When you book a campground, you generally don't know what you will find. Some are better than others but all are a bit of a surprise. Today, we had a wonderful surprise of a last-minute change in plans. I had heard about a small fishing village with cute striped buildings. So, I decided to book a night for us near this village. It turned out to be the cutest place we've visited yet. The campsite is located between the ocean on one side and a river on the other side. We decided to visit the beach first, just to see what it looked like.
Beaches
Beaches are not all the same here we are finding. In the north of Spain, the beaches tended to be fairly small - maybe 500 meters to a kilometer long and maybe 20 - 50 meters wide (street to ocean). The first beaches we visited were really sticky sand. Brown sand and so sticky, it didn't easily wash off. It took water and a bit of scrubbing to get it off. Oddly, these beaches had no shells at all. No rocks in the sand - just brown sand. Then, we went around the north corner of Spain to the west coast of Spain and Portugal. These beaches had super coarse brown sand, made up of sand and small rocks. When it was just sand, it was bigger, coarser sand than "normal" (we are always comparing to South Carolina sand). There have been lots of beaches with huge rocks along the coastline, sometimes making the beach smaller. Now, we are farther south in Costa Nuevo and the sand is the softest sand I've ever walked on. Its a bit like how walking on cotton balls or powdered sugar must feel. There are finally shells on some of the beach. But, even the wet sand up close to the water is soft and very hard to walk on (but feels amazing on our feet). The beach here is the widest beach we've both ever seen. We are guessing that it was roughly 400 meters from the dunes and sand grass to the water. And it was longer than we could see in both directions. We wondered if this is what the Sahara feels like. It was gorgeous and nearly empty. We saw less than 10 people on this very long and wide beach. Amazing!
Fishing Village
So, if you know me a bit, you know I am not into fishing or fish in any form. I actively tend to avoid fishing places. But I'd seen a pic of 2 building in this village and wanted to see it. It is the cutest little town I have ever seen. The town was on the river on one side and the ocean and beach on the other. Many, maybe even most of the buildings are striped with vertical stripes. They are many different colors (one color per house) with white stripes. They are so cute, I must have taken 50 pics of striped houses. And the village was having a small festival today. We ate local foods - a marinated pork sandwich (not quite as good as Paul and Laurie's though) and a pita type thing with sausage and cheese in it. Both were super yummy. Marc had intended to get fish at the local fish place, but he got too full on sausage and bread and then didn't want the fish.
This village is so tiny that we didn't see any hotels. There were some apartment-style buildings that we suspect were vacation rentals. Idyllic and tiny. We are a kilometer outside the town and the only camping place I could find in the area. They've been smart in figuring out how to keep it from getting over-run with tourists. And, ironically, this place had more hand-made crafts for sale than most of the towns we've visited. We got a few items as well as some not so hand-made items. Cashmere scarfs for only $10. They weren't hand made but so cute and the price was great!
There was a guy playing guitar in the town. He was playing what we are guessing must be traditional Portuguese music. It was soothing to walk around the town listening to him. Such a lovely day.
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