In the footsteps of the Popes
Tuesday,November 7
Camping Los Pinos, Peniscola We’re back to short hops when it comes to changing campsites. This makes sense as the excellent non-toll road, the N340, runs right down the coast, almost parallel to the toll road, and has hardly any traffic on it at this time of year. We can chug along this for as much or as little as we like in the knowledge that we can exit at almost any junction and there’ll be a campsite a mile or so towards the coast. We knew there were three or four campsites and camperstops to choose from in Peniscola and we opted for the second, Los Pinos, about a mile from the coast and more or less equidistant between the historic town of Peniscola and the busier but less pretty Benicarlo a couple of miles to the north. The site was cheap (€12 a night) with good facilities, a little bar/restaurant where you could get a beer, a pizza or a baguette in the morning but very little else. Thankfully, there was a Mercadona a short hop away where we stocked up for a reasonably long stint. After a quiet night, we cycled into Peniscola on Wednesday to have a look at the spectacular castle, once home to two popes but now more famous as the location for the film El CID, starring Charlton Heston as the eponymous hero who drove the Moors out of Spain, and, more recently, Game of Thrones for which it doubles as the sunny sea-bound Meereen. We parked the bikes by the prom and then had a walk up the cobbled streets that wound up to the castle at the top of the headland before paying €5 each to access the walled fortification itself. It was money well spent, if only for the amazing views of Peniscola and the rest of the coast that you get from the top of the ramparts. The rest of the town, sadly, doesn’t match up to the castle, hardly surprising given that it’s mostly shut down after the end of the the season. There is much to see, though, in the farmland around the campsite and we explored rather more of this than we intended on Thursday when we found ourselves lost while walking, covering 12kms around the orange groves and artichoke fields before Google-mapping ourselves back to the campsite. Back on our bikes, we had a more successful Friday when we cycled into Benicarlo and found it to be actually a lovely, lively town with a bustling old quarter, some decent shops (including haberdasheries!) and a good cycle route along the coast to Camping Allegra, which we visited after reading about it in a leaflet picked up at the TIC. Right on the beach and bathed in brilliant sunshine, this is a real winter home from home for a lot of British couples and their vans, which have mostly congregated into one corner of the campsite. At their disposal is a great little bar and restaurant serving fish and chips and other UK favourites, while on most nights of the week you can enjoy such activities as bingo, pool and darts tournaments and boule. For our ‘research’ we had the site’s set menu (€11 a head) which was three courses, plus a decent bottle of wine. It was excellent but not enough to persuade us to pitch in with the ex-pats. No tennis court, for a start, although for €10 you could hook up to the camp’s own satellite system and enjoy BBC, ITV, C4 etc in your own van. Our Saturday night was a walk into Peniscola and a few drinks in a little craft beer bar we’d spotted on our first visit. Guided by the very talkative owner, we had three nice local beers, including a very tasty artichoke ale, before walking home via the Mercadona where we picked up some cheeses etc. for supper. The wind we thought we’d left behind in Almadrava returned with a vengeance later that night and woke us up, such was the ferocity of the storm. It didn’t abate on the Sunday so, with a slightly heavy heart, we decided to up sticks and move again – we thought we might as well be on a campsite with more to offer than stuck on Los Pinos which, for all its charm, still felt a little isolated. Monday, November 13 Camping Torre La Sal 2, Oropesa del Mar About 35 miles south, we knew there was a gold standard campsite: good reviews, great sports complex, free Wi-Fi, restaurant, bars, right on the beach, excellent toilet block etc. And when we got there, we found it to be all that and more. The site, spread over two sides of a beach road, is very impressive, it has to be said. It’s clean, well organised, lavishly appointed and opens out onto a beautiful beach that’s very un-Med like in that there’s a lot or surf, even though the wind is nothing like it was further up the coast. It’s also very popular with the Germans who have colonised Torre La Sal like no other site we’ve ever seen. Happily, they’re very friendly... well, why wouldn’t they be? We seemed to cram a lot into our first day. As well as having a good look around the site, we cycled in the afternoon to the next