Heading North towards the French Border (and it’s getting colder)

Wednesday 11 to Thursday 19 January 2023

We left Los Alcázares on Wednesday, having had a look round (we ended our last post after arriving at the motorhome aire at Los Alcázares but before having done any exploration).

We really liked the place; it was a mile from the aire down to the sea-front, then a really nice promenade curves around the bay. We’ve no idea how long it is as we didn’t make it all the way to the end.

We’ve really struggled to find aires with available spaces up this part of the Spanish coast. It has seemed even busier than it was in November on our way south.

We decided, therefore, to go for a purely practical stop on Wednesday night:

Overnight: San Fulgencio

San Fulgencio is only about 45 minutes from Los Alcázares, so we arrived mid-afternoon (after exploring Los Alcázares in the morning).

It’s a tiny compound between a petrol station and a Burger King, which sounds grim but it was actually OK for one night. The laundry right next to the motorhome area was fantastic – lots of machines and all very sparkly clean.

Mark found a nice-looking aire that he fancied for Thursday and possibly Friday nights. As we arrived, we both realised that this was one of the ones we’d enquired at on the way south in November (they were full). We decided that as we were there, we may as well ask anyway. The French owner nearly fell over laughing when I asked if they had any spaces…

We decided not to bother any more with “nice-sounding” aires on the east coast of Spain. They’re all full of Germans who’ve set up camp for the winter….

From now on we were going back to hippy mode – free and cheap camping spots for us. Preferably places with 48 hour parking limits or where getting tables and chairs out isn’t allowed (either of which would put off long-stayers and hopefully therefore mean there’d be space for us).

We retired to Mercadona to get a bit of shopping in and consider our options. Typical – they’d covered their whole car park in shades that are no doubt much appreciated in summer by car drivers but made the car park unusable for SOK.

“Sod it”, we thought. There was a row of completely empty parking spaces on the road outside. We’d just “park like Germans”, sideways across as many spaces as it took.

It’s not the first time we’ve accidentally started a trend: by the time we came out, two other motorhomes had done exactly the same as us.

We ended up driving a total of about 130 km on Thursday, north past Alicante and Benidorm, to a free roadside motorhome parking area at Benissa.

Overnight: Benissa

The parking at Benissa sounded a bit grim in the apps we use, but it turned out to be much better than expected.

We had a wander around the town itself, but didn’t find anything much to report. Mark was mesmerised by the huge nativity scene (Bethlehem in its entirety?) still on display in the church and couldn’t figure out why it contained multiple versions of baby Jesus.

We found a great overnight stop on Friday another 170 km north (past Valencia) at the Coves de Sant Josep. This is a tourist attraction promising a boat ride through “the longest navigable underground river in Europe”.

We’re not sure how true that claim is and we didn’t get to investigate further as the caves were closed for maintenance.

Luckily, the car park and motorhome service point were still open, so we had an empty car park between us and a few other motorhomes. We’ll have to go back another time to check out the caves.

Overnight: Coves de Sant Josep

We were up early on Saturday as we had a mission: to get to the free motorhome aire at El Grau early enough to bag a spot. We’d really liked it here on our way south (it’s at the southern end of the promenade that goes up to Benicàssim; again, not sure how far the promenade goes as we’ve never made it to the far end). Unfortunately, lots of other people seem to really like it too so competition for spaces is fierce.

We arrived at 9.30am (it’s only about 45 km from the caves) and were lucky:

Overnight: El Grau (2 nights)

We left El Grau (reluctantly) on Monday morning, having stayed our allowed 48 hours. We’d decided that we shouldn’t rush north too quickly; we’d be better off making the most of the Spanish weather while we could.

About 60km north of Benicàssim is the town of Peñiscola. We’ve driven into Peñiscola once before (back in Kampington days), couldn’t find anywhere to park, and carried on.

Since our last visit to this area, though, a new motorhome aire has opened within walking distance of the medieval walled town. We booked in for two nights at the bargain price of €9.50 a night (no electricity).

Overnight: Las Brisas, Peñiscola (2 nights)

We had a walk round on Monday afternoon. The medieval walled town of Peñiscola is on a tiny spit of land that protrudes out into the Mediterranean:

This is the castle and beach made famous by Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in the film El Cid. Unfortunately we didn’t have a horse handy for Mark to be able to re-enact the final scene (of a dead El Cid leading his troops into battle on the beach, tied to his horse).

We entered through one of the old gates:

The town itself is full of narrow winding streets:

We decided to leave the castle until Tuesday as Tripadvisor suggested that a visit would take 2-3 hours and we didn’t want to have to rush to see it all before closing time.

The castle was built by the Templars between 1294 and 1307 on the site of an earlier Arab construction. It definitely looks the part:

You can just picture the Templars in the church and the main hall:

Peñiscola Castle was also a “papal” residence. Pedro de Luna (“Benedict XIII”) was the Avignon antipope from 1394 (at a time when the church had two popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, both claiming to be the “real” pope. Of all the times when a thunderbolt from above would have been helpful…).

In 1409, the Council of Pisa, probably fed up with the whole pope / antipope carry-on, declared both the Rome pope and the Avignon pope deposed and chose a third pope (just to add to the farce – obviously the existing two weren’t backing down so now there were three popes).

The Council of Constance then deposed Benedict (again) in 1417. He ended up having to do a runner (long story) and took refuge at Peñiscola Castle between 1417 and his death in 1423.

We left Peñiscola on Wednesday morning and drove 175 km to a little place called Santa Margarida i els Monjos, just south of Barcelona. This is a wine-producing area that has set up free motorhome aires in 12 local towns and villages.

Overnight: Santa Margarida i els Monjos

There wasn’t much to see near the aire but we had a quiet night and it’s one to remember for the future, being only a very short distance from the motorway and having a massive car park right next to the motorhome area – so we’d always find space here for a night when passing through:

It has been getting gradually cooler for a few days now. Rather than 20 C, afternoon temperatures have been only reaching about 16 C. Also, it has been getting much cooler at night and staying cool for longer in the mornings.

Last night was the coldest night we’ve had in quite a while. We even needed to put the heating on to warm the van up before getting out of bed this morning. When we set off, SOK reckoned it was still only 5 C outside…. We haven’t needed any heating in the evenings yet…..

Another 190 km driven today took us part Barcelona and Girona to the tiny town of Peralada and another free motorhome aire.

Overnight: Peralada

We had a walk round the walled town and read all of the information boards we came across telling us about its history. Apparently a famous medieval chronicler, Roman Muntaner, was born here in 1265. Many of the other details passed us by somewhat as we just don’t know enough about history in this part of the world to be able to place the information on the boards into any kind of context.

It’s not far at all now to the French border, so we’ll most likely cross over into France tomorrow morning. We don’t want to head north into the wintry weather too quickly, so we’ll probably hang around on the Mediterranean coast for a couple of days before trundling on in the general direction of Dieppe and home.