The fourth-largest city in Spain had lost its former glory as a manufacturing centre: its factories shuttered, its port decrepit.
There's nothing in particular to make it child-friendly but small people are welcome, and Dina and Walter were endlessly patient with my four-year old, who loved hunting for lizards in their garden and feeding treats to their poor decrepit old dog.
Now, a new phoenix is projected to rise from the 800 acres of decrepit dockland along the city's eastern shoreline, again in the prime south.
In my mind, Sheffield was the mouldy brown sludge of Devvy Green, and the decrepit markets where stocky women stood, wearing raincoats, chain-smoking fistfuls of cigarettes.
Jenkins found that by 2009, the year Kate and Harry were cremated, furnaces at Emstrey were decrepit.
But weirdly, being decrepit helps in a way with the perception of you as an act, because in the 1990s when we were young and comedy was the new rock'n'roll, it was like you were supposed to be a pin-up.
Now the challenge is to stamp out the disease – the incidence of new cases had fallen at the beginning of the year, but that decline has stalled in the past few weeks – while simultaneously rebuilding health systems so decrepit that they contributed to the rapid spread of Ebola across Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia last year.
An inability to move from or redevelop their decrepit Somerset Park home has been a major hindrance to Ayr's plans for progress over the past two decades.
No one can relate to decrepit emperors or the impossible-to-pronounce names of French battlefields.
I'd only recommend Dadanawa if you can manage a smile when Duane DeFreitas picks you up from Lethem airport in a 50s Land Rover with no roof and asks "have you ever been in so decrepit a vehicle?" There's a sign at Guyana's airport that welcomes you to "The world's last undiscovered natural paradise".
Mr Yeltsin's handlers presumably do not want the world to hear the incoherence into which Russia's first elected leader has lapsed.Kremlin courtiers down the centuries have realised that tsars in their dotage and decrepit party bosses have their uses.
