March 27th

Joe has just rejoined 'Anna M' for the trip back home to Sherkin.

February Report, 2008

So thirty quid and a couple of hours’ flying can put a stop to all that dark northern winter weather; sun’s been shining away on the Costa del Sol pretty much every day for the month of January, temperature up there around 18° in the afternoons and the sea sometimes quite swimable. Moreover Almerimar has proven to be a useful place to get boat jobs done, as well as a pleasant and easy spot to live in, and we have had some good sailing and hill walking to boot. The Med is supposed to be poor for sailing, with either too much or too little wind; maybe this is a good time of year for it here, with a perfect breeze on many days. With Tony Whelan aboard the Anna M, we have been trading video footage with Jose of Caracol II, who zoomed in on us one very pleasant Saturday afternoon.

Still the Med keeps you on your toes; conditions later went from the extreme peachiness of this photo to force 6 within 15 minutes, and on the odd day the wind has been very strong, with gusts over 60 knots recorded. Such days are better for walking, and the odd thing is that one can leave the wind behind by going a few miles inland into the mountains. Another of the violent contrasts of this land is the difference between the low-lying coastal promontory where we are, all covered in plastic beneath which many of your supermarket vegetables are grown, and those rugged, somewhat tortured hills.

There is one chunk of open land, a nature reserve to the east of Almerimar, where you can watch a large flock of flamingos if you are up to contending with the mosquitoes. They flew over the harbour in the dark last night, just when I stuck my head out before going to bunk; quite a spectacle in the clear moonlight. Oh and then of course there are the golf courses and the odd scruffy corner of provisional destiny where the goats can still graze; other than that it’s just flats or building sites. The large herds of goats and sheep, often running together, apparently spend much time under the plastic in the green-houses cum covered fields, tidying up the leftovers of vegetable crops. They produce both meat and delicious cheese, very good value in the shops, almost as good as the booze.

The set-up has a striking easy-going dynamism; everywhere you look, people are busy, but they do not on the whole appear unduly pushed or hurried. The sun will shine tomorrow too. They take their weekends and their siestas, there time to stroll out en familia along the magnificent new-built promenade. But one does sense new-fangled pressure getting into things. The sheer scale of human activity is amazing, using every inch of this arid strip of level ground squeezed between the sea and those barren hills, yet dependent on both of them.

In any nook of the hillsides, people have been making terraces for ages, using every drop of the precious water coming from them. This is not new, the Moors were great at irrigation. Yet how things have moved on since I first visited Andalucía in the ‘60s! Now the hills are gashed and cut and tunnelled with roads, their deep ravines spanned by great viaducts marching on huge concrete stilts, and valleys are blocked by dams built for much more water than they ever seem to contain. However there are many winding little roads too that lead to mountain villages still gently dozing in the sun, and paths that mount quickly to the stony hillsides where the tinkling of goat bells gives way to bird calls, and silence comes heavy with the scent of wild rosemary and thyme.