Behind shuttered windows you hear the sounds of lunch being prepared, children doing their homework, the sharp ting! of a spoon knocking against a glass. It's here that people still live and everyone gravitates: to the tangle of little alleyways and squares around the cathedral, where old men doze on benches and black-clad matrons haggle over plastic bags of fish and lush tomatoes. Buy a paper cone of sugared almonds – another legacy of Arab times – and munch on them as you walk the shady byways, where buskers strum guitars and sing melancholy songs as if commissioned by the tourist office to re-enforce every stereotype of Andalusia. Then laze at an outdoor café over some olives and Malaga's favourite summer drink, zumo y tinto, a very refreshing mixture of red wine, orange juice and sparkling water, with lots of ice – the perfect antidote to the hot wind of southern Spain.

Most of the old town's streets are now pedestrian only, and you could spend an entire afternoon rummaging through their dark little stores. Traditional painted fans and glazed ceramics make for entrancing souvenirs, but just as interesting are shops selling modernist furniture or Italian designer beachwear: evidence of the new spring in Malaga's step. Most of the commercial activity fans out from Calle Larios, a street of sophisticated shops and coffeehouses, marbled flagstones and bold orange street lamps.

As the sun slides down behind the suburbs and the sky turns mauve, Malaga shakes off the heat of the day and finally comes alive. Locals emerge in shoals, drifting up and down Calle Larios as they lick ziggurats of scarlet ice-cream. As darkness settles in, the old town reveals it's trump card: neighbourhood tapas bars. Squeeze in past huge wooden barrels of sweet Malaga wine, bottled olives and great wheels of cheese and take a stool at the bar for some tapas, those pre-dinner snacks so beloved of the Spanish. (And a necessity to keep hungry tourists going; don't expect to be served a meal any time before ten o'clock.) Tapas start off in a series of cold dishes arranged along the countertop: slices of eggplant glistening with olive oil, a little potato salad, or tiny purple-shelled cockles in garlic and parsley sauce, salty from the sea. You can order hot dishes too from a waiter in a crisp white apron: a tiny omelette, some juicy green peppers roasted over an open flame until the skin is charred, deep-fried squid sprinkled with pepper and lime juice. A local Jerez wine or Cruzcampo beer is the accompaniment of choice – Malaga at its very seductive best.

At dinnertime, seafood is king; the fried fish from the cafés at Pedregalejo is reckoned to be the best in all Spain. Sit out under the stars and order a whole baked fish stuffed with fragrant leaves of basil, fennel and parsley and covered in a mound of sea salt. After a while, the waiter carries it out and cracks open its carapace of hardened salt, spilling crystals across the tablecloth. Then he expertly slices off pieces of flesh, flicking away the bones with a fork before laying it on your plate, delicate and fine and full of flavour.

Stay for the long haul, because after midnight, as the stone streets finally give up the last of their heat, you'll hear the distinct, oddly arrhythmic clapping of customers in dim bars, then the rasping tones of an old man singing of treacherous women. You might think these people have been hired as extras from a scene in Carmen, but the overlay of mumbled conversation and the continuing rattle of dishes and cutlery says otherwise. This is no stage performance: this is just Malagans enjoying themselves. Happily, flamenco in Malaga isn't a quaint and dying art, and the same trendy youngsters you see shopping in jeans during the day are just as likely to be clapping and dancing at night, silk roses in their hair and knotted shawls around their shoulders. Castanets click, feet rattle floorboards, a singer moans. Malaga seduces you once more.