2025: Europe – San Roque, Spain

The sun, sea and sangria lifestyle had never appealed to us, so we hadn’t visited the Spanish mainland during more than 30 years of travels.

But first we had to get there via East Midlands Airport. I will warn you now: don’t go into the space allocated for smoking unless you are desperate. The smoking space wasn’t worth it, just another adjunct to the box-shaped scheme that is East Midlands Airport. I will reserve my opinions on smoking and the treatment of smokers for a future post.

When I say ‘we’ hadn’t visited Spain, I meant we. I had travelled to Valencia and Marbella, on both occasions for bike launches. Buell’s Firebolt and BMW’s eccentric-looking C1 scooter, in case you were interested. Both were short visits that never took us beyond the clutches of a manufacturer’s PR office.

As I have learned, you have to visit a place to understand it; allow the place time to get under your skin. Spain can’t be all like Torremelinos, with its ‘English breakfast served here’ signs, the owners mopping up all the sick and debris from the previous night‘s mayhem of Brit’s on holiday. It’s not.

We were headed to Sotogrande, San Roque in Spain, an hour and a bit along the south coast from Malaga airport. Naturally, you have to pass by Torremelinos en route. But thankfully we were in our friends’ Porsche Cayenne S E-Hybrid in the fast lane on the motorway passing by.

Our friend’s apartment was luxurious. It was a ground floor, end apartment with three en-suite bedrooms and a bathroom that led off the entrance hallway. This, in turn, connected with the large living, dining and kitchen space, surrounded by views of the garden. For what it’s worth, one of the penthouses on the third floor of the block opposite is owned by an ex-England footballer. That should tell you something. There are a number of blocks all, apparently, with the same configuration: three floors, eight units per block, with two penthouses sharing the top floor.

There were also other well-known names in the neighbourhood. These included Tony Blair – the laughing-stock of British politics – who brought new meaning to the words ‘shock and awe’. Shock in the sense that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction; and awe that we continued to inflict war on the Iranian people, regardless. And Vladimir Putin, the disgraced megalomaniac who had invaded Ukraine, among other things. His residence was confiscated by the Spanish authorities as part of Europe’s retribution. As you can imagine, Sotogrande is a wealthy district, even if it is home to the rich and infamous.

One of the mornings while I was there I decided to join Stuart, our friend, for his daily dose of exercise. The three hills I think he called this walk. We set off at a fair pace, Stuart always leading the way. At the top of the first of the three hills I was panting and took a few moments to recover. The morning heat was building. By the time we reached the top of the second hill I was panting like a dog just back from its daily run. As we set off down hill towards the third I called Stuart back and said I’d had enough, I was going back. I thought, being a gardener, had compensated for my addiction to smoking. It hadn’t.

Over the next few days, we lay by the pool, ate out at decent restaurants, ate in when Stuart barbecued, including salted and grilled padron peppers. One memorable lunch was at a harbour side restaurant, where the young Asian girl taught me a few words of Spanish. (She spoke perfect English as well.) I’d never learned Spanish at school, only French, so it was interesting to see how the ‘locals’ put their words together.

But the highlight of our trip was sailing a yacht to Gibraltar, getting a glimpse of the Moroccan coast as a bonus. When we turned back at Gibraltar, just as the waters of the Mediterranean started to get rougher where the channel narrowed, we were joined by a super-pod of dolphins.

We were surrounded, they swooped under the yacht, left to right and stern to bow, and cut through the choppy waters like knives through butter. But they were always graceful, even as they dived low before rising from the water like a team of ballerinas doing pirouettes. They followed for miles till their interest and our skipper’s fish stocks waned.

As we arrived at Malaga airport for our journey home, it was an experience in itself. The designer/architects had obviously put some thought into its design. Malaga was as an airport should be: a cathedral reaching for the skies. Boxy British airports take note.