Leaving Oliva is never easy, and it was no different this time. As you can see by the weather forecast at the point we were heading off, it was hard to leave that idyllic, sunny, beachy lifestyle behind!
Mrs B had suggested that to make the most of the good weather, we take the route along the Mediterranean coast and head over the border at La Jonquera into France – a route that we hadn’t taken heading north for a very long time! And as we were in that memory lane zone, she also suggested a campsite we had last visited with our girl Lu and her bestie, Maisie, 24 years ago, in Tamarit, just north of Tarragona.
But first – and we timed our (slow) departure from Eurocamping to allow it – we thought we’d treat ourselves to one of our all-time favourite free-camps on the cliffs at Alcossebre, to stage the journey.
As you might recall if you are following this trip, we stopped at the campsite in Alcossebre on the way down for a week or so, and whilst there we had admired the half dozen or so free-campers we could see each day, perched above the beaches not far from the Tropicana site. And after our sleepless last night there, kept awake by campsite aircon, what better than parking up right on the beach with the sound of the sea lapping the shore and lulling us off into a gentle, compensatory night’s slumber?
Well, let’s just say that Mrs B’s observation that the sea seemed higher up the beach than when we were here last, was not only accurate, but based on the fact that we were arriving on the tail end of a storm surge on this part of the coast that had washed away a fair bit of beach, some of the cliffs, and flooded some of the roadways…
But, none of that put us off and before long we had parked up in an idyllic spot…
…got ourselves ready for a moonlit dinner…
… and before long we had settled in, with the waves lapping…
…err, hold that thought, more like roaring at the beach (according to Mr B that is!)
And, as we had chosen our spot on a small headland, they were ‘roaring’ onto the beach either side of where we had parked. The effect of which (for Mr B only…) was that what was once a gentle lapping and lulling had turned into a discordant slapping as the waves pounded the beach…
All of which meant, that by dawn, Mrs B woke refreshed by a good night’s sleep, and Mr B was wandering about muttering that his masterclass in CIA interrogation techniques had left him just a little tired…
…which is why he ended up wearing sunnies for breakfast, when the sun had barely crested the horizon!
Heading out of Alcossebre after filling up with fuel for Evie and us, we headed north on the old N340, now quiet since the AP7 motorway became free to use, before joining the motorway at Ampolla and passing the nuclear power station just by the motorway near Tarragona…
…and arriving at the site at Tamarit that we had last visited in 1999, after a relatively easy drive.
We had left Oliva with enough time to arrive in Tamarit on the Thursday before the Halloween weekend, having learned the hard way in Conil last year when we struggled to find a site with any vacancies. So we knew that it was going to be busy…
…but we hadn’t expected to see all the arrival bays full of campervans waiting to get in (it’s now a much larger and very popular site!). Once we had waited our turn in the queue to talk to one of the busy receptionists, taken in the signs promoting three separate Halloween events at the site on October, including the weekend coming, and noticed the ghoulish decorations outside reception, we were pleased to be told that yes, we could stay for the two nights we wanted, but…
…no ACSI discount on the second night – eek! This was a surprise to us as sites normally list their exclusion dates on the ACSI app and in the book, which this one hadn’t, so the difference was €23 for Thursday with ACSI, and €41 for Friday and, as it’s Catalunya, taxes on top, just like neighbouring France! So, we thought we’d see how the Thursday night went and review on the Friday morning…
Parking up in our allocated spot, along with a good number of early arrival Spanish Halloweeners, we couldn’t help but wander around the site for old time’s sake (we have some very fond memories, as well as being both flooded and robbed, on two separate visits, back in the 90s!) and blimey has it changed! It is now so much bigger, and we could soon see why it’s now called a ‘resort village’!
It still has the lovely tall pines, but the area where we had camped with the girls (when their tent got flooded) is now a complex of rental chalets with a wellness centre and bike rental.
