The End

After our (almost) week with a car, bopping around in rural and small-town Andalucía, we had four days remaining in Málaga before heading home. They were a good few days.

On the Thursday, we did – well, we did nothing. Except the usual walk down to the sea and sitting in the sun, reading. That evening, we tried to get a reservation for dinner at one of the better restaurants in town, La Luz de Candela, but they were full up. I made a reservation for the next night instead. This was to be our going-away treat. La Luz is, according to TripAdvisor, the number-one ranked restaurant in Málaga.

On Friday, we got a little more ambitious. In the late morning, we walked about an hour west along the beach to La Térmica, a city-run cultural centre housed in a former hospital and orphanage. It has exhibition spaces – the attraction for us – and offers regular workshops, lectures, concerts and films, as well as providing studio space for artists.

It still has the feel of an early-20th century institutional building – albeit a Spanish one with lovely tile work and courtyards – which somewhat clashes with the creative intent of the place. The staff also gave the impression they were mostly time-serving municipal employees, not terribly interested in what the place is about. On this April morning, it wasn’t exactly a hive of activity either.

There were two art exhibits on, both photography, both portraiture. The first was by a long-established fashion photographer, Michel Comte, mostly black and white. Some of the pictures are fabulous, some quite iconic – like the one of a screaming, 50-something Tina Turner shimmying in her fringed mini-dress. Comte’s heyday was the 1980s and 1990s which is when most of the pictures here were taken.

I’m guessing this exhibit was booked to coincide with the film festival earlier in the month – most of the pictures were of actors and other entertainment people. Otherwise, I can’t quite see the point of it. This is old and not terribly distinguished work. It’s a type of photography not usually accorded the prestige of display in an art gallery – although that may not be as much the case here in Europe. It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing you’d expect at a supposedly cutting-edge cultural space.

The second exhibit was a little more cutting-edge, in a way. It was mostly candid portraits taken by the Spanish film director Isabel Coixet (Things I Never Told You, My Life Without Me, etc.) of actors and associates who worked on her films. They look to have been taken with a phone or very simple camera and then heavily worked over in Photoshop to make them look “arty.” Each one is only a few inches square in a big frame, accompanied by a little quote from the subject, or from Coixet about the subject. Some of them to me looked like photocopies of photographs, they were so over-Photoshopped.

Sorry, Térmica – two duds. But it was good to get a long walk in along the beach. We shopped at a Mercadona on the way home and then mostly whiled away the afternoon with reading, photography, blogging. We were tired after almost three hours of walking in the morning.

Our reservation at La Luz was for 8 p.m. It’s only about a seven-minute walk away from the apartment. We had been hearing drumming and mournful brass band music in the late afternoon. I assumed it was rehearsals for the Semana Santa processions, which we thought started Palm Sunday. But when we walked over to the restaurant, we ran into a parade swaying up the street, not on our street, but the one just to the east of us.

I’m not sure if I’ve said much about Semana Santa – Holy Week – in this blog. It’s an important festival time in most of southern Europe, but in Andalucía, it’s huge. The festivities here are fueled by competition among the confraternities or brotherhoods (hermandades or cofradias in Spanish), lay organizations set up to support and promote charitable and pious works. There are many in major cities like Málaga and Sevilla, the oldest established as early as the 16th century. Some churches have more than one associated with them. Most brotherhoods have thrones on which they mount lavishly decorated effigies of Christ or Mary. During Holy Week, they carry the thrones through the streets to commemorate the Passion, usually accompanied by penitents in the distinctive pointy-topped masked hoods and robes that make them look like KKK clansmen.

Some of the thrones are the size of small tractor trailers and are carried by hundreds of confraternity members who walk in unison, packed tightly together supporting the throne on their shoulders. They walk for a few minutes, usually in a kind of swaying rhythm to create the illusion of life-like movement in the figure on the throne, then stop and set the throne on the ground while they rest. The marching is accompanied by bands, usually brass. Many play simple, monotonous, mournful music, some are much more accomplished and play more complex, occasionally quite nice music. And there are almost always rattatatting and thumping drummers, pounding out the rhythm for the carriers.

