Almerimar to Tarifa

Saturday 10 – Tuesday 20 December 2022

Where did the last ten days disappear to? It’s gone frighteningly quickly.

We left Almerimar on Saturday morning and drove an hour and a half to Caleta de Vélez.

Overnight: Caleta de Vélez (2 nights)

The motorhome aire at Caleta de Vélez is at another marina but it’s not as attractive as the one at Almerimar; it’s basically a secure fenced-in area at one side of the marina. I didn’t bother taking a photo of SOK inside a compound.

Although the view from the van wasn’t great, the area around the marina itself was really nice:

The palm trees along the front were packed with lots of green parrots busy extending and/or improving their nests:

We were confined to the van by bouncing rain on Sunday morning, but it had cleared up at lunchtime, so we managed to do a bit more exploring.

There’s a paved promenade that takes you the two and a bit miles along the front to the neighbouring town of Torre del Mar with information boards along the way telling you about the history of the place. All very nice.

We didn’t wander around the town centre itself, it being a Sunday, but from what we’d seen on the way through town on the drive in to the marina, it seems a perfectly functional little place rather than just a tourist resort.

We moved a bit inland on Monday to Antequera. We’ve been to this area before to visit El Torcal, but we hadn’t been to the town itself.

Overnight: Antequera

The motorhome aire at Antequera is by the sports centre, so we’d expected something a bit different to what we got. It was much more “in the thick of things” than we’ve used to at sports centre aires in, say, France.

Given how surrounded we were by blocks of flats, bars etc, we were pleasantly surprised at how quiet it was overnight.

Arriving on Monday morning gave us plenty of time to wander through the town and then visit the Alcazaba, a Moorish fortress dating back to the 15th century and built on top of some Roman era ruins.

Antequera was captured from the Moors in 1410 after a five month siege, the last city to fall before Granada.

Here’s Mark on the “Arch of the Giants”, a 16th century replacement for the original Moorish gate:

Note the strange-looking lump in the landscape to the left of Mark in the photo above. It’s called the Peña de los Enamorados and looks just like a red Indian’s head in profile. We’ll come back to that a bit later on.

The view looking down over Antequera:

You’ll see two people at the top of the tower in the photo above, just under a giant bell. We’d been up there ten minutes previously and had commented that they must not ring it or they’d deafen any visitors who happened to be there. We’d hardly got to the bottom of the stairs when the bell rang… extremely loudly even at that distance. “What time was that?” asked Mark. “14.25”, I replied.

Right next to the Alcazaba is the Santa Maria Collegiate Church, which I had already read was one of the first (and apparently the best) Renaissance churches in Andalucia, built in 1514-1550.

The lady at the ticket office for the Alcazaba sold us combined tickets for the two; it was only €2 extra to add the church, which seemed fine. She told us that there was an exhibition in there about the Lord of the Ring (el Señor del Anillo), which I just took to be some local Catholic thing. Possibly another dusty doll of great religious significance like the one we saw in Chartres Cathedral on our way south?

Ah, no, I messed up….

It was VERY difficult to actually pay attention and look at this church. The only way to do it was to continually look up…. which revealed Ionic columns and what is apparently a Mudejar ceiling

Yep, the Señor del Anillo is, of course, the Lord of the Rings in Spanish. Which just goes to show that you can know the words but still be completely lead astray by the context…..

A church full of figures of characters from the Lord of the Rings, strangely enough without any notices to remind you of what they were or their role in the story.

Even more confusingly. the strange-looking “madonna with the seven headed thingie” at the back of the photo above wasn’t part of the Lord of the Rings display. It’s a Tarasca, a dreadful monster (in this case a seven-headed dragon) at the feet of a lady (in legend this was Saint Martha, who legend has it had tamed said beast, which allowed the locals to then kill it), that would traditionally lead the Corpus Christi procession in Granada and Antequera.

Of course, Mark found the dressing-up corner:

Before leaving Antequera on Tuesday, we visited the Dólmenes de Antequera. Together with the Peña de los Enamorados and el Torcal, the two dolmens and a tholos (dome-shaped tomb) form a UNESCO World Heritage site.

We started in the very modern museum (the white building in the photo above), which gave us a very good explanation of the site and the various excavations over the year. Intriguingly, the grassy “lump in the landscape” just behind the museum has never been properly excavated…

One of the main reasons that the site was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site is the very unusual alignment of two of the three sites: they’re aligned with specific features in the landscape as well as the Sun.

The Dólmen de Menga is aligned with the Peña de los Enamorados:

On the summer solstice in June, the Sun rises right over the “nose” of the rock and enters the dolmen’s entrance corridor.

