We left the Cactus campsite at Motril on Tuesday morning and headed up the magical coast road towards Cabo de Gata National Park ...
We stopped off at Lidl for some much needed supplies - at last! As you can see the carpark was deserted and there seemed to be only one person working in the large store ...
We decided to check out Roquetas De Mar, which is south of Almeria. We were in the middle of the Almeria greenhouse area, which has the largest concentration of greenhouses in the world and supplies over half of Europe's fruit and veg. They are not glass greenhouses but, in fact, plastic shades. The area is absolutely massive, the greenhouses go right from the sea to the base of the mountains ...
This satellite pic shows just how many there are ...
It seems that most Spanish find the conditions too unbearable to work in so they are mostly staffed by African and Eastern European 'expats'.
It is an absolute eysore, but a huge money making venture for Almeria ...
It's like driving through Soweto ...
We made our way to the seafront and it was rather more pleasant. After lunch we had a walk around the harbour and beach area.
This lovely yacht had recently sunk in the harbour ...
A rather ironic name ...
The beach was lovely and dog friendly. It was very quiet, as are most places at at this time of year ...
We were going to stay overnight in the port area but some of the expats looked a bit dodgy. They were probably fine but sometimes your gut feeling just says move on......which we did.
After driving for a while we still hadn't found anywhere to stop and we were slightly concerned as there was not too much daylight left! So, we decided to keep on driving to San Jose as it's in the national park and we thought we remembered it from last year. We seemed to remember it being a nice spot and also being motorhome friendly.
Once again it was a stunning drive along the coast road rather than the main highway ...
By the time we reached San Jose the moon was coming up and we couldn't find a motorhome (to park up with) anywhere ...
Also, we had remembered the wrong place - it wasn't the place we thought it was at all! We drove around some very narrow streets (with El getting more and more worried the narrower it got!) ...until we came to a wide road along the river bed. Out came the laptop and a quick search for motorhome friendly parking site resulted in a spot about 200 metres from where we were parked....result! El was well happy with that as, today, she was the one getting tetchy!
We found about 5 motorhomes parked up on a large bit of waste ground very close to the centre of the village. If it hadn't been dark we probably would have spotted them.
As we were rather knackered we had a nice night in eating pasta and drinking red wine whilst watching four episodes of WPC 56 (which we found on a couple of DVDs in the last caravan park). It was a rather good night (yes, we are easily pleased!).
This morning we were up early to brilliant sunshine and warmth.
We went for a walk around San Jose, which is just lovely ...
We sat down by the harbour, where the water was crystal clear ...
We fed the fish with some bread that Elaine had bought with her to feed any starving birds she spotted ...
As you can imagine, being a national park, there are a lot of fish about as fishing is banned along the shore line ...
It really is a lovely settlement. I will have to check the real estate prices later, although I'm guessing it won't be cheap!
We will go back into the town tonight when it will hopefully come alive!
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