In Seville, when we were there a few years ago, we were told that the Semana Santa processions are very solemn affairs in that city, often candle lit, with onlookers hushed in silence. Here, it seemed more a festive atmosphere. Neighbourhood folk were out talking and laughing, following along with the parade – sometimes chatting with one of the throne carriers, or grabbing a selfie with a pointy-hooded penitent. Great fun.

La Luz is an interesting restaurant. It’s French, or at least, it’s run by a couple of French guys. The food is a hybrid of French and Spanish – served tapas style, to be shared at the table. And it’s a slow-food restaurant. Everything is sourced locally and made fresh when you order it. The décor is urban chic, unlike the typical Spanish restaurants we go to for our menu del dia lunches with their heavy wood furniture and gloomy interiors. The service was also more relaxed and friendly. Our server, the same guy I’d emailed with about the reservation, Matthieu, introduced himself and shook my hand when we came in, then chatted with us in English and French all evening.

Most importantly, the food was fabulous. For starters, we ordered two vegetable dishes – a white asparagus plate and a spinach and goat cheese salad – and an order of La Luz-style patatas bravas for me. All excellent. For “mains,” we had two meat dishes (natch): melt-in-the-mouth pig cheeks in a rich gravy and rump steak cooked rare. Total bill, with a bottle of quite nice Spanish wine: less than $90 CDN.

Not long after we sat down, the Semana Santa procession caught up with us. We could hear it coming. Then band members and other marchers started coming into the restaurant, asking to use the toilets – which the restaurateurs graciously allowed them to do. Eventually, the procession came right by the restaurant. Half the guests and staff went out and stood on the front steps to watch. It’s not a very wide street, and the throne, a Jesus, stopped right in front of us, filling the street.

I had assumed the procession was on its way back to the confraternity’s chapel when we saw it at the restaurant. There is a chapel just up the street. They typically go in a circuit, out and then back to their lair. But it evidently wasn’t headed back at that point. When we came away from the restaurant later, we found the procession lurching down our street. It was on its way back then apparently. I went upstairs for my camera and flash and spent 45 minutes photographing the tired marchers as they went past our building, and then followed them up around the corner, almost to our Mercadona.

On Saturday, we hung around the apartment in the morning, did some laundry and packing. In the afternoon, we went and sat in the Plaza Merced in one of the sunny cafes, the Cafe Picasso, and sipped a glass of wine. The square, just outside the historic centre, is about a ten-minute walk from the apartment. There was a football game on the big-screen TV, which some of the patrons were getting excited about from time to time. It was good people watching.

There was a threesome of young men at a table near us in the next café who amused me. They were having a spirited conversation that I could partly follow, even with my limited Spanish. It involved two of them ganging up on the third, egging him on in a joking way to do something he didn’t want to do or didn’t think he could do. No idea what. “You can do it.” “No!” “Sure you can.” “I don’t want to.” Lots of laughing. I thought the behaviour was very recognizable. I could imagine three young Canadian dudes having a similar conversation, railing on each other in the same way.

But when they parted in front of the café later, they kissed goodbye. It was just the three cheek pecks. Still, it brought home that, yeah, there are still cultural differences between here and home – despite the disappointing Americanization of much of Europe in recent decades. This was an example. I have also been noticing that in Spain boys are allowed to touch each other in ways that I don’t think they are in Canada anymore. When I was growing up, it was perfectly alright for boy pals to walk around with their arms around each others shoulders. I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine Canadian boys today doing that. We saw it often in Spain when we encountered school groups in the street or at tourist sites.

