Europe with Jessie and Malcolm - rest of the trip

We bid a fond farewell to Granada and began making our way down through the Sierra Nevada national park and along the coast road toward our last home in Spain. On the way we passed some incredible engineering, with huge viaducts spanning the valleys and field after field of wind-farms.

Many of the viaducts were even higher and longer than this one

One of dozens of identical villages along the coast

The viaducts' sole reason for existence is to speed the passage of English (and other) tourists on their way towards and along the Costa del Sol - the most incredibly built-up piece of coastline I'd ever seen. Fortunately for us it was mostly quiet (out of peak season) so we made pretty good time as we motored along past Malaga, stopping only at a beachside town for lunch by the sea - we had the beach to ourselves!

Our picnic by the Atlantic ocean

The place we were staying at, Hotel Sindhura, couldn't have been nicer, but it was very much a retreat - it was on the outskirts of a village that was on the outskirts of a town (Vejer de la Frontera) which was about 30 miles from Cadiz. Suffice to say that the location wasn't quite what we'd expected - the town was quite substantial (complete with its own medieval castle), but the village, La Muela, could best be described as 'rural' - and we were getting even more rural than that. I think it was when we started driving down roads that weren't even on the GPS that we started to get really worried...

By the time we reached our hotel it was dark - and we were very sure to beware of the bulls

The retreat itself was very nice, albeit with a focus on meditative healing rather than the traditional spa therapies. It was set in a field, and we had an ocean view room, but we decided that the photos on the internet must have been taken with a very long lens as the only sea that we could view was a long way off.

El Toro was beginning to be a theme

Thursday we decided to try for another stamp in our passports and headed down to Gibraltar. 'The Rock' tries to present itself as being more British than England, and they've certainly got the stereotypical greasy fish and chips right (although not all English food is that bad). Once you get away from the thin strip of poor quality replica of the English seaside and duty free bottle shops, it is actually a fascinating place - given its place at the gate to the Mediterranean and the closest point between Africa and Europe it has been a strategically important site for a millennium.

The Rock has a classic silhouette

The view from near the top of The Rock

This was once a Moorish castle, then became Spanish - but it now very much British

The amount of tunneling that has gone on, first in the Spanish siege of the British base, and then during the Second World War, means that there are more than 90 miles of tunnels, some of which were big enough for trucks to pass each other in, throughout the upper part of the outcrop. Also fascinating were the Barbary Apes, which seemed as interested in the people as the people were in them. Apparently the colony was dwindling, until during the Second World War when Churchill heard that 'if the apes ever left the rock, the rock would cease to be British' - so he had another 23 shipped in from Africa and they've never looked back.

Looking out over his domain

The apes really were cute...

We took a fairly coastal road down to Gibraltar, and on the way passed some very nice (although windswept) beaches, including the beach where the battle of Trafalgar was fought. We got our toes wet in the Atlantic Ocean, but that was about all that we felt up to as the water has definitely decided that winter is coming.

Sarah on the beach at Trafalgar

Most impressive to the engineers in the car were the sheer number of wind farms (and we could see at least three generations) collecting the fierce breezes off the Atlantic. There were literally hundreds of turbines as far as the eye could see in places.

Hundreds upon hundreds of wind-turbines

We stopped off that night in a local seafood restaurant, for what was to become a habit - great seafood served not far from the sea. The contrast with the 'British' food served less than 100km away could not have been greater.

Friday we made our way out to Cadiz, which was a fascinating town built far out onto a spit of land with marshes either side. The old town is actually walled off, and had a similar feel to other parts of Spain (although less Moorish influence than the Andalusian towns). The new town features miles of beaches, as well as (slightly) less construction than you would typically associate with the seaside in Spain - more like where the Spanish would holiday than where the English would come.

We found a genuine tapas & seafood bar in the old town for lunch, and stood to eat Tapas until a table became available. Once inside we ordered what would be a moderate-sized lunch, and ended up with more food than we knew what to do with - Stephen's two half-rations were each big enough to be a full ration, and the seafood platter that Malcolm and Sarah shared would probably have satisfied three people easily. We learned another key fact - the food in the side-streets of Spanish tourist towns is far superior to that in the squares - follow the people who speak Spanish, and eat like a king.

Cadiz by day...

...and by night - looks like something from another world

Saturday morning we drove west into Portugal, where we were due to finish our holiday. We managed to spend our entire time there being amazed at how laid-back they seemed about time - we ate even later there than in Spain, and still people were coming in later. It wasn't until we arrived home that we realised that Portugal is on GMT, and so every time we thought we were late, we were actually one hour early. We were staying in what is now a little fishing village called Cabanas, but will one day very soon be a huge crowded holiday village. It is just near Tavira, and about half an hour from Faro

The only way to the beach was by a little ferry on the half-hour

Major high-light of Portugal was the seafood (spotting a trend yet?). Twice we managed to eat fantastic meals of fresh seafood, and were indeed served more than we could eat - each time for less than EUR40 for the four of us. We worked out that, relative to the prices in London, the savings in food costs would pay for the airfares if you flew over here and ate well all weekend.

We young'uns also checked out the pool, but it was something of a token gesture - it really wasn't quite warm enough to swim (actually, not warm enough by a long shot - but worth a try). We figured we couldn't come from London to the Algarve and not get in the water - what sort of British tourists would we be!?

Notice that nobody else was swimming - though the pool was 25 degrees

We were very disappointed to leave on the Sunday - Jessie and Malcolm managed another couple of days where they checked out Taveira and Faro, and we're certainly keen to return and follow in their footsteps. But until then, it was back to rainy, cold England (and Aberdeen, for Sarah) to dream of our next traveling adventure.