under cover of fog and forget

[More old...]

A man and dog hug the shade by a whitewashed wall. The dog, a little unsteady in the heat, moves slowly through the weeds and parched wildflowers of the gravely field edge. When the bus from the city announces its arrival with swirling dust devils and a squash of tyres on tarmac, the man whistles, and walks forward with hands in pockets.
In the late May sun, Chipiona bus station bakes on one of those expanses of scrub dotted between unlovely half-built developments that are modern Andalusia’s response to the tumbledown Roman aqueduct, the stork-topped mudejar tower and the whitewashed brick wreckage of a thousand years’ weathered housing stock. Under the concrete canopy, teenagers thump down fold-out stairs first, eyeing each other in white denim, strappy tops, baggy shorts and baseball caps. As the last pensioner stiffly descends, man and dog look on, before he turns away, shaking his head, still whistling. The dog follows, pattering always in whatever shade can be found, headed somewhere lazier.

We walk past a T-junction, where local scooter girls wait, glancing at the incoming city talent before puttering towards the sea, ask directions to the beach, and are pointed to a bleached unfinished road between low-rise buildings. It’s not so easy. Three beaches fold around this town – the squint against the wind and you’d miss it Las Canteras, the short, scruffy-dog-loveable Cruz del Mar, mostly shored up behind ancient and murky fish pens, and the longer La Regla, backed with cheap hotels painted brightly, optimistically, against the Atlantic wind. The lighthouse, Spain’s tallest, gives a sense of the dangers of this coast of waves, wind and currents, though today the ocean seems too sunbeaten to work at the rocks. Down where the tired rollers trundle to a halt, a boy, no more than ten, tanned and sure-footed, with curling toes gripping the slimy surface, is fishing from the breakwater. He stares at the sea, accusingly, as if his were the only baited hook on the whole Atlantic coast. He’s caught nothing all day. Turn the corner, beyond the lighthouse, and the beach curves away, at the point where the town loses conviction, to the church of Nuestra Senora de la Regla. There, a black madonna statue blesses those who wrestle trawlers and lilos alike. More of the latter, these days.

Along the seafront, in front of the overspill of the cafes and bars, a girl in a communion dress walks on the very edge of the pavement, itching to get on the sand; others are plain itching, as the coarse sand peppers oiled skin in the gusty wind. Over the low seawall, a grandad in a sailor hat fusses round children who work diligently on sandcastle extensions, and a brother-on-brother penalty shootout goes into sudden death. Urgency has put its feet up and is sipping a spritzer in the shade.

It’s an easy kind of pleasure to sit, feet in sand, outside a bar seemingly airfixed together from plastic weatherboarding, watching the comings and goings, and listening to weekending Sevillanos dispute the merits of the city’s two football clubs in characteristically belligerent tones. This corner of Cádiz province lies at the end of a blessedly air-conditioned bus route from the swelter of summer in the Andaluz capital, and a jostle of down-for-the-day teenagers, squabbling families and shuffling retirees bears out the attraction of this ventilated coast for those in the airless interior. They come to stretch out, to sprawl on the beach in bikinis and heels, or muffintopped swimshorts, and to eat and drink. Whilst the former tuna-fishing villages skewered on the silver coastline to Tarifa have a surfy, international flavour, this end of the Costa de la Luz remains marinated in sherry. Sanlucar, just ten kilometres away, is the home of manzanilla, the lightest grade of the sherry bodegas’ product, with a salty tang and a fresh, slightly oily taste well suited to the spit-and-seaweed ambience. Chalked up on a hundred blackboards, food is simple, and tailored to the local obsession with the brisk transfer of catch to bubbling oil – fried anchovies, hake and cuttlefish, shrimp fritters, battered cod, battered prawns, battered batter.

