El Puerto de Santa Maria and the Ancient Port City of Cadiz

Zagan the motorhome is being regaled to the rasping howl of a petrol hedge trimmer at Camping Playa Las Dunas in El Puerto de Santa Maria. The site’s a stone’s throw from a pale-sanded beach, overlooking the bay of Cádiz (N36.58869, W6.23804). The site accepts the ACSI CampingCard discount card so comes in at €18 a night for the two of us, including electrical hook-up. For three nights we’re shelling out €54 though, which still feels a little steep as the pitches are pretty basic with few dividers for privacy, and although it’s busy with motorhomes and caravans, there is a steady turnover of rigs. Not far from the site gates, on a flat piece of land with direct views of the sea, there are a bunch of other motorhomes staying for free and I spotted a few others on my morning run yesterday, just above a small cove a mile or two to the north-west. Our income these days enables us to pay for sites more frequently (handy today when Ju’s doing a ton of laundry), which offers a better chance of a good night’s kip and improved security (we think it was here someone tried to nick our mate’s bikes while they were asleep), but I also miss the ‘slightly wilder’ parking options too.

No matter how long we do this motorhoming-malarky we still manage to cock it up from time to time. Coming here from Jerez, we successfully avoided a 2.5m height barrier at Lidl (first one we’ve seen), stocked up on fresh food and brimmed off the diesel tank, all good. Under a blue sky we rolled along the quiet roads all the way into the centre of El Puerto de Santa Maria, when the entire world suddenly shrank. Yep, there appears to be a nice wide road around the town to the west, with roundabouts and everything, but nope, we’d not bothered to eyeball the route before we arrived and went into satnav muppet mode, straight into the old town. Just like that, we were back in Italy, with its butt-clenching squeezes through car-lined streets. After a couple of tight spots, one created by a double-parked van which we had to get to move, and after discovering our route was blocked by a market, Ju flicked satnav to manual (turned it off) and found us a route here, phew.

Fessing up: apart from the drive through it, a couple of jogs and a walk to the port for the bus-boat to Cadiz, we’ve not seen much of El Puerto. The place is in a great position by the sea with long, clean and light-beige sanded beaches, but the big tourist draw is clearly Cadiz, sprouting low on the horizon, across the rippling waters of the Atlantic. Also fessing up: we visited Cadiz yesterday without doing a single iota of research on the place, with just a vague notion of it being an ancient port after recalling an exhibit in Madrid’s Museo Arqueologico Nacional showing how it might have looked when the Phoneticians first established it roughly 3000 years ago (it was a distant outpost for them from their base in the Med to the east of Cyprus).

Our visit here coincided with Linda and Steven’s, an Irish-American couple travelling Europe (also in a Hymer B544) after having spent four years touring 49 of the United States in an RV. They’ve been blogging for 11 years (!!!), with the later years at www.thechouters.com, and have just returned from Morocco and were hoping to pick up some post here. It’s taken 12 days so far, and still failed to arrive, so they’re leaving without it (this is our general experience too: it takes weeks for parcels to get across Europe sometimes).

As none of us have been to Cadiz before, we travelled into the city together yesterday and spent the day walking and talking. Getting there from El Puerto is fairly easy: it’s about a mile walk to the ferry port from the campsite and tickets are €2.80 per person each way from the ticket office, with the ferry sailing every 45 minutes(ish). For some reason half the sailing had been replaced with buses on our way out, so we got to drive alongside the salinas by the Rio de San Pedro (salinas are salt flats, used to extract the mineral from seawater by evaporation), and then over Spain’s longest bridge at just over 3km, named La Constitución de 1812 and it was opened in 1969. The bus dropped us at the ferry port in Cadiz, a short walk from the centre of the old town.

Like us, Steven and Linda had done no research either (endless years on the road seem to have this effect), other than to identify the fact there’s a camera obscura set atop one of the city’s many towers. Steven’s a photographer (one of his shots is sold world-wide at Ikea) and creates unique pin-hole photographs using digital equipment, so had an interest in seeing this larger version of a pin-hole camera on the Torre Tavira, the highest point in Cadiz old town. I fancied a look too, so Steven and I headed in while the ladies found a nearby eaterie. Through a wee ‘lost in translation’ moment we managed to buy tickets for the camera obscura which didn’t actually let you visit the camera obscura (whoops), but still got to enjoy the views from the top of the tower (the official website is here). From up there the city, built on a spit of sand which long since ran out of room to expand (Spanish law prevents it from reclaiming land from the sea), it’s a packed-in hubble bubble of mis-matched flat-roofs, reminding me of views over Fez in Morocco, with mosques swapped for churches. As Steven noted, it’s the kind of view you could stare at for hours, keeping spotting more and more details, each of us seeing our own version of the same image, depending on what’s happened in our past to draw our eye to them.

