A New Year and a New Direction: East then North

Sunday 01 to Tuesday 10 January 2023

We ended our last post on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, wondering what the chattering Germans at El Hornillo would get up to that evening.

Well, they peaked too soon….

At 8.30pm, we had a rousing rendition of “La Bamba”. By 8.50pm, they’d moved on to “Sweet Caroline”. From there, it was all downhill to gentle burbling and then silence….

On New Year’s Day (Sunday), after an unexpectedly good night’s sleep, we moved on just a few kilometres east to Caleta de Velez for two nights.

This is the place by a marina with green parrots that we’d visited for the first time earlier this trip on our way west.

This time, I remembered to take a photo.

Overnight: Caleta de Velez (2 nights)

We hadn’t had much time to explore the town on our first visit, so we had a good wander around this time. There isn’t a huge amount in the town centre, although the place is well supplied for supermarkets: an ALDI, a LIDL and a Mercadona.

We had also only been along the promenade in one direction. This time we explored it in the other direction on Sunday, then on Monday managed to slowly jog the full length in both directions (8 miles total).

We were surprised to discover what good value the marina laundrette is at Caleta de Velez: €3.50 to wash and €2 to dry (which gave us 60 minutes in a commercial dryer). Definitely one to note for next time.

On Tuesday, we drove another hour or so east, stopping on the way to look at the Santa Cruz aqueduct on the outskirts of Almuñecar:

A sign at the site told us that this is the best-preserved Roman aqueduct in Andalucia and that it is 7 km long, taking water from the Rio Verde to the town of Almuñecar.

Our overnight stop at Motril was an area near the beach where we could park for free for up to 48 hours.

Overnight: Motril (2 nights)

It’s a massive parking area, though the reviews did say that the middle section gets flooded when it rains:

On Wednesday, we both simultaneously came down with upset stomachs, but like the good little soldiers that we are, we plodded on. We couldn’t work out what had caused it, but thankfully within a couple of days we were back to our normal selves.

It was too far to walk into Motril and the main road into town didn’t look inviting from a cycling point of view, so we drove in and parked SOK in the large shopping centre car park before walking the short distance to the Preindustrial Sugar Museum.

This was a great little museum for €3 each. We got a description of the history of sugar in the area and then got to see some reconstructed machinery.

There are records of sugar cane production around Motril going back to the 10th century, but production was at its height between the 16th and 18th centuries.

It’s the usual kind of story: production expanded and sugar cane eventually took over, becoming the single crop right along the Costa Tropical.

Over time, all the trees on the hills behind the coast were cut down for fuel to boil the sugar, resulting in significant environmental degradation.

Costs soared as fuel now had to be transported in over long distances and ever higher taxes were levied by the state, then competition from American sugar damaged the industry further.

There was a revival of the fortunes of sugar in the late 19th century, but it’s all gone now. We were told that the last sugar cane plant in Europe, located just down the road from Motril, closed in 2006.

Outside, statues on two roundabouts depict the sugar industry in Motril. The first is of a lady whose job it would have been to strip the leaves from the sugar cane. The second is of a man transporting sugar cane with a mule.

As we were parked on the shopping centre car park and weren’t in much of a state to do anything more strenuous, we thought we’d do our first bit of gratuitous shopping for the trip: AlCampo, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon. We didn’t manage to buy very much at all……

From Motril we drove to… erm… Almerimar. Our objective on the way east had been to stay at new places, but we couldn’t just drive past Almerimar.

Overnight: Almerimar (2 nights)

We managed to only book in for two nights this time, rather than the twelve nights we ended up spending here a few weeks ago when Mark was waiting for the dentist to work his magic.

We were treated to the annual Three Kings procession on Thursday evening. The night of the 5th-6th January is when the Three Kings are supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem bearing gifts: it’s the Three Kings who traditionally leave presents for Spanish children.

The Three Kings showed up in Almerimar not on camels…. not even on horses….. but in Minis.

Lots of boiled sweets were thrown from the procession; Mark managed to hand over a small mountain of sweets to one rather pleased-looking little lad following on behind the procession with his family.

We moved on to the next little town along the coast, Roquetas de Mar, on Saturday.

We’d never been there before and imagined it would be a small place like Almerimar. A motorhome aire had opened since our last visit to Spain, which is what prompted the idea of visiting, but we were then told by other motorhomers not to bother as the aire was full of long-stayers so we’d struggle to get on.

We discovered that there were also 15 free motorhome parking spaces on a car park at Roquetas de Mar, so we went to have a look.

Bingo – we got the end spot right by the beach.

Overnight: Roquetas de Mar (2 nights)

Roquetas seemed like quite a big resort, spread out along the beach. It’s so long that it has a LIDL at both ends!

We never did find a “town centre” as such, but we jogged along the promenade and had a look at the outside of the (rebuilt) castle, 19th century lighthouse etc.

Monday saw us round the “south east corner” of Spain and start heading north.

We stayed overnight at a motorhome aire in a tiny little resort called Agua Amarga, just south of Carboneras.

Overnight: Agua Amarga

When we arrived, the reception was closed for lunch and didn’t reopen until 4pm, so we parked up and then went out to explore.

It’s a really pretty little resort, but almost everything was closed at this time of year and there weren’t many people about other than fellow motorhomers.

We explored Agua Amarga thoroughly before returning to SOK.

Unfortunately, there is a code on the pedestrian entrance to the motorhome aire and you only get given it when you check in (which we hadn’t been able to do yet).

No problem. Mark soon let us in by poking a stick through one of the gaps in the wooden planking on the gate and using it to press down the handle on the inside. So much for Spanish security!

The rest of the afternoon was spent dossing:

It’s a hard life!

We’ve continued quite a distance north today. Our planned stop near Calabardina (just north of Águilas) turned out to be full, so we ended up driving on past Cartagena to our next planned stop at Los Alcázares (about 180 km in total for the day).

In a first for this trip, we splashed out on a road toll along the way. €5.70 saved us a good half-hour detour. We did the detour on the way south and it wasn’t particularly scenic, so we decided to skip it this time. The toll charge was a pleasant surprise: there are no signs up telling you how much it’s going to cost in advance and we’d expected it to be more expensive than that.

The place we’re at now is a free aire situated in a former bus station! So far so good.

Overnight: Los Alcázares

We haven’t done any exploring here yet, so we’ll have to leave that for our next post.