Final Sunlit Days on the Costa del Sol, Nerja

Tomorrow we’ll leave the Aula de Naturaleza campsite here in Nerja on the eastern end of the Costa del Sol, and start crossing the Iberian Peninsular on our way to Santander and home in England. We arrived here at the end of October 2020, just before tourist travel from the UK became impossible, with the aim to stay on the site for maybe 5 months, until around the end of March. That didn’t quite happen as a few days after arriving I got the news my mum had suffered a huge stroke and was critically ill. A week later she died in the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, and Ju and I headed home on a flight from Malaga to mourn and help my dad. After six weeks we’d had the funeral (small as it was in COVID-19 times) and sorted out the paperwork, so opted to fly back here before Christmas. At that point we half expected a full lockdown to happen here, confining us to our pitch, but that never happened. A nighttime curfew has been in place throughout our stay, and at one point we couldn’t legally leave the town, but schools, churches, bars, shops, restaurants, gyms and hairdressers have remained (with certain restrictions) open all winter.

We expected there’d be another resurgence of the virus (although nowhere near as bad as it turned out to be back in the UK), and our hope was it would have reduced by the time we came back home. That part at least has panned out, the UK’s long winter lockdowns and rocket-powered vaccination programme appears to have brought things under a good degree of control. For our part we’ll go through the pre-departure and post-arrival testing, tracking and quarantine processes, and then get the vaccination as soon as it’s available to the under-50s, which may well be immediately we’re out of the Cooler. We’ve socially distanced for over a year now, and have gotten used to wearing masks almost all of the time off-pitch, and we’ll keep doing these as needed once we’re home.

Other than buying a car (a 2013 1.2 Hyundai i10 is looking favourite at the moment) and doing a range of jobs on the van, we don’t have plans for when we’re back or any idea how long we’ll be back for. Having spent all winter here in the sunshine (we’ve had maybe 10 or 15 rainy/overcast days), we’re in no rush to go abroad again. We recognise our huge luck here of course, lots of you reading this will be desperate to head out to the continent in your motorhome or camper, and we wish you the best of luck with your plans. We’ve deliberately not spent much time touring England up to now, partly down to the higher cost of using sites there, and partly as we figured we could tour around when we were older and less able to travel abroad. Now looks like a good time for us stay on our native shores, or maybe head over to Ireland. There’s talk of campsites filling up, but we’re not members of the clubs and don’t use the bigger sites with their family facilities, and are highly flexible on dates so I’m pretty sure we’d find somewhere if we needed it. There’s always Britstops too, once the pubs start to open up again.

We’ll leave the site here in Nerja with mixed emotions. We’ve done what we set out to achieve, to manage our mental health in a calm and safe place surrounded by green hills, 1,500m high mountains, the blue sweep of the Med merging into the equally blue expanse of sky. The site here is owned and run by a family who live behind the reception area, a kind, helpful and friendly lot they are too. Although we’ve not had anything like as much contact with the other people staying here, keeping pretty much to ourselves, they’re a lovely lot too, interesting, hopeful, friendly and inspirational. The biggest thing we’ll miss, I think, is the climate. The occasional cluster of overcast days made us appreciate the long spells of pure blue sky in between. Getting up in the morning we roll down the kitchen window blind to see the early morning sun bouncing from the while villas of the hillside urbanisation behind us. To start off each day the air is cool, but the sun quickly has us reaching for the Factor 50 and hats, and we’ve carried water in backpacks on the longer hikes into the hills.

We’ve tried to make the most of these past few days. Hiking up to Frigiliana we found our favourite restaurant closed, so took a gamble with one in the centre of the village. It looked a little more upmarket but we were blown away when our mixed tapas turned up, a thing of beauty and with tastes to match. The Amaretto-flavoured jelly and Parmigiano ice cream were completely new to me, never tasted anything like it. When they turned up we squinted at them, quickly got a photo and then checked the price again. €25 it said, for two people. We fully expected that to be per-person when the bill came, but nope, we paid €36 including four drinks and a tip, wow.

Instead of coming back via the roads we opted to take a steep path down to the Rio Higueron canyon, a much more awkward walk than we remember. At one point while edging along a ledge path 2m above the river bed a fist-sized rock dislodged itself from high on the cliff above us. We heard it bounce a couple of times and Ju just had time to look up and see/feel it pass less than a foot behind her, crashing into the path. Another stroke of luck.

Apart from that we’ve been out running, sweating in the heat of the day, recovering from the 20 mile virtual Ashby 20. Lots of members of our running club did the 20 mile distance back home too, and will all get a hoodie for their efforts, something this particular run is famous for. We’ve the club’s virtual awards night this weekend and are looking forward to running again in small groups once we’re out of quarantine. We’re waiting, like everyone, to see whether/when races start to re-appear, as our culture slowly starts to grind back into life in the coming months.

This evening we’ll likely have a walk into Nerja and grab a last ice cream. The town seems to ebb and flow in terms of people being out and about. Looking at heaving YouTube videos of it in normal times though, it’s almost completely devoid of tourists these days, just a few locals and expats here and there in the shops, or sat outside bars and restaurants. A surprisingly amount of work’s been going on while we’ve been here, with new toilet and shower blocks being installed along the beach, block-built bin surrounds, a large town-centre demolition and miles of fencing being repainted, and the laying of foundations and stonework of a brand new restaurant being build on Playa Calahonda near the Balcon de Europe. A good many shops look to have closed permanently away from the main tourist drag though, and the leaflets and brochures in travel agent windows are rapidly fading in the sun. As we leave it, Nerja feels like it’s being fettled but it remains deep in slumber, with hotels showing no signs of re-opening.

Our plan for tomorrow is to drive the free motorways up through the mountains around Granada and Jaen and then north to the free aire at Puerto Lapice, about 380km and maybe 5 hours of driving. After a night there we’ll follow in the footsteps of Stuart, who left here a couple of weeks ago and will be out of quarantine now, staying at another free aire at Herrera de Pisuerga, another 450km and 5 or 6 hours north. That’ll leave us just 132km south of Santander, which has a couple of aires in the city and more overnight options dotted around the surrounding area. Ju’s got the campsite here to print off our ferry reservation to show to any police who might stop us on the way north, and we’ve copies of our campsite bills to prove we haven’t moved around outside the province while we’ve been here. That should, hopefully, be enough to get us back to the port.

So, another chapter draws to an end. It’s a long old journey home, although the boat will do a lot of the heavy lifting for us, halving the driving distance. We’re looking forward to getting ourselves installed back in the Cooler, having a fire, the luxury of never-ending running water and getting some long-put-off work done while we’re locked in. Thanks to everyone who has sent hints and tips for the journey home, the paperwork and care needed to return safely has obviously (and understandably) increased significantly since we came back 12 months ago, but we’ve done our research and fingers crossed everything will go smoothly. If it doesn’t, we’ll deal with whatever happens.

Cheers, Jay