The Dólmen de Viera is right next to the Dólmen de Menga but more traditionally aligned to the South East.

4km away is the Tholos of El Romeral, a tomb with an entrance corridor followed by one large and one small beehive-shaped chambers with huge stone slabs on top.

El Romeral is aligned with the highest point of El Torcal which, we were told, was a prehistoric settlement site so presumably had some spiritual significance to the tomb builders.

We thought that the dolmens were well worth a visit. Remarkably, the whole thing (visiting the museum and the monuments) was completely and utterly free.

From the dolmens, we drove on Tuesday afternoon to Coín, our next overnight stop.

Overnight: Coín

The motorhome aire here was the edge of an industrial estate and not near anything of particular interest to look at, but it was free and had fettlings (clean water and disposal of grey water and WC).

Wednesday took us further west to Castellar de la Frontera, a few kilometres north of Gibraltar. To get there we had to go down to the coast at Marbella then along the coast road before turning back inland.

The weather this week has been mixed to say the least! We didn’t get the usual view as we headed downhill towards Marbella:

Overnight: Castellar de la Frontera (2 nights)

We arrived at Castellar de la Frontera in the early afternoon. The motorhome parking area was perfectly functional:

We managed a wander round town during a lull in the bouncing rain. It’s a strange place, purpose-built to rehouse the inhabitants of the original village of Castellar de la Frontera a few km away. The inhabitants moved to the new village in 1971.

The thing that makes the place look strange is that all the buildings are clearly the same age and from the same book of designs. It’s a bit like a big housing estate of the same kind of era in the UK or a holiday camp.

There’s an era-appropriate central square housing most of the public facilities:

A stork on the church roof, the first we’d seen this trip:

We drove the short distance back down to the coast on Friday, planning to spend three nights at Gibraltar. Again, the weather wasn’t quite what they promise in the brochures:

Things started to look a bit better once the rain stopped:

Overnight: La Línea (3 nights)

The marina is actually at La Línea on the Spanish side of the border, about a ten minute walk from passport control.

We managed a wander round La Línea on Friday afternoon. La Línea really is a pretty scruffy place, though the marina itself is fine.

We crossed over into Gibraltar on Saturday for a mooch round town. We went up the rock on our last visit, so we didn’t bother this time.

Horror of Horrors: the week before Christmas and Morrisons Gibraltar was clean out of unsmoked bacon. Oh well…. We did get mince pies…..

We had a reasonably lazy day on Sunday. Mark went jogging; I did a spring clean of the van and did our washing at the small marina laundry.

We completed our chores on Monday morning by visiting a huge Carrefour on the outskirts of La Línea; depending where we get to in the next few days, this could be our last opportunity to visit a large supermarket before Christmas. With turkey etc safely acquired, we filled up with diesel at a very cheap fuel station we’d spotted nearby, then headed to another fuel station to top up our LPG so as to be absolutely sure that we’ll have plenty to cook our Christmas dinner.

Driving a bit further west, we arrived at Tarifa in the early afternoon on Monday. It’s all very different here. We’ve been astounded at the number of hugely expensive monster motorhomes (mainly on German plates) that we’ve been seeing so far in Spain this trip. Go to www.morelo-reisemobile.de if you want an idea. These things are worth cost as much as a very nice house!

By the time we got past the Costa del Sol and as far as Gibraltar, the Morelo numbers had dwindled significantly. Here in Tarifa, we haven’t seen a single one. We’re now in full-on hippie territory – there are vans literally everywhere, in every car park. It’s not permitted but the authorities seem to turn a blind eye in the winter….

We decided that we’d just go on the official motorhome aire, which costs a mere €8 a night. There are always people around here, so we figured that SOK should be safer whilst we went off to explore.

Overnight: Tarifa (2 nights)

We’ve been here one night so far and the place is much nicer than we’d expected.

The old town, which we accessed through the only remaining gate in the original city walls, is a tightly-packed maze of little streets with bars and tourist-oriented shops:

The castle is shut on Mondays and Tuesdays, so we didn’t manage to go in and have a look:

A small island (the Isla de las Palomas) is linked to the mainland by a causeway built in 1808; the southern end of this island is apparently the most southerly point in mainland Europe.

We did cross the causeway (with the Atlantic on one side and the Mediterranean on the other):

Unfortunately, there’s a great big locked gate at the far end, so we couldn’t go onto the island itself. The best we can say, therefore, is that we’ve been to what would have been the most southerly point in mainland Europe before 1808 when they cheated and built a causeway.

Our plans are fluid at this point. We have an aire in mind as a possible destination over Xmas itself, but things can always change between now and then. We’re sure it’ll all be fine; the main thing is that we have turkey and we have gas to cook it with. Everything else is flexible….