White Hill towns and Tarifa
Trip Start
May 12, 2009
1
8
52
Trip End
May 12, 2009
Tarifa,
Andalusia,
Spain and Canary Islands
Saturday, June 27, 2009
It is what Rick Steves calls a white hill town. Arcos is all whitewashed, and it is a town perched on a hill, so I guess it all works.
We wandered around the town for a couple of hours. It consists of impossibly narrow streets, which are all very steep. Occasionally a street will turn into a flight of stairs, just like that.
We bought muffins from an actual cloistered nun. Well we thought that we did, as we never did see her through the wierd lazy Susan contraption that was used to exchange money for sweets. 1.5 euros for a dozen tasty muffins. Nick slyly commented that the nun may have been cooped up long enough to have lost track of inflation. How was she supposed to know the going rate for muffins anyway? he said. You know being cloistered and all.
We snooped around a little church that displayed several saintly skeletons from the 3rd century, and lots of soulful Madonnas.
This part of the world has some interesting mixtures of cultures. These hill towns were built to guard against the Moors, and so became obsolete around 1492. An aside about the cultural mishmash: Toledo has an Arabic looking building that looks to be a mosque in every way. However, it is called the Santa Maria Synagogue. Huh? It turns out that it was built as a Jewish house of worship, by a Moorish Mosque builder. Then it was taken over by Catholics, who added the Santa Maria part.
From there we headed toward Tarifa. We stopped at a few more of these Hill Towns. The kids got tired of the concept and decided to stay in the camper playing video games.
Steve the GPS unit faithfully led us to this campground. It is right on the beach. The Rock of Gibraltar looms in the middle distance. Africa is just accross the straight, on the other side of the stream of container ships.
We had a great walk down the beach in the evening. The tide was out, and the sand stretched on and on, covering quarter sections like a Saskatchewan wheat field.
Dozens of wind surfers and para-sailers practiced their skills. The air was a mass of colourful sails and kite contraptions.
The kids ran up and down the beach, running away from the waves as the tide came in.
The evening was pleasantly warm, but not hot.
Tomorrow we will try to get to Morocco. We'll leave in the morning and come back to our camper by evening.
