Cabo de Gata ( Pujaire)

The good, the bad and the ugly* and your tomatoes all come from here. This is the desert part of Spain. The average rainfall of this area is about 12mm for a typical March. We had that on each for the days we were there! Many spaghetti westerns were filmed in this area because of the desert look. It’s also an area which is jam packed with plastic greenhouses in every inch of flat country. Each packet of tomatoes, courgettes etc that you pick up in the supermarket are likely to have been grown in these plastic monstrosities. Luckily for us only the coastal strip is flat and the hills are rather stunning. I had my best day of the trip so far here. We cycled along the coast on european cycle route 8 , it took us past the salt flats with flamingos, over a hill and down to the next bay where a beer in the sun was imbibed. The blue sea was crashing on the rocks below the arid hills covered with gorse scrub above. The one downside was the road, which at points was so rutted that the only way to pass was to get off our bikes and push. The rain that day fell before we set off for the ride and once we returned.

We also did a cycle ride to Nijar, a town listed as an especially pretty town on a site my brother pointed me at. The old town was pretty, nestled in the hills and the town is famous for its ceramics and rugs so lots of tourist shops. The restaurants were hard to find (even with Google) and we ended up with Spanish chicken nuggets, which was disappointing as we only eat out once a week and I try to avoid meat (hard in Spain), but the big thing that ruined the day was the cycle ride. Normally Spanish roads are quiet, even the motorways, but not in this part of Spain. Even smaller roads had lorries thundering past in a constant stream (picking up those tomatoes) and add into that the rain which fell for the full 4 hours of the ride in light showers for the first 10 minutes then onto total downpour for the last 2 hours with thunder rumbling all around. Not a ride I’ll repeat in a hurry.

* The good, the bad and the ugly had only some scenes filmed in this part of Spain and that may not have been on Cabo de Gata but in the wider Almeria area.