From the Plaza Merced, we walked about ten minutes north to the Basilica of Santa María de la Victoria, the place with the fabulous rococco sanctuary that I wrote about earlier. According to the Semana Santa schedule we had, they were going to parade their Virgin today – a kind of opening act for Holy Week. The schedule was a little glossy booklet, sponsored by the gas station chain where we’d filled the rental car before returning it. The cashier handed it to me with my receipt. Can you imagine PetroCanada sponsoring a program for a religious festival?

When we got to the Basilica, there wasn’t much sign of anything going on at first, but then we noticed a small crowd clustered around a side door. There were a couple of balloon sellers out in the square in front too. This, we had begun to learn, was a good sign that festivities were in the offing.

We hung around with the crowd for 20 minutes or so, and then the procession came out. It had a completely different look and feel to the one the night before. There were no penitents in masked pointy hoods, and only a few servers carrying censers in robes - or they might have been priests. Everybody else, including the guys carrying the relatively small throne was dressed in sobre church clothes. Strange that from a church with such lavish decorations should come this uncharacteristically conservative procession. Even the music was modest – a small band of women on wood-wind instruments playing gentle, barely audible music. No drummers.

The marchers seemed solemn enough, the small crowd slightly less so. There was an air of sobre religiosity about this one that appears not to be the norm in Málaga.

On the way up from Plaza Merced, I had noticed some interesting-looking wall art down a side street. After we left the procession, we walked back there and discovered an interesting, funky neighbourhood, with a treasure trove of street art. I spent a half hour photographing it, then we went home via Plaza Merced – which was still buzzing.

On the street just east of ours, where we’d first seen the procession the night before, one of the confraternities, a different one, was getting its thrones ready to parade. The great doors of its casa hemandad were open and we could see the thrones inside – a Jesus and a Mary. A small crowd was milling out front. It was the Cofradia Pollinica, according to the sign over the doors, a fairly new one, established in 1911. Our schedule told us the brotherhood would be starting its procession from here the next morning, Palm Sunday, at 9:45, and it would be on our street about 10:30. So we knew what we’d be doing the next morning.

Palm Sunday was our last day in Málaga. We had nothing much planned, except lunch out and procession watching. The parades started in earnest today, with nine scheduled, the first, ours, setting out at 9:45, the last ending at one o’clock in the morning.

The Pollinica procession started more or less on time. Most of the morning was spent marching from the casa hermandad and then up Ollerías, our street. Karen and I mingled with the crowds in the street at first, then went up on our roof, where we’d been hanging our clothes to dry all winter, and watched from there.

When the first float, a beautifully decorated Jesus under a palm tree, had passed, I went down and walked around the corner to see the next float, the Virgin, start down Ollerías. Then went back on the roof again. It was equally impressive. This must be a very rich hermanadad. The thrones would have cost a fortune to build and decorate. The base of the Jesus float was all intricately carved wood. The Virgin float had a lot of silver – probably not solid, but still very expensive. I’m guessing easily over a €1 million for the two.

The processions go on for a long time. The Pollinica parade was still going – somewhere, far out of sight of where we were – when we set out about 1:30 to go for lunch. We had chosen Casa Lola, a tapas place in the heart of the historic centre. It had a very high rating from TripAdvisor.

The streets in the centre were crowded with revellers, although there was no sign of processions at this point. Our restaurant was in a narrow street, and already crowded with lunchers, mostly Spanish families. We were lucky enough to get a table in the street out front. The people watching was superb, the street crowded with passersby and folks waiting for seats, the tables crowded, everybody in a jolly mood.

The food was also pretty good. We ordered eight different things, including pinchos (meat skewers) and little bocadillas (like sliders). Most of it was pretty good, some of it very good, and all well prepared. I didn’t partake of the Russian salad – a staple of tapas menus here – and Karen ate very little of it in the end. It was the one thing she didn’t like. It was still only a little over €30 with three glasses of wine and a large beer. (Hey, we were celebrating our last day!)

