La verdad sobre la Costa del Sol: Part 2… more truths

I posted in July 2018 with my random musings about the Costa del Sol and it’s debatable integrity, based around a summer soak in sunshine and local colour.

“The truth about the Costa del Sol is that what endures,
what is worthwhile, is what is Spanish.”
David Hewson

 
For me, Hewson’s quote above remains rock-solid true. But there are things to add now… more truths.

 

And I make no apology for quoting Laurie Lee’s “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning” once again, for it is relevant (and he couldn’t half write):

“The road to Malaga followed a beautiful but exhausted shore, seemingly forgotten by the world. I remember the names, San Pedro, Estepona, Marbella and Fuengirola. They were saltfish villages, thin ribbed, sea hating, cursing their place in the sun. At that time one could have bought the whole coast for a shilling. Not Emperors could buy it now” 

Back in early June, we had welcomed 2 tenants from the US (plus small canine tenant) to our Valencia apartment, to stay until November. So we needed a summer holiday venue. My previous experience of Estepona had been with my work back in April 2007, I remembered a town that had retained its elegance, despite its proximity to Marbella and Fuengirola to the east, as our Laurie mentions above. So Estepona was our choice.

 

With tedious predictability, our budget airline (the red one) landed us 2 hours late in Malaga, and with an hour on the road to Estepona still to come, hunger was the enemy. We scrambled directly to the nearby Puerto Deportivo de Estepona on arrival, and snacked at Café Bar Reinaldo as the marina began to grow quiet, late on a weekday evening.

Until the nearby Plaza de Toros emptied. Mercifully (if you’re a bull) the bullring was now being used for concerts and performances, and suddenly the marina was full of hundreds of people retrieving their cars, and the amusing struggles with ticket machines and exit barriers (that we enjoyed for the whole visit) added to the sudden bustle.

 

The next day dawned hot and breezy. I remembered Playa del Cristo to the west of the marina due to its proximity to the hotel we had used back in 2007. The walk from the marina was a little longer that I remembered, perhaps due to the wind creating clouds of thick dust in the large car park between marina and beach. A sign at the car park entrance prohibited caravans and motor homes. Predictably, the shore side of the car park was populated by around 30 caravans and motor homes.

 

Despite the wind, we enjoyed a first day in the sunshine on the beach, a chiringuito lunch (more on these fine establishments shortly) and shopped on the way back to our unremarkable holiday apartment so that the fridge could be filled.

 

To the east of the marina, towards the town new and old, lies Playa de la Rada. This huge beach stretches from the puerto pesquero and its fish market, right along the breadth of the town itself. It was along this beach that we strolled on day two, looking for a more authentic chiringuito experience… and so we happened across Chiringuito Tropical, the first that you’ll encounter in this direction.

 

So… chiringuitos. Our friend Wikipedia describes such establishments by suggesting that they’re not really established: “a small beach bar, selling mainly drinks and snacks, and sometimes meals or tapas, in a more or less provisional building, since a more permanent structure on the beach may be inviable”.

I love that chiringuitos can sometimes feel a little provisional, perhaps ramshackle, temporary… your chiringuito may even be a shack. It takes me back to one in Cyprus many years ago that was literally a shack, but produced a lunchtime brandy sour that was a game-changer.

 

It’s the makeshift nature of the chiringuito that makes the good ones so remarkable. The coast of the Malaga region specializes in very good chiringuitos, with very good fresh fish and seafood, invariably staffed by amazing people.

 

In an attractively ramshackle arrangement of buildings on a beach, there will be a kitchen, a bar, sometimes an indoor eating area, sometimes a decking eating area, sometimes tables right on the sand. Many then have sunbeds on the sand stretching towards the sea.

For us, these are some of the ingredients that make a summer holiday.

 

On first arrival at Chiringuito Tropical, we found sunbeds available from 11am. As soon as the chiringuito opened, you would pay a very friendly guy for your sunbeds and get on with your busy day of lying down a lot in the sunshine.

 

The sunbeds filled pretty quickly, and after a few days, you began to recognize and interact with the “regulars”:

Dutch family. Astonishingly adept at languages, flitting between Dutch, Spanish, English and French as required. Dad was resigned to the expensive tastes of his brood, constantly fishing into his back pocket for more euros to finance their prodigal beach lifestyles.

Spanish couple. Not sure if local to Estepona, but we got on speaking terms after stepping in to rescue a broken cigarette lighter crisis. They swam every day until the 11am “sunbed release” watershed.

Spanish family. Couple with young son of about 8 and very small son #2 who was unfeasibly cute, very good at the waving game, and also very good at demanding his family’s attention. Punched his Papa's arm remarkably hard for a small child when Papa was reading instead of paying attention to him.

 

60-something Spanish lady who was very particular about almost everything, but also very pleasant. Loved her time in the sunshine and enjoyed the sea. Retirement life goals.

 

Huge American guy in a basketball vest with a partner who never said a word. This was perhaps because he constantly talked about himself, and how he had played basketball with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. Even if we had thought it was true, nobody cared.

3 Spanish ladies of a certain age (taking us back to my 2018 post again…) talking all at the same time… clearly determined to have a great day… and nobody can blame them for that. They were great fun, and cackled a lot after their first jug of sangria arrived. One fell asleep after a long lunch and snored loudly. Her mates found this hilarious, and therefore made a video. They then randomly played 30-second snippets of the same horrific euro-pop tune repeatedly, for what seemed like hours. This endeared them to us a little less, but they’d had a great day.

 

And various Spanish, Brits, Irish, French, Portugese, German, Scandi, Dutch, Eastern European and many and varied visitors. Some harmless, some demanding, some ignorant, some lovely.

