It is just as well the sun was out in Glasgow yesterday and is expected to remain out for another day at least. Mercifully, and in the nick of time, a cold front has given way to another barmy - no, not balmy - Glasgow heat wave just as 30,000 sun-kissed señors of Catalonia and Andalucia are arriving for this evening’s Uefa Cup final at Hampden Park.

The fans of Espanyol and Seville have been infiltrating the city, many of them taking up their positions and mimicking that enjoyable old Glasgow pastime of bevvying around George Square, the central plaza of the city where many a social knees-up has taken place.

Culturally, Glasgow is pretty chuffed to be staging the Uefa Cup final and George Square is ever the fitting venue for some human pageantry to mark the occasion. It was there in 1990, when Glasgow was dumb-founded to be named European City of Culture, that the celebrating crowd began bawling “here we go, here we go, here we go” as the Hogmanay minutes ticked down, in what one commentator called “the least auspicious start to any city’s year of culture there has ever been”.

On the main Edinburgh-Glasgow rail link yesterday afternoon it would be stretching it to report that there were sombreros strewn about the place. But it resonated with loud and argumentative disputes in Spanish, causing at least one Edinburgh sweet old dear to peer apprehensively over the top of her newspaper.

The city fathers are almost beside themselves with glee, not just at all 9,000 hotel beds being snapped up, but at the opportunity for Glasgow’s tapas specialists to get their goods out on to the streets.

They have even printed instructions in Spanish on how to navigate Glasgow’s underground system. It should not be difficult – there only are two loops.

Out to the south of the city, the grand old lady called Hampden Park is bracing herself for one more piece of football theatre. Hampden no longer resembles the old dirty dust bowl of years past, of those sepia-tinted days of the 1960s when Real Madrid, in their blinding, radiant white, put Eintracht Frankfurt to the sword in front of 135,000 people.

Like most grounds today, the cathedral of Scottish football is a piece of patched-up pristine plastic, with its 52,000 seats set to house its second European final of the millennium.

The previous time, in 2002, the Hampden marketing men got lucky: Zinédine Zidane let go one swish of his left boot and dispatched a fizzing volley past Bayer Leverkusen for a goal that was subsequently voted the greatest in the history of the old European Cup.

At yesterday’s press conference, a few of the locals wandered around looking bewildered – despite Glasgow being a football-mad city, neither Seville nor Espanyol set the passions raging here. A chaotic Spanish press corps, though, added their spicy ingredients.

Juande Ramos, the Seville coach, is pursuing three trophies: the Spanish title, the Spanish Cup and, as defending champions, the Uefa Cup. “It is a huge responsibility to defend our Uefa title,” he said. “It has been a long season, but a beautiful season for us; motivation goes beyond fatigue. We have done our best in all three competitions.”

Ernesto Valverde, the poor Espanyol coach, has been unable to live down being a player with the club when they blew a 3-0 first-leg lead against Bayer Leverkusen in the Uefa Cup final of 1988.

“Losing the 1988 final has [meant] the Uefa Cup has a special meaning for Espanyol,” he said. “The fans feel very close to the tournament. This has been our goal since the start of the season and we are glad to have got all the way to Glasgow. I can’t remember how I felt back then, but of course it is different now because I am a coach, not a player who only has to worry about himself.”