complex, Marina d’Or (via a nearby Mercadona and one of the ubiquitous Chinese bazaars). A huge multi-hotel complex surrounded by a phalanx of lookalike high-rise holiday apartment blocks, it is, of course, completely deserted after the end of the season. We cycled around the canyon-like streets between the hotels, all full of shut-down shops, pizzerias, bars, restaurants, down to the front where a lavish, ornate park was still being maintained by the local council, presumably for the benefit of the family of swans paddling around the ornamental pond at its heart. For all the world, it looked like we’d stumbled on a post-apocalyptic city everyone has fled. Looking at reviews of the place on the internet, it appears to be the most unloved resort in Spain, in one of the ‘ugliest’ parts of the country. I can’t say we agree. In the evening, after dinner, we had a look at the main bar-restaurant where they were holding a German-Spanish bingo night, advertised earlier in the night by a rather unnerving tannoy announcement relayed to the entire campsite. In German, never one of the world’s loveliest languages, it sounded like the sort of thing the POWs of Colditz would hear shortly after an escape has been discovered. The bingo session itself wasn’t much better. We didn’t play but the humourless caller barking out “ein und zwanzig” along with its Spanish counterpart suggested it couldn’t have been a fun evening, despite good prizes for a line and a house. We said we might try our luck at the Friday session when my schoolboy German lessons and knowledge of Fawlty Towers will hopefully come into their own. On Tuesday, as the weather held, we had a nice walk in the sunshine along the front, to the north of the campsite. Here, we stumbled upon a very well populated wild camping site, again packed with Germans and the occasional Dutch van, as well as a lonely but still open beach bar and a wild and windswept nature reserve. Despite the bleakness and ruggedness of this coast, there were still some lovely views to be had and they gave us further affirmation that, contrary to what the curmudgeons of the Internet say, this is far from being the ugliest part of Spain. A cycle ride on Thursday along the Via Verde, an old railway line hugging the coast between Oropesa and Benicàssim, only reinforced this thought. We set off at about 10.40 for what we expected would be a tough 30km ride but it was pleasantly flat, as you’d expect from an old railtrack, and didn’t take us too long. As we cycled down the gentle incline into Benicàssim – famous for its annual summer pop festival – we could see the port derricks of Valencia in the distance. More dramatic, though, were the striking, colonial ‘fin de siecle’ villas that dominated the stylish promenade. Most of them date from before the First World War, at a time when beach holidays were becoming popular with the ‘beau monde’ thanks to the perceived health-giving qualities of sea water and a Mediterranean climate. Artists, writers and the rich would flock to Benicàssim and have such riotous parties that the villa quarter became known as ‘Hell’. Today, that description could better be applied to the campsite in the town that we looked at. Bonterra Park is pitched at the same price as our temporary home in Torre La Sal but has none of the charm or facilities. We will be giving it a wide berth. After a Lidl salad lunch on the Ruta de las Villas, we headed back along the coast and took the opportunity of having a close look at Oropesa’s old town, built in the shadow of a medieval castle. Busy, bustling and benefiting from a large mainline railway station, giving access to Barcelona and Valencia, it is nevertheless dominated by Marina d’Or, the Orwellian hotel complex just to the north. We had another look at this and, devoid of people, it looked even more like an abandoned Chinese pleasuredome than it did earlier in the week when we cycled through it. Beautiful and manicured gardens punctuate the hotel and apartment complexes while two huge tin/aluminium sculptures bookend the place, reminding me of something you’d find at the gateway to an old Soviet space centre. Jane loves them but to me they just look, well, bonkers. In the evening, we ventured out to try the fare at the camp’s own beach bar, Cabana and for €11 a head the set menu wasn’t half bad. Jane had a salad starter followed by sweet and sour pork, while I had a chicken and rabbit rice soup to start, followed by a bony fish main course. On Friday, during our usual tennis game, we were interrupted by an elderly German woman in search of a fourth to make up a doubles game with two of her friends. I volunteered and on Saturday we all got together for a fun hour of mixed doubles before doing our laundry. It may not be the high intensity I’m used to at Dinas Powys on a Tuesday morning but until those days