After lunch, we wandered around in the centre and ended up down by the Roman theatre. Most of our time here, I had been looking covetously at some drawings by an artist who sometimes showed his stuff on the sidewalk near the theatre. I’d once asked how much they were and was surprised that he only charged €25 each. Today, I decided it was now or never if I was going to buy one.

I figured he would probably bargain. His friend sitting beside him, showing much less interesting work, interpreted. Neither of them had much English. I offered €40 for two, and my guy agreed. That’s about $65 CDN for two original drawings measuring 10x14 inches each. They are decidedly odd in subject matter – kind of fantastical – but I think quite accomplished and original. I doubt they’re going to appreciate in value. The guy – his name is Juan Pablo Gongora Lanzigri – looked to be in his mid- to late thirties, and not very well off, possibly with some, um, issues. As far as I can make out, he has zero profile on the Internet. Definitely dances to the beat of a different drum. So, now what do I do with them?

We had planned to just wander about and see what processions we could find to watch, but carrying the drawings was a little awkward so we walked back to the apartment and dropped them.

We went out again late in the afternoon, but it was crazy in the centre. We came to Plaza de la Constitución at one point, where they had erected huge bleachers earlier in the week. Two different processions were criss-crossing apparently, the back of one of which we could see from a distance. But it was a madhouse. We couldn’t get near the square. We decided we really didn’t want any more of crowds. We’d had a good look at a Semana Santa procession with the Pollinica parade in the morning, that was enough. So we headed home.

As we were walking up our street, I looked down the narrow lane that leads to the San Felipe Neri church a block over. I could see some figures in all-white penitent gowns and hoods. They looked picturesque against the church wall, so we walked up to have a look, and take some pictures. They were just kids. Some were standing on a porch overlooking the street. Some were milling with onlookers in the street.

I’m not sure who they could be. They might have been participants in the Pollinca procession still hanging around, but it had ended a couple of hours before, and these kids looked too fresh and clean to have paraded in the streets for five hours. And why would they still be wearing their full costumes? Besides, there was a sense of anticipation. I assumed at the time they were waiting to start a procession, but there were none scheduled to start that late, according to our little booklet. Curious. So were there even more than the nine processions our schedule showed? Or was this the beginning of some other activity that involved dressing up like a KKK member.

     

The big conclusion to be drawn from the day’s acitivies? The Spanish are plum loco!

We finished our packing after dinner and TV, but the housing development behind us was having another Saturday night street party with incredibly loud music. There wasn’t a lot of point going to bed. About 11, I emailed Christina, our landlady, to let her know about the noise – I assumed she already knew, that she could hear it from her apartment next door, but maybe not. I didn’t hear back that night, but the music shut down shortly after 11:30.

The next morning, I had an email from Christina saying she had called the police after seeing my email. They told her they’d had other complaints and were on their way. So maybe I should have complained the week before when they had music blaring at nightclub volumes until after one in the morning.

We were out of the apartment before 8:30, walked up the street and got a cab at the taxi rank. We were at the airport 25 minutes later. Our BA flight was delayed almost an hour but we made up some of the time.

We had arranged with Caitlin and Bob to meet them at a pub near the airport that afternoon. They drove down from Essex where Caitlin was staying with Bob for the weekend. They brought Bob’s little boys to introduce them to us and have lunch. The boys were on school break, and Bob was down for the week looking after them. Unfortunately, they arrived at the pub early, and we were late because of the flight delay and taking time to try and solve communications problems at the hotel – Wi-Fi was down and cellular reception was non-existent inside. This was a Courtyard by Marriott, supposedly a business hotel, and there was no cellular reception in the hotel! In any case, we finally made it to the pub almost an hour late and spent a very pleasant hour and a half or so with Caitlin’s little adopted family.

The kids are spirited but were generally pretty well behaved, especially given they’d been cooling their heels in this pub for well over an hour before we got there. They’re both kind of cheeky, but very likeable. Ed, the younger, at four, is the more social and laid back. Will, seven, is a bit shy and higher strung. I was amused by Ed at one point addressing Bob as “Daddy m’laddy.” Don’t know where he got that from, possibly a grandparent? As I say, cheeky.

