Nerja - from fishing village to prestige holiday resort

I walked to town and back this morning using a different route through the back streets interested in finding out more about the variety of shops tucked away from the main thoroughfare. There were just half a dozen regulars for the Eucharist in the church shop, no visitors. After a drink together, I walked back past the town's old covered market, now transformed into a small exhibition centre, and finally found it open at a time that was convenient for me to stop and take a look at the latest offering.

Jose Miguel Ortuño Rodriguez has published a book about how Nerja has changed in the past two centuries from a poor simple fishing village into an international holiday resort. This uses the work of an eminent local writer and historian Alejandro Bueno García (1851-1927), using quotations from his work about Nerja published in 1907, illustrated with photographs from the era.

The substance of the book is the subject of displays on a series of eight large wall mounted exhibition panels. One end of the building contains a collection of painting and furniture of the period, arranged into a writer's study, and there are display cases with artifacts from the period as well.

Now that I have come to the end of all the learning exercise  drills in the Duo Lingo language app, I thought I would make an effort to read all the texts as well as look at the many interesting pictures. This was not quite as daunting as I feared. With some gaps, I was able to follow most of the texts I read from start to finish. I still have a lot of work to do, topping up my memory and remembering verb declensions, but I begin to feel as if I have actually made some progress in learning Spanish since Kath introduced me to the app last Christmas.

Back at home, it was time to do a load of washing before lunch, but the machine wouldn't start, as there was no water supply. If it was scheduled and advertised, I hadn't noticed. Anyway, promptly at one it resumed, thoughtfully, for people starting to cook lunch. By mid afternoon the washing was done, dried and gather in, smelling all fresh and warm, baked in the bright dry heat of the backyard that gets the sun durectly above between two and six at this time of year. Then, time for a brisk walk to Mercadona to replenish some basic foods for the week. Domestic tasks complete, time to relax.

After supper I went out for a stroll around the urbanizacion, and came across a very excited white wagtail, flying around in circles, chirping madly for its mate, and returning to perch and chirp again, staying still long enough for me to get a few photos, despite fading light.

I found my way to Genesis Bar, the local hostelry in the urbanizacion, run by an English couple. It was very quiet. I had a beer and then made my way home.

Finally, I found out from a local English language website 'Nerja Today' news blog that Partido Popular's Jose Alberto Armijo Navas, el alcalde de Nerja, has been re-elected for another four years, albeit with a reduced share of the vote (42.62%), which means coalition negotiations, as elsewhere in Spain this week. He's been Mayor for the past 20 years, with a good development track record, so no doubt his team has a lot of experience of compromise as well as leadership at a local level.
  

Getting ready for summer

I enjoy not having to plan what I'm going to do every day here. There's always something that comes up, that I need to engage with. This morning I worked on preparing a letter, as if I was in Cardiff at the CBS office. I find that having a quiet workspace is quite constructive, even if I miss out on the social dimension, and the cups of tea.

After lunch, I walked along the Rio Chillar that runs behind our urbanizacion to Playa Torrecillo. For the first time, as the weather is now warming nicely, I abandoned socks with sandals, and very soon regretted having done so. I called in the Super Sol next to the main road bridge out of town, to buy a pair of socks, to reduce the damage being done to my left big toe joint, a long standing vulnerability. It made the continuing journey less of a misery, but a protective plaster will be necessary for a while. Something like this always happens when I get a new pair of sandals. Stupid really. Will I  ever learn?

On the return walk, I paused on the Balcon d'Europa watching a boat making its way up the shore, about a hundred metres out, dropping off occasional yellow marker buoys as it went. I couldn't quite make out what kind of craft it was. It was too large to be an off-shore fishing boat, and I couldn't see any nets flowing out of the stern. Then it dawned on me that the buoys were to establish a no-entry boundary for maritime craft other than leisure boats. Presumably the boat was the guardacostas equivalent of the familiar local Council lorry. It's still early in the holiday season.

   

Development despite recession

Today was quiet and uneventful, the skies still cloudy with occasional showers. I took a phone call in Spanish from a photocopy engineer who wanted to make a service visit. I understand far better than I can speak, as I don't get enough practice on a daily basis, and my recall is quite slow, but somehow I managed to convince him that neither Tuesday nor Wednesday this week would be convenient for him to visit. 

Before supper I walked down the steep hill to Burriana beach, and discovered there was another way to return, up another more winding steep hill with different views. This brought me out near the new Mercadona, which I recall being just a wasteland site with a ruined building when I was first here four years ago in May during the Romeral de San Isidro.

The photo below was taken from much the same location. I took another photo here, when I was here two years ago, interesting only for the graffiti it contained,. At that time the site was fully enclosed with a couple of tