Our host here at Mijas didn’t need the place the next day so we agreed we’d check out a bit later at 2:00PM. Everyone else asleep, I sat on the porch outside our two-bedroom flat of this stately beach community on the Coaste del Sol and sipped a cup of espresso. This would be my one chance to walk along the Mediterranean on this trip, and on queue it was the first cloudy day we’d had since we’d arrived. I didn’t really want to swim or sunbathe anyway. Rather just consider the Mediterranean once again, and all that it means.
Before heading out I sat and finished “Duende” this morning. It had grown on me. I’d become invested in Jason Webster's tale and more intrigued by the art form. At the back of the book there his helpful list of his favorite Flamenco albums which, I dutifully downloaded, one after the other, so we could play aloud on our drive up to Granada. Vincente Amigo, Carmin Linares, Juan Alfonso, La Nina de los Pienes, now I had something beyond Paco de Lucia to listen to.
The beach was densely developed. Our compound, I later learned, was early and one of the only ones that had retained land between it and the beach. All the neighboring developments came straight to the sea. It felt tight. I dipped my bread in my espresso as I walked along the boardwalk. Down on the sand I considered for the first time what it might mean to use my Seek app at the ocean. Plants in the main, of course: Saltwort, Devil’s Thorn and Canary Islands Ivy, but there were Pacific Purple Sea Urchin’s that were a long way from the Pacific and someone had caught a pair of sea breams that were lying on the dock, though my app couldn’t identify them definitively beyond the genus.
Later we sped along the water and could consider just how much development there was here on this southern coast. I got tired and turned the driving over the Mrs. and when I awoke we’d left the shore far behind and rose up into the Sierra Nevada’s on the outskirts of Granada. We parked at a recommended public lot and I got my first Uber of this trip over into the Albacin, there directly below the Alhambra. We arrived at siesta-time and nobody seemed to want to serve us food, only drinks but I was able to get some simple fare and we considered how to kill our late afternoon there beneath the towers. Later we walked down towards the Cathedral and got our dinner at a restaurant named after the architect who built the place: Siloe. A nice enough spot though the woman at the next table kept listening to loud Tik Tok like clips that were dreadful to endure.
Saturday, 8/21/21