Bob eventually set off on his own with the boys to drive them back to their flat in Maldon. Caitlin stayed with us because she was flying back to Glasgow that night for work the next day. So we had some more time with her in the pub and then back at the hotel. She set out from the hotel by the shuttled bus a little after seven.

Our flight the next day left more or less on time, but arrived very late. The flight itself was good – the cabin crew were terrific – but, as on the flight over, the food was awful, sandwiches on soggy bread. After we’d begun our descent into Toronto, the captain came on to say that Pearson had been closed that afternoon because of thunderstorms, and we’d have to circle for at least a half hour to wait for the backlog to clear. Then a half hour later, he came on again to say we were now being diverted to Hamilton to refuel.

We were almost two hours late into Toronto and missed our 5 p.m. Robert Q bus. We got on the next one available at 7:30 p.m. But our odyssey was not over. The driver, it turned out, was new to the Toronto-London run. It took him three tries to find the right roadway to get down to the Arrivals level at Terminal 1 where there were other passengers waiting. The dispatcher at Terminal 1 kept calling him on his cell, which he had on speaker phone, saying, “Where are you? I can’t see you.” She was evidently outside, watching for him, and getting very annoyed. Karen, who was sitting next to him in the anti-car-sickness seat, said he was definitely getting flustered. She in the end pointed him down the right road.

It still wasn’t over. The 401 was closed because of an accident. We would have to go the long way around by the 403, through – yes – Hamilton! Nice city, but twice, unscheduled, in one day? We arrived after 10 in London, but Ralph and Pat were there to pick us up. Pat had even bought us a bag of groceries with breakfast things. She’s so sweet.

And that really is the end. I got up the next morning after about 6.5 hours sleep and went and played hockey. So, Spanish plum loco, Blackwell almost as plum loco.

More daytripping

We’re home in Canada now, but there is still much to write about our time in Málaga and Andalucía. I left off in my last post after our excursion to Antequera. The next day, April Fools, we drove east in our rental car to Nerja. (The coast of southern Spain at this point runs almost due east and west before turning, after Almería, to track northeast.) There are fewer resort towns appealing to foreigners in this direction, and less development in general. Nerja, about an hour up the highway, is the exception.

The main attractions here are the beaches, and the very tourist-y old town. There is also a Neolithic cave just outside the city, which was on the itinerary Karen had planned. I knew she didn’t really feel comfortable in caves, though – she had a panic attack in one in France many years ago – so suggested we skip it, to which she readily agreed. She had only included it because she thought I was keen to do it. I did get interested in seeing the paintings in the cave after learning about them in our visit to the archaeological section at the Museum of Málaga, but not at the cost of worrying about Karen flipping her wig at being underground.

Playa de la Torrecilla, Nerja

We found a free parking lot a few blocks from Playa de la Torrecilla, the westernmost of the town’s beaches, and walked along the promenade above it – part of the coastal walkway I wrote about earlier – to the centre of the old town, and the Balcon de Europa. The Balcon is a terraced area that juts out into the sea with vistas along the coast in both directions and to the Sierra Almijara mountains to the east. It’s so called because a long-ago king of Spain came to town in the late 19th century to view damage from a recent earthquake and was taken to this spot. He admired it and commented that it was like the balcony of Europe. The name stuck.

Views from Balcon de Europa

The views are nice. There is a hotel here, where I begged a tourist map of the city, and restaurants and cafes nearby. There were lots of people taking in the views, but not an uncomfortable number – it wasn’t as crowded as some of the famous miradors in Lisbon on a Saturday afternoon, for example. A cheesy busker had set up with an amplified guitar, which somewhat detracted from the atmosphere. Otherwise it was pretty cool.

We walked back into the old town and found some steps down to the beach. It looked from the top like there was a pathway just above the beach, under the cliffs, and the map suggested there was too. There was a pathway at one time, but it had been closed because of rock falls. It ended after 100 feet or so. So back up to the top we trudged. At the head of the stairs a couple of flamenco buskers, a man and woman, were playing, the guy on guitar, both of them singing. They sounded pretty good. We walked through the old town, along streets running parallel to the beach. They were lined with tourist shops and restaurants, many with terraces overlooking the sea. We probably should have chosen one of them for lunch, but were intent on reaching Playa Burriana, the easternmost, biggest and reputedly best of the beaches.

Playa Burriana

It is a nice beach, lined two rows deep with shops and restaurants. Condos and villas climb up the hill behind it. Many of the restaurants have large terrace areas on the beach where they rent lounge chairs under woven grass umbrellas – which we saw them making on the way down from the cliff above. We walked to the end of the beach, looking for a reasonable restaurant. Most were fish places, of course. We ended up choosing a glitzy-looking burger joint. It was against our better judgement, but it was too late to traipse back up top and find one of the restaurants with a cliff terrace. And we were hungry.

The food was okay, the people watching, slightly better. We sat in plush furniture at a low table near the back of a tented section, well away from the beach. Most of the other patrons were tourists, many of them Brits. But there was a group of Spaniards near us who had a seemingly endless succession of tapas plates delivered to their table, mostly fish.

After lunch, we walked down on to the beach. There were a few hardy souls in the water – no doubt northern tourists. We found a spot to sit against a huge rock in the shade and read our books for 45 mminutes or so, then retraced our steps and found the car. Karen was amused by a car in the parking lot that had obviously been abandoned there. Whoever was maintaining the lot, rather than having the car towed, had simply let weeds grow up around it so it was completely boxed in.

This was not our most exciting day trip, to be sure, but pleasant. 

Miss Tom-Tom was not on best behaviour during many of these excursions. She seemed incapable of homing in on the satellites in the centre of Málaga when we first came out of the parking garage, presumably because the streets are so narrow and the buildings high enough to block sight lines – although the buildings are only three or four floors at most. It sometimes took her over half an hour to triangulate our location accurately, and even then, she frequently got confused. She was also flummoxed by some of the mountain roads we took, again, presumably because she lost sight of the satellites. It all added to the stress of driving in a strange place. In the past, I’ve never felt that driving in Spain or France was a big deal. Here, it was wearing me down a bit.

So the day after, the Sunday, we took a break from out-of-towning, and had a lazy interlude. It involved nothing more than walking around the city and ending up, as usual, at the harbour, where we sat on a bench in the sun and read.

Playa Malaguita, Málaga

We were briefly entertained there by a group of parrots that had flown down to forage on a patch of gravelly terrace in front of where we were sitting. Usually, we could only hear the parrots. They mostly cluster out of sight in the palm trees, and shout at each other. That’s what it sounds like, but maybe it's just that they’re like Italians and Japanese who sound like they’re arguing when talking normally. In any case, as many as eight of them at a time were waddling around on the terrace, poking their beaks into the dirt to dig out bugs or grubs or something. There were a few turf wars that involved the parrots getting in each others’ faces, shouting at the tops of their lungs and flapping their wings threateningly – until one gave ground and skittered or flew away.

The next day, Monday, we got back in the car and drove out towards Antequera again. We had two stops planned: a visit to the Laguna de Fuente Piedra, a salt water inland lake where flamingos come to nest and hatch their young at this time of year, and a return to El Torcal de Antequera.

It took us a little over an hour to get to the Laguna de Fuente Piedra, to the visitor centre there, which is part of a national park. As with any wildlife sighting activity, there is always the risk it will be a complete bust. The population of flamingos and other wetland birds here rises and falls each year according to climate fluctuations. One hundred and seventy bird species have been recorded here, and as many as 40,000 flamingos have congregated at one time. If it’s a dry winter, the lagoon doesn’t completely fill with water because it’s only source is rainfall. In that event, the birds don’t come, or not in as great numbers.