IIn the backstreets of the old town, the church square hides a Cruz de Mayo, one of the lower-key Andalusian mergings of God and the bottle. The cross itself is elegantly dressed with vines, and flowers, in a dinghy washed up on a beach of petals. The action is at the temporary bar, where a flamenco-dressed matron spins with enthusiasm to piped sevillanas, her heavy steps watched by a small crowd, syncopated clapping echoing around the plaza. Nearby, lovers recline under the shade of a palm, in front of the wedding cake church, decked with bougainvillaea. It’s a moment of distilled Andalusia, a drop or two of oily beauty. But even this seems too earnest for Chipiona. It’s a bucket and spade kind of place, unfussy, unstuffy and, with only a narrowing of eyes, a babelfish in the ear, and a broken thermometer, it could be anywhere on the more windswept coasts of England, complete with the steamy tang of fried fish, the rattle of one-armed bandits and the spillage of plastic cup punters onto promenades.

six kinds of thankless

[more prefabbed travel guff no one wants. See how I can write in a style I really don't like]

Pick an Andalusian town, any Andalusian town. Given luck, you’ll find a crumbling Moorish castle, a crop of wonderful churches, some palaces, patios, the last trappings of mediaeval Christianity and more bars than can possibly be sustained by anything other than the inhabitants’ impressive commitment to the good things in life.

Luckier still and it will be Carmona casually ticking off the checklist and asking if you’d like fries. A romantically derelict Alcazar, a flush of fine churches, a shady main square, bars, restaurants and a handful of hotels are all here, but what makes Carmona special is the box-set succession from Neolithic remains, through Carthaginian, Roman, Moorish, and Renaissance styles, right through to the mouldering art nouveau of the Cerezo Theatre.

Arriving at siesta time, there’s little to do but wander the streets and wait for the town to open like a jetlagged flower; it’s the kind of sleeping beauty Andalusia does so well, away from the crowded coasts and cities – a music box tinkle to Seville’s brassy blare. Even by local standards (nearby Écija is another outcrop of perfection on the dusty plain), this small town is crammed with unregarded masterpieces alongside the picturesque decay of a thousand years of housing stock. As everywhere in the province, ancient churches are scarred with the blocked doorways and windows of social and ecclesiastical change – patches on patches, mortar on rubble. There’s quiet splendour in the delicate plasterwork on the library, the palatial houses in the centre of town, the domes and courtyards, and the shapes and textures of innumerable balconies and doors.

A fair walk outside the town walls through the colossal Puerta de Sevilla is the Necropolis, where, in the late 19th century, hundreds of burials of the more well-to-do citizens of Roman Carmo were uncovered. It’s a little spooky descending into a mausoleum in the silence of off-season solitude, starting at the scuttle of a lizard and checking nervously over your shoulder. While none of the tombs offer any Tutankhamun moments, this is an atmospheric place, and a surprising glimpse of just what a substantial town this was in the days when Baetica was one of the richest provinces in the Empire. Further Roman survivals are the amphitheatre across the road and, in the old town, the restored Puerta de Cordoba where the city walls spill on to the broad plain, now, as when first built, awash with grain.

Skipping forward a few hundred years, the Alcazar is as uncompromising a pile as you’ll find, though part-transformed into an elegant parador (with prices to match), looking out across the plain with well-heeled grace. This kind of reinterpretation is nothing new, as the town’s Mudéjar belltowers show – here, as elsewhere, the Reconquest subsumed and transformed, working on anything but a blank slate. San Pedro’s Giralda-Lite form and the convents of Santa Maria de Gracia and the Convento de las Descalzas (a beauty and the beast pairing) are highlights, but there are too many churches in the town for anything other than bewilderment at past social priorities. Also worth looking out for is the Iglesia del Salvador, its tower seemingly snapped off like a cone under the weight of the ice cream dome. It was never finished.

On the secular side, the old town’s main plaza is surrounded by elegant buildings, with the disintegrating Moorish Revival façade of Bar Goya the standout – and the food’s not bad either. Most of the bars serve up a blackboard of Andaluz favourites; so far from the ports, land wins out over sea, and ham, grilled pork and pulses are to the fore. This time of day it’s strictly for tourists. The locals are elsewhere: perhaps in Bodega Jose Mari (opposite the market square) where fragments of Roman columns support the doorway and a rough chalk scrawl proudly proclaims the first of the year’s mosto. Sadly, before I have time to sample more than a glass or two of what’s on offer, it’s time for the bus back to the city. Though, Seville being Seville, that’s not such a hardship.