Possibly the place I was most surprised by this year was Cóbreces. It’s yet another little town on another little estuary on the North coast of Spain. To me it was little more than a name, a place you pass through on the way west. I chose it as an overnight stop on our walking tour this year because it was more or less in the right place, it had a beach of sorts and I wanted to look at the only feature I remembered, two large, colourful churches, one blue and one pink, just above the road.
The village is scarcely worthy of the name (perhaps I do it a slight injustice) but the beach was welcoming. Cool water, comfortable sand, rocky headlands at both ends (all the beaches on this coast are like that) rocks forming pools that the children can look for crabs in, water shallow enough to be safe for children (it was that day, at least), waves sufficiently high and strong to be fun to play in, two restaurants, one of which turned out to be rather good, and a surprising number of people. It was the most crowded beach we saw all week, in terms of density of bodies.
The river flowed out, as it often does in these places, as a channel through the sand, making a small area of water meadow with plants and a bridge across it to the path that climbed the opposite headland, and which we would take the following day.
After we had changed we went back down for dinner, and sat on a terrace overlooking the now much greater expanse of sand, as the tide receded and uncovered a silver plateau sprinkled with rocks, home to a wide variety of what I would call worms and fishermen would call bait.
It was the time of the strollers, the runners, the young couples, the teenagers who clamber on the rocks, and so we watched them as the sun went down.
The blue church turned out to be a Benedictine Abbey which cannot be visited. The pink one is the parish church but we were advised not to bother walking up there as inside there is nothing worth seeing. So we looked at the beach instead.
Possibly the place I was most surprised by this year was Cóbreces. It’s yet another little town on another little estuary on the North coast of Spain. To me it was little more than a name, a place you pass through on the way west. I chose it as an overnight stop on our walking tour this year because it was more or less in the right place, it had a beach of sorts and I wanted to look at the only feature I remembered, two large, colourful churches, one blue and one pink, just above the road.
The village is scarcely worthy of the name (perhaps I do it a slight injustice) but the beach was welcoming. Cool water, comfortable sand, rocky headlands at both ends (all the beaches on this coast are like that) rocks forming pools that the children can look for crabs in, water shallow enough to be safe for children (it was that day, at least), waves sufficiently high and strong to be fun to play in, two restaurants, one of which turned out to be rather good, and a surprising number of people. It was the most crowded beach we saw all week, in terms of density of bodies.
The river flowed out, as it often does in these places, as a channel through the sand, making a small area of water meadow with plants and a bridge across it to the path that climbed the opposite headland, and which we would take the following day.
After we had changed we went back down for dinner, and sat on a terrace overlooking the now much greater expanse of sand, as the tide receded and uncovered a silver plateau sprinkled with rocks, home to a wide variety of what I would call worms and fishermen would call bait.
It was the time of the strollers, the runners, the young couples, the teenagers who clamber on the rocks, and so we watched them as the sun went down.
The blue church turned out to be a Benedictine Abbey which cannot be visited. The pink one is the parish church but we were advised not to bother walking up there as inside there is nothing worth seeing. So we looked at the beach instead.
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Who's looking after El Spikey?
That sacred duty is deputed to the cleaning woman, who has performed it perfectly. Now he's at the farm with us, and he loves it here. Even though he doesn't get out much, the smell and the plentiful insects to crunch on give him new life. That's what holidays are for, after all.
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