It had apparently been a middling winter in terms of wetness. More than half the area of the lake was covered with water, the rest was wet mud. But the flamingos, which looked to number in the hundreds, were mostly clustered a long way from the visitor centre at the other end of the lake. (The lake is over six kilometers long.) It was impossible to get much closer. They don’t want the birds disturbed. There were a few flamingos – white ones with some pink - in a smaller lagoon near the visitor centre, but they were still a good distance away. Bummer. I had imagined great hordes of bright pink birds close enough to photograph easily.

The visitor centre has a quite good display about the ecology of the area and the biology of the bird life. You could, and we did, purchase an audio guide that explained the displays inside and the nearby outdoor displays and bird-watching hides. None of the labels and explanatory plaques are in English, so you pretty much need the audioguide.

After we’d finished the self-guided tour, which took in just the area around the visitor centre, we walked out along one of the paths around the lake. It would have been far too long a walk to get closer to where the flamingos were, and we may not have been able to get much closer anyway. One pathway that led in their direction was blocked off, presumably to keep visitors from getting too close. We walked a couple of kilometers through farm fields. It looked like rapeseed, all brilliant yellow, but there were also olive groves on the nearby hills. Then we turned and went back. We didn’t really see anything much of interest. Oh well.

We drove around the lake to see if we could get any closer to the birds, but it appeared we could not. We gave it up after several kilometers, and headed off to El Torcal. We went via the outskirts of Antequera, the same route we had taken up the mountain a few days before. At the visitor centre, we took our picnic a little way into the rock fields along one of several walking paths, found a rock to sit on and ate our lunch. Just in the few days since we were here, the place has begun to green up and blossom out. We don't remember any blossoms on the trees on our first visit. Today, most were out.

After lunch we went for a walk from the visitor centre that we thought would take 45 minutes or an hour. But we somehow got on to a different path – one much longer that took us more than two hours to complete. It was up and down slopes, through a narrow crevice in the rocks at one point, into little glens, under towering rock spires. Near the beginning of the walk, we had noticed what looked to me like cow pats just off the pathway. Karen didn’t think there could be cows way up here, thought they must be goat droppings or something. But later in the walk, we came into a little glen where a few brown cows were grazing.

It’s a gorgeous place, but the walking was not easy and, although it was cooler up here than it had been in Málaga the last few days, it did warm up in the sun as the afternoon wore on, and we were over-dressed, especially me. I was quite damp by the time we got back to the visitor centre.

Rather than taking the return route to Málaga that we’d followed the week before, which was down a narrow mountainous road with switchbacks, we backtracked to Antequera to pick up the A45 motorway. However, Miss Tom-Tom was not being very helpful – no idea why this time – and we got lost in Antequera. At one point I went down a street that turned out to be a cul de sac, ending at some steps. I had to back out a quarter of a kilometer, squeezing past parked cars. Any time that we might have saved coming this way was lost. We should have gone the mountain route.

The next day, Tuesday, we had what turned out to be our last outing in the car. It wasn’t what we’d hoped it would be. Our first idea was to drive towards Granada to a place in the mountains where there is a spectacular walk along the edge of a gorge on a boardwalk that clings to the sides of the rock. It’s called the Caminito del Rey, the pathway of the king. It was originally built for workers at the hydroelectric plant there. The king of Spain famously walked it shortly after the plant was built in the early 1900s. Hence the name. Today, after millions of euros in renovations to the walkway, it’s a popular tourist attraction.

It looks like a fabulous thing to do, but it is a long-ish walk (they say to allow four hours), and an awkward, remote place to get to and back from. And as we discovered, you can’t just decide to go on the spur of the moment. It’s tightly controlled and you have to book ahead online. When we looked on the website, all of the slots for this day were booked.

