Spanish Trip Diary, Part 3: Costa del Sol and Gibraltar

Added 19 March 2006. Pictures and stories from our trip to Spain, from February 28 to March 10.

1. Madrid / Tolédo
2. Andalusia: Seville / Cordoba
3. Costa del Sol and Gibraltar

The aptly named Costa del Sol, or Sunny Coast

Transportation and hotel notes

No high-speed train is available from Seville to Malaga, so we were booked on the regular train, leaving around 1:00 pm. So the morning was quite leisurely. The ride itself was less smooth and relatively longer than on the high-speed train, but everything went well. At the train station in Malaga, we transferred to their regional train to get to Torremolinos. Then we walked from that train station to our hotel.

When we got to the hotel, the manager was on the phone. “You're Jean Lefebvre?” he asked. On confirmation, he said we had a phone call from “Michel”. This odd turn of events was our cat sitter saying that Sandy has been to the vet and we should call them.

After a bit of flurry of checking in and figuring out the phone system, we got through to the Waterloo West Animal Hospital, and spoke to our vet. She went through the up and down saga of Sandy's hospitalization. But the final news was that he had passed away the previous night, before she even had a chance to figure out what the problem was.

So, though the Torremolinos beach (if not the town and hotel) was beautiful, this wasn't a time of many pictures. We walked along the very long beach boardwalk where we noticed that the town was frankly overrun with cats. A couple of the orange ones let me stop and pet them. Isn't that sweet?

Our hotel room, while nothing fancy and with no view to speak of, was perfectly fine. We had a little seating area with couch, table, and TV; we pushed the two single beds together; the shower was great.

As with Madrid, transportation to the Malaga Airport was convenient and cheap, by train. And Heathrow Bus problems didn't repeat themselves, so we had no trouble making our connection in London on the way back home.

Sights

Nerja Caves

The major site in Nerja—well, a short bus ride from Nerja—are the Nerja Caves. These are enormous and filled with stalagmites and stalactites. They're somewhat difficult to get pictures of, but just awe-inspiring to see. We bought a book of photos from the rather good tourist shop there. (But the picture below is Jean's.)

The Nerja Caves. Look kind of spooky here, but not so intimidating when you're walking through them with a bunch of other tourists.

Gibraltar

To get to Gibraltar, which is a British-owned piece of land within Spain, we decided to sign up with a tour company. We did it for convenience (we were picked up right at our hotel), but later figured out that it was actually cheaper to do it this way. Initially we signed up just for the bus ride there, but en-route we decided to sign up for the guided tour as well. That was a good choice because it turned out to be a very worthwhile tour.

On the way, we saw some other Costa del Sol towns like Fuenjirola and Marbella. On arrival, we got off the bus and walked across the border to avoid the long car lineup. We then started our mini-bus tour with the local guide. The tour was all in English, but the guide’s (Tony) accent was this odd mix of Spanish and British. Tony was a lot of fun.

We drove through very low tunnels and tiny streets. The first stop was at a very windy lighthouse area. The next was at St Michael’s Caves. These too were quite impressive, and we probably would have been blown away if we hadn’t seen the Nerja Caves the day before.

St Michael's Caves in Gibraltar

Our next stop was the Ape Cave, where the Gibraltar monkeys hang out. (Actually, some of them had migrated to the St Michael’s Cave area, so we’d had a preview.) These guys aren't at all shy. It was something to be so close to wild monkeys (imported from nearby Africa many years ago).

This one would be good for a caption contest...

Kind of cute in their own way, eh? (The monkeys, not me!)

Tour guide Tony and friend

The last part of the visit was free time in the city part of Gibraltar, off the rock. We had lunch there and did some shopping—there are some interesting stores, but we didn't buy a whole lot.

Town of Gibraltar, with the rock in behind

Activities

Hanging out in Nerja

The “white town” of Nerja was really quite lovely; we enjoyed our day there. The Balcony of Europe area overlooking the beach was especially nice. The picture at the top of this page was taken from there. This city was also a good place to do some errands, like buy enormous strawberries and pick up some pharmacy supplies.

White town of Nerja

Balcony of Europe. Note the statue on the very right.

Visiting Mijas

Sherry had recommended a visit to Mijas, another little “white town” not far away. It was indeed a very pretty place, up in the mountains, with a lovely garden area and nice town square.

Lovely mountain town of Mijas

Terrace view in Mijas

After touring around Mijas for a while, we decided to try to make it to Ronda, a mountain town further afield which features an enormous gorge. That meant busing to Fuenjirolas first. However, buses to Ronda just aren't as frequent, and we missed our connection. So we actually decided to go back to Mijas, and likely have supper there. To pass the time, we visit a few shops, including a Wine Museum that had some interesting information on the local wine industry, but also gave us a chance to pick up various Spanish wines not available here.

Then we made what turned out to be a big mistake and had a glass of sangria at a little pub. About an hour or two later, the wind had really picked up, and both of us felt a little queasy. Jean actually had to go to the bus station washroom to throw up. Dinner no longer seemed that appealing, so we took the bus back to the hotel. Our personal diagnosis: food poisoning, though sangria seems a weird thing to get it from. We spend the night sapped of energy, very thirsty, and thinking that we'd never eat again.

The one thing you can say is that, if we had to get food poisoning, that was about the best time to get it. It was the end of the vacation anyway, and it eased off by the time we had to fly out—we required no extra trips to the tiny plane washroom. We even managed to keep down a little airline food.

The food report

Our Torremolinos hotel, despite being the cheapest of the trip, was the only one that included meals. And not only breakfast; also dinner. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, the buffet-style food was not very good. The supper we tried only the first night; only the plain spaghetti with plain tomato sauce was really decent. For breakfast, the eggs and related meats looked pretty scary. However, we did enjoy the fruit salad, yogurt, and it's really hard to get toast wrong (especially when you do your own toasting). They even had whole wheat bread.

We did get some pretty decent seafood in these parts, though. Highlights were:

• Extremely fresh baby clams simmered in garlic, which we had at a generally good restaurant in Nerja. (The sardines—little ones like here, not the big ones we had in Portugal—and the octopus were decent also.)
• Very good oysters a different restaurant in Nerja. Strangely, we were unable to find oysters on the menu anywhere else.

We also enjoyed our British pub lunch in Gibraltar, where we had good Indian food featuring distinctly un-mushy peas, and fish and chips!

Observations

• Temperatures now 16 to 27 degrees, so coats could finally be abandoned (though we hadn't figured that out yet in Gibraltar).
• We rather missed the compulsive street-washing of Madrid, as here we had to play “dodge the dog poo” (at least in the beach towns).
• In preparation (we guess) for their busier Easter tourist season, there was a lot of street construction going on. Annoyingly so, at times, as it made it difficult to find a walking route to the beach.
• Bathrooms. The story of the bathrooms is that there wasn't much of a story. They were all your normal toilets, except that the flusher was a pull-up thing. Except in Gibraltar, where they had the British-style big lever instead. Toilet paper was occasionally missing (we carried our own) and soap was often missing (hand sanitizer!). (Which may explain our little bout of food poisoning, actually.)
• A lot of tourists here! Quite different from the other regions in that way. Most tourists are British, and most of those seem to have a fondness for ill-fitting shorts. But we also ran into some Americans, French Canadians (easy to pick out because of the accent), and even Spaniards from other parts of Spain.
• Torremolinos seemed to not have any non-smoking restaurants, sadly. Afraid to offend the British tourists, maybe?