Back down at ground level, the ladies had sniffed out a great little spot for a snack at the Mercado Central, where we all enjoyed a Shrimp Tortillita, made with wheat flour, chickpea flour, onion, parsley and small shrimps. They’re fried in olive oil and served up hot in paper, a curious sight filled with tiny shrimps still in their crunchy shells, their teeny deep-fried black eyeballs staring up at you as you eat. Verdict: delicious, well worth €0.90 a pop. The stalls had a ton of other fried fish treats if you’re hungry too, or fancied something different, a cracking little spot to spend a while.

Inside the market’s the raw stuff, enormous chunks of tuna, langoustine lined up like toy soldiers, sharp-toothed mackerel and a ton of other fish I didn’t recognise (fish back in my 1970s and 80s UK youth was battered or bread-crumbed, and utterly unidentifiable).

While tasty, the torillas weren’t enough to take the edge off hunger so after a wander along the sea-surrounded Paseo Fernando Quinones, out to a mareografo (a tide gauge, don’t ask me how it works), we headed for a restaurant to refuel.

All the while we’re chatting with Steven and Linda, a fascination for us, partly as we’ve never travelled in the US by RV and partly as they were such interesting folks. Just an indication of this was the fact Linda’s father was a geophysicist in the oil industry and she spent 10 years of her teens and 20s living in Libya. Steven moved from Ireland to New York with his rock band, playing keyboards in the city for a decade, and they’ve both walked the length of Spain on the Camino pilgrim trail. Yep, very interesting people to be around! As well as the life stories, the sheer size of RV life in the US was mind-blowing, with rigs that do 8mpg, water and waste tanks large enough for two and a half weeks completely off-grid (wild-camping is called ‘boondocking’ in the US), 50 and even 100amp hook-ups (in Europe it’s typically 16amp), some RVs with several kW of solar on the roof (20 or 30 times as big as our solar system), multiple air-con units and washing machines on-board like the amazing The Beast, home of the smashing Phil and Liz who we met on Pag in Croatia.

The conversation turned to the subject of blogging at one point. Why do it? It takes far more time than I’d ever have imagined to build blog posts, and can be a serious drain on anyone’s mental resources. Financially, it’s rarely better than working a minimum wage job, although it doesn’t **feel** like a job being sat in such lovely places. It gets awkward sometimes too. Although we’ve oodles of time, carving out a chunk of time to blog when you could be socialising or just taking in your surroundings sometimes feels a poor use of your time on Earth. In the end we all do it for our own reasons, but I for one enjoy the outlet for my thoughts, as small as they are. The blog serves as my memory too, and will become more valuable over time in this regard. And last but far from least, the blog’s led us to meet up with so many interesting folks we’d likely never have otherwise met, which is pretty-much priceless.

After getting the bus in, we got the boat out, a far shorter journey across the sea and a pleasant way to end a day’s exploring. I enjoyed Cadiz, mostly for the company but I also liked the place itself. It had a pretty laid-back feel, and although some folks took bikes with them on the bus/boat, it was easily walkable for us. One day was enough though, and today we’re surrounded by washing lines. We’ve waved goodbye to Steven and Linda who are making a run for France. Their plans are affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic , like millions of people at the moment, and they were thankful to get refunds for ferries to and from Italy, which they can no longer visit since the country went into lock-down. They’d hoped to visit Croatia on the way to the Baltics and Scandinavia, but that plan has to change and for now they’re aiming for France to collect various parcels and decide where to head next.

We’ve also just heard that the Malaga Half Marathon we expected to run in 10 days has been postponed, probably until November, so we’ve some re-planning to do ourselves. We’re both a tad fed up, but acknowledge the fact it’s only a very small inconvenience for us. It was always a bigger race for Ju than I, as my ‘big race’ is the 50 mile one in May in Scotland, although that too may be cancelled of course, who knows? We’ve just had a chat and decided not to go to Malaga, mainly because it’s at the other end of the Costa del Sol now, not exactly a beautiful drive, and also to avoid being in among a high concentration of people. We’re lucky enough to be relatively young so the impact of us catching the virus is more likely mild than severe, but the bigger picture is the spread of the thing, which we’d become responsible for if we caught it and couldn’t isolate ourselves properly. We’d probably need to find an aire with fresh water available and avoid contact with people for a couple of weeks, which wouldn’t be fun but would be very possible (we’re immensely fortunate in that we don’t need to go to work, which used to be an office with a thousand people in it).

Anyway, our plan is to try to stay healthy, to think of the people around us and to keep washing those hands folks. Look after yourselves, cheers, Jay