Luckily, we had a Plan B. We drove instead back towards Nerja, then up into the mountains to visit the Parque Natural Sierras de Tejeda, Almijara y Alhama, a mountain nature reserve about half way between Málaga and Nerja. There are many recommended walks in the park, including one to a waterfall with petrified logs in the pool below it. This sounded like a reasonable substitute for the Caminito.

The route up to the visitor centre we’d selected, one of a few for the park – it’s huge – was along another winding mountain road with lots of switchbacks, and fabulous views. It took almost an hour to get to the place, Sedella. The visitor centre was right in the village, not at a park gate as I had expected, and it was closed. At this time of year, it was only open Thursday through Sunday, I suppose to cater to weekend walkers. This was not something mentioned at the park’s website, however.

Now what? Plan C, of course.

We didn’t have information with us about where the park’s other visitor centres were, and there was no way to know if they’d be open even if we could find them. And we had no information about where walks started. In any case, it was clear that most of the walking around here would be very hilly and challenging, especially for the weak of knee. So we decided we’d drive back down the mountain the other way and do a more modest walk we knew about, near the cave at Nerja. The place we headed was miles away, but actually in part of the same nature reserve – that’s how big the park is.

Near Sedella, Karen with our Renault Megane rental

It was another slightly harrowing drive down the mountain, though not as bad as going up. We stopped a couple of times to take pictures of the splendid views of white villages.

When we finally got to the Cave of Nerja, where the walk starts, it was lunchtime. There was a reasonably priced little restaurant near the parking lot where we got a good menu del dia lunch, and sat outside on a sunny patio. The clientele was half Spanish – walkers at a guess - and half tourists, presumably there for the caves.

The walk, which started from the parking lot, was up a gently winding dirt track around a steep hill. It led eventually to a couple of restaurants – which we didn’t get to – and took us through hilly, rocky terrain, with pine woods. It was fairly easy walking, if up hill on the way out. The scenery was nice, but nothing like as spectacular as the mountainscapes we’d seen earlier in the day near Sedella. We walked up for 40 minutes or so, then turned and walked back down the way we’d come.

Miss Tom-Tom dropped the ball again on the drive into  Málaga from the highway. I basically navigated my own way home from memory. By the time we got back to the apartment, I was a little frazzled and managed to ding the car slightly pulling it into the parking elevator. I swore at this point that I wouldn’t drive anymore in Spanish cities. Karen, sensing I was fed up with driving, suggested we just take the car back the next day instead of going for another excursion. We had it until Thursday, but we’d only paid $78 CDN for the week, and there was nowhere else we were desperate to go.

So that’s what we did. The next day we drove into the centre, found, with great difficulty, a gas station not far from the train station, refilled the tank and returned the car. I didn’t say anything about the very slight damage I’d done when I turned in the keys, and they didn’t ask me about damage. When we got the final bill from the car rental company several days later, it was only the amount we’d agreed to pay, nothing extra. Whew!

We walked home from the station and had lunch, then set out again down to the water. We walked east along the beach to the same exercise patio we’d stopped at before, and sat reading in the sun for an hour or so. Afterwards, I wanted to go look at a shoe store over by the train station, an activity that for some reason did not interest Karen. So I left her on another sunny park bench at the harbour and went on my own.

Plaza de Toro - where they had finally posted ads for this year's fights

Harbour front park

The route took me through part of the Soho district, between the Alameda Principal and the water, where the city has encouraged street artists to “express” themselves. I found some very nice pieces I hadn’t seen before. This city is still not a patch on Valencia for street art, but it was starting to go up in my estimation.

I thought the shoe store I was heading for, which I’d spotted on one of our walks, might have a deal on the Camper shoes I want. It was a wasted trip. It turned out to be a place that sold cheap, remaindered shoes. If they’d ever had Campers, as the sign in their window suggested, they didn’t have them anymore. I did find another, more upscale shop nearby that did have Campers and other good brands, but the prices were the same as everywhere else – too expensive: €140 for shoes that I’ve never paid more than €90 for. So sad. 

I went back and collected Karen and we walked home. End of post.