"IMAGINATELA," urge the Spanish posters for Expo '92, Seville's technology fair and arts jamboree extraordinaire, which is the last Universal Exposition this century.
"Imagine it."Surrounded by a monorail, criss-crossed by cable cars, and flanked by a series of gracefully improbable bridges, it is a futuristic jungle filled with architectural fantasies of every conceivable kind.
Now still taking shape, it will open with a flourish on April 20.
While the world's poorest countries huddle in groups for economic comfort, each major nation is using its pavilion as in the Venice Biennale to embody its own particular statement of cultural/political intent.
Sweden comes in the guise of a slim white skyscraper enfolded by vast white wings; Finland, just across the street, plays a subtler game in black.
The united Germany's pavilion will be shaded from the sun by a huge canopy suspended from a single mast. In the shadow of Britain's Westminster Abbey-sized glass box, one side of which will be bathed in a constant wall of water, lurks a rocky extravaganza: New Zealand, harking back to Captain Cook.
The Japanese pavilion, one of the biggest wooden buildings in the world, contains the scarlet-and- gold replica of two floors of a medieval fortress. The Saudi building contains a palm-tree oasis and a miniature sandy desert.
Some Cornish carpenters completed a computer-conceived ski-slope roof: they were pleased with themselves, because until they built it no one had been sure that it could be built at all.
Spain, meanwhile, is represented by a variegated ring of buildings round a new lake, and by the renovated Carthusian monastery, which gives Expo's island its name (La Cartuja), from which Columbus planned his second great voyage.
Seville is Spain's hottest city: Expo's planners have resorted to a mind-boggling variety of tactics to combat the relentless summer heat.
First, they are "greening" the land on which Expo stands - 25,000 trees have been planted and 300,000 shrubs, many of them American species new to Spain. Pedestrian walkways are being canopied by living foliage. Areas that were barren wastes are now thickly forested by palms and orange trees.
Second, they are employing the same methods the Moors used to cool their palaces: water, water everywhere. Under the pavements, to cool the feet. In liquid curtains along glass walls stretching as far as the eye can see. In artificial lakes. In banks upon banks of fountains. And in hundreds of ingenious applications of the hot-air-rises/ cold-air-sinks principle.
My guide took me up close to a tree to show that many of its "branches" actually consist of metal piping. On the end of each metal branch was a nozzle for injecting water into the atmosphere at high pressure through minute orifices. And then I saw that every tree in that long avenue had a similar device lovingly woven through its branches. The official claim is that this will create a microclimate. Assuming all goes according to plan, it seems quite believable.
Another of Expo's promised marvels is a tailor-made IBM information system. You approach an ordinary-looking video screen showing a map of the site and touch a Union Jack at the bottom (no messing about with a keyboard): cue into English. Touch a point on the map, and you get a blow-up of that area. Touch a point on the blow-up - a section of a pavilion, say - and you get a view of the room you seek.
Simply through the heat of your finger on the relevant point on the screen, you will be able to cue into timetables of theatrical and musical events, and even restaurant menus. You will be able to use this machine to make bookings, order meals, send messages to friends, make drawings that will be entered into Expo's daily computer-art competition...Hold it!
That is harder to imagine, since they are expecting this system to be used by 25,000 of us each day, or one Expo visitor in 10. And new computer systems have been known to break down.
Now imagine 250,000 people, which is the number expected to pass through the security alerted, metal-detecting turnstiles each day in July and August. Then look at the projections another way: parking spaces have been created for 40,000 cars, and for 1,200 coaches (these figures have already made it into the Guinness Book of Records).
For those of little faith, here is the crunch. Does all this denote something wonderful, or something quite appalling? That is the question on which everything relating to Expo '92 ultimately turns, and to which one must try to hazard an answer.
Throughout a succession of Sundays last autumn, sections of Expo far less than its operational whole were thrown open to local residents. Roughly 150,000 turned up each time, and by all accounts the place felt far from overcrowded. Restaurants, a free bus service, lost-children rerieval schemes: the basics have been exemplarily planned.
Security is clearly a worry coupled with the Barcelona Olympics, Expo will inevitably be seen by ETA, the Basque terrorist group, as a potential hunting-ground, but on this subject the authorites sound bullishly well-prepared.
But imagination is something the Expo planners have been systematically exercising ever since the project's inception in 1982: they have had to.
Ask any official a logistical question and he will immediately reach for his "hypothesis." The transport hypothesis holds that 53 percent of Expo's anticipated 18 million visitors will arrive (via the region's new highways) in their own cars. But will there not be horrendous traffic jams on the way in and out?
No, they insist. Even the bus parking area has a four-lane entrance. Relax! A spanking new railway station has been built and Seville's airport has been expanded very elegantly to accommodate four times more passengers.
The hotel-bed hypothesis is aggressively flourished: there will be accommodation for everyone that needs it. But things are not quite that simple. Even after the recent hotel-building spree, Seville only has 24, 000 hotel beds. Another 20,000 have been found through a scheme called Exhibit, which has roped in the bed-and-breakfast market. New campsites, some providing their own tents and sleeping bags, can accommodate 12,000 more.
What the hypothesis does is to add in all the available beds in towns and resorts within striking distance and it stresses the cheapness of staying in resorts such as Huelva or Cadiz, which are only an hour and a half away.
This is is a key point: Seville's hotels are doubling their rates for the event.
Meanwhile, Expo will be awash with day-trippers from the Costa del Sol and the Costa de la Luz: tour operators are planning to make a day at Expo the prime attraction for all their packages to that part of Spain. This is not hypothesis: it is fact.
So: how to enjoy these cultural Olympics and how to avoid disaster?
Whether you visit for one day, or for several, it is probably wise to go on a package: you can waste a lot of time trying to get into things under your own steam, and Expo's concerts and theatrical events are going to be heavily oversubcribed.
Plan as much as possible. Arrive early in the day. Do not expect your hosts to speak English. And beware July and August.