 

And the lunchtimes. We wouldn’t miss those chaotic, hot, noisy, smoky, delicious, long lunchtimes in those vibrant, full-of-life chiringuitos for the world. Sunday especially is the Spanish family day out, and they dive into sardinas and boquerones fritos and calamares and fresh lenguado and dorada and paella and beers and sangria and they kiss and they laugh and they shout and they argue and we love it all.

 

We enjoy our own calmer version of the above, and we listen and we people-watch and we enjoy the service of the incredible staff, who work from 11am through a crazy long lunchtime service in 30º heat that can easily run through to 5pm… then they grab their own food and get ready for the evening.

 

We left Chiringuito Tropical on our last full day with heavy hearts and lots of genuine thanks. We had spent almost every day of our 2 weeks with the 3 generations of the family that run that place, and they had made our holiday.

 

Just as an aside, we had taken to enjoying a morning coffee close to Chiringuito Tropical before their 11am opening. Our venue of choice for coffee soon became the oddly named El Amanacer de Paco* on Calle San Roque. This was partly because of the great coffee, but also because we were often served by a lovely guy who wasn’t Paco, but bore more than a passing resemblance to Tattoo from Fantasy Island, the awful/great Saturday night TV offering from the 1970/80s**. “Tattoo” was such a nice guy, bustling around the tables, sharing the challenges of his busy life with a grin and a shrug. Paco himself was a tall, gentle guy with a more understated manner. Rather disappointingly, he bore no resemblance whatsoever to Ricardo Montalbán, so the 1970s Saturday night TV analogy was never quite complete.

 

And so to Estepona itself. In Estepona I felt closer to Valencia that I had ever felt in the other Costa del Sol resorts that we’d visited before… Marbella, La Cala de Mijas, Fuengirola.

Estepona is a fairly large town, and feels like it’s been a fairly large town for some time.

 

We knew La Cala de Mijas had been a tiny fishing village around which a resort grew at an alarming rate. In our first few years of holidaying there, we found that the pace of change from village to resort was reasonable, but this changed. The old original cafés close to El Torreon in the beachside heart of the resort lost their Spanish character. Some became places where you couldn’t sit and talk with a coffee or caña… the table couldn’t be yours unless you ordered food. Some guy from a TV show about Essex bought a restaurant there, and advertised it as being in Marbella. It isn't. The supermarket big brands moved in, as did Irish bars and kebab shops, and places where you could get a Sunday Roast or an English Breakfast.

 

Beyond the coast road, the building of more and more housing moved on at a frantic pace (and still does) and the whole thing will just snowball.

 

But the feeling in Estepona is not the same. Yes, the town continues to grow as people from all places move in to live and work and retire, but you don’t feel that it will ever be swallowed like La Cala has been. Estepona was there before all of these people, and I think Estepona will remain.

I think the word is established.

 

We walked to the old town from our apartment close to the marina. Up a gentle hill from the Rotonda de la Barca, you very quickly arrive at the start of a traffic-free walkway that strolls you past a tastefully redeveloped residential area, all the way to the pretty (if very busy) old town. I remembered back to 2007 when some of this smart, floral, water-featured, cool walkway was a grubby, noisy, car-filled seafront road. What a difference.

 

For all of our 2^nd week, along this cool walkway, there was the Jamon Festival Estepona 2024. For the uninitiated, jamon in Spain is a VERY BIG DEAL. It’s hard to think of a UK equivalent to the impact, importance, history, artistry, craft and place in society that jamon has in Spain.

 

The best jamon is revered like the finest wines, and that is reflected in the cost. This festival featured an impressive range of jamon for sale, competitions for the best ham carver (an art within an art) and of course the finest ham at the end of the week. With sellers of cheeses and beer, and bread and dulces, the many stalls leading up to the great ferris wheel at the start of the old town were a delight.

 

We ate in the old town on a few evenings. One very nice mesón had a very likeable host and tables a little way down the street close to the ancient castle wall of Castillo de San Luis... and the food was amazing. Some old town restaurants were too turistic, but the occasional chiringuito tempted us back for an evening meal when we could see that fresh fish still being barbecued over wood.

 

On our way home, families played giant chess at midnight on the traffic-free paseo. The queue for the ferris wheel didn’t seem to diminish, and the jamon carvers didn’t slow down.

 

And just a word for the gulls. Gulls justifiably get a terribly bad press in many places. They scavenge and steal food and are a nuisance and a genuine threat to people in many places across the UK.

There are a lot of gulls in Estepona, but they didn’t appear to be a problem for anyone. They largely remained around the puerto pesquero, and that end of the beach. They fly in large flocks in the mornings and evenings, only once making themselves scarce when a gang of black kites moved in from the African coast one evening***.

 

The gulls appeared to have everything they needed from the puerto and the fish market, and to some degree they sum up Estepona as a place. Their part in the established order of things seemed clear, and they don’t push the boundaries. There are thousands of expats in Estepona also, but they haven’t turned it into any kind of expat enclave. There were a lot of visitors of all nationalities, but they were largely unable to have a negative influence on such an established town that clearly has solid foundations.

 

Nice place, Estepona. It’s something of a comfort to think that it’s likely to remain so.

 

 

 

 

*One of the possible translations is "The Dawn of Paco". Maybe he had some kind of epiphany that inspired him to open a café and employ Tattoo from Fantasy Island. It's hard to know where the truth lies. My Spanish wasn't good enough to ask him, and it's probably best left to the imagination.

** Many of my very few readers wil probably need to google this due to age, and then maybe you'll understand what I'm talking about. I hope.

*** I'm no Bill Oddie (again, please google if required) but apparently it's not unusual for Black Kites to cross the Straits in groups.