return it will have to do... and there was a lot of me scampering around the court, it has to be said. As one of the women is going home on Sunday, Jane is going to take her place for our next match, on Monday afternoon. Before then, though, we cashed in our Syns (yes, we’re doing Slimming World) on a few beers at the bar while watching the first half of the Madrid derby (it finished, predictably, 0-0). After watching real football on MOTD, we retired to bed and woke up with a hangover... the last for a while, hopefully, as we’re now moving into a dry period. Any Syns now will be spent on ice cream. Sunday was a quiet day but it was enlivened by a visit from Steve and Karen who were looking around the site for a possible visit. Talk turned to the subject of British TV and Steve said he managed to get everything in his van thanks to an Android device that worked through the site Wi-Fi. He offered to come back and demonstrate it on Monday and, sure enough, once he’d plugged it into the back of our telly and hooked in to the Wi-Fi we had access to all the UK channels, plus all the Sky sport and movie services, and just about every movie we could think of. By this time, though, we’d already signed up to a week’s trial of Hoola TV and a month of Netflix, both of which were working perfectly and had effectively made the Three myfi device virtually redundant. Steve said an Android TV dongle would set us back between €60 and €90 and, of course, would need its own Wi-Fi connection. After talking it through, we decided we didn’t need it and Hoola’s free option, giving us just BBC1 and four other channels, would do us for the time being. Our tennis session in the afternoon with Paula and Ghisela went well and we had three fun sets, each playing with different partners, before we arranged to play again on Friday afternoon. On Wednesday, we walked along the boardwalk to Marina d’Or, through the ornate, ornamental park, complete with huge Koi carp, white peacocks and swans, then back via the nearby campsite, Didota. We got chatting to a Uttoxeter couple, Karen and Graham, after they pointed out to us as we were leaving that it was happy hour. “Just show them your receipt and you get another drink free,” they said. So we did, and then did it again! It was dark by the time we got back to Torre La Sal but Jane managed to rustle up chilli and garlic bread for supper. Thursday was a dry day and in the morning, while Jane sewed, I had a bike ride north along the coast to the nature reserve by the salt flats, coming back via the N340 and the Mercadona. It was very rough along some of the coastal terrain but my cheap Halfords special was just about up to it and got me through safely. On Friday, we cycled to the old town of Oropesa and walked up to the castle which overlooks the landscape. A spruce and hitech museum showed us the history of the region, from stone age times, to the attack by African pirates and its capture during the Peninsular Wars of the 19th century. Today, the castle is being renovated but it’s hard not to think that the town would be nothing without the advent of Marina d’Or, whose empire includes a concert venue, a theme park and an indoor pool complex, as well as multiple hotels and apartment blocks. Later, we had another three sets of tennis with our Swiss/German partners and on Saturday we rounded off the evening with another drink at Didota then a couple of bottles of Tennants beer at our Cabaña beach bar where we chatted to the owner who told us about the history of the camp. In the winter, the occupancy is 90% German, mainly couples, but in the summer it’s 90% Spanish, with all their children and the difference in numbers is something like 1,000 in winter and 4,000 in summer. It must be quite a sight to see it at its peak but, as we told Paula and Ghisela, when we come back to play tennis with them again, it will be next autumn/winter. We have decided to move on after the weekend, once we’ve activated our 15-day discount. We’re going to Calp and the Mediterranean Camperstop for a week and decided to book ahead this time, knowing how popular these places get in the winter. We shouldn’t have worried and when we spoke to the German owner Christian he said he would save a place for “Wells Fargo” from Tuesday. Pictured, right, from top: the rugged coastline of Torre La Sal near the campsite; three views of Peniscola; one of the striking villas on the front at Benicàssim; heading north on the Via Verde; on the cycle route and in and around Marina d’Or; Martin with his new friends, Paula, Ghisela and, er, Heidi; images of the ornamental park at Marina d’Or, plus the spectacular sunrise at Torre La Sal and taking a break on a coastal bike ride; bottom, Bosko, who sings and plays organ at the twice-weekly German dance night
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