The charm is still there though and the flood management so much more sophisticated with concrete roads, massive drains, and a battery of pumps ready to send floodwaters on towards the sea.
So after our orientation wander, and getting lost a couple of times, we had to go for a beach walk up the coast to Altafulla beach. The clouds may have filled in, but it’s still a very picturesque beach and walk…
Further evidence of the recent storm surge could be seen as we approached the town, with giant sandbags outside a restaurant to protect its underbuild, and this precarious life-guard tower left casually leaning out to sea…
Making our way back along the beach after admiring some of the older beach front properties…
…we decided to have an early dinner on the pitch and then a wander around to see how the site was filling up…
Suffice to say that we now appreciate just how well behaved the weekenders are at Eurocamping in Oliva, as the night got louder and louder in the zone we were in, with no-one minded to keep quiet after midnight, or indeed at all until they were ready to turn in some time before dawn…
So no surprises that when we did eventually prise our eyelids open next morning, Mr B scampered off to see if we could change pitch to one of the quieter areas we had reconnoitred the night before; after all, if we were paying more, surely we would have some choice…
Well, up to a point. Mr B returned with our options – two pitches only, with the rest that were at that price point already booked! Within minutes we had made our choice and by mid morning we had settled into our very much nicer, larger and hopefully quieter pitch, closer to the beach and further from the noise ‘hotspots’. We also think it’s close to where we got robbed, but that was in Daisy when we used to sleep with the back doors open and just a mosquito net between us and the knife-wielding ladrones, who slashed the net and stole Mrs B’s watch from right beside our sleeping heads… Needless to say, no more open door sleeping these days!
And as if to celebrate our good fortune with the new pitch, the sun then blessed us with its presence for the rest of the day, tempting us into the new and much, much larger pool…
… but with our waterslide days firmly behind us, we reverted to a day of the usual, reading and snoozing on the beach, with its amazing old castle at one end…
or walking along it and up into the old town for a wander around.
The old town is typical of so many in coastal Spain, with its narrow streets and old (mainly 18C here) houses superseded by a more modern beach resort on the coast itself. So it has plenty of charm…
a castle…
and, a definite to visit if/when we come back; a very nice looking Michelin starred hotel/restaurant that Mrs B had soon spotted…
Returning along the beach, with the sun setting appropriately on what was our last day on the beach in Spain…
…we arrived back just in time for the first of the evening’s entertainments, a children’s dance-along disco with roasted chestnuts for sale…
After watching for a while, and before Mr B was tempted to join in, we headed back to Evie where we enjoyed a much calmer-than-last-night dinner on the pitch, reflecting that for our entire time in Spain on this trip, we had not needed to eat inside the van once, with our alfresco breakfast, lunch and dinners reminding us of one of the things we love so much about our travels – being outdoors as much as possible!
By about 9pm the camp had gone eerily quiet, of course, it was suppertime for the locals. So we used the hiatus to wander around and have a look at the Halloween displays that almost all the Spanish campers had erected on their pitches, with this one being our favourite…
The second instalment of the entertainment – a live band – kicked off at 1030 for an hour or so and, unlike the previous night, and partly because we were in an entirely different part of the site, by midnight we were able to settle down and, in our now heavily clichéd world, were serenaded to sleep by the waves crashing on the beach in the distance….
After a restful night, we made, for us, a timely departure, helped along by an early morning wake-up playlist of the theme tune to Pan’s Labyrinth on repeat over breakfast (more onsite entertainment with an actual labyrinth set up amongst the trees – they really go all-out with Halloween here!) and, after a final stock up at a Spanish supermarket we were back on the AP7 heading for the French border, destination tbd!
So it’s ¡Hasta luego España! And thanks for an amazing time and such incredible weather! We have an inkling of what we are returning to in the UK, but first, we need to manage our return across France, not wanting to leave the sunny south too soon, and not wanting to have to race to the coast to get the ferry in Dieppe…
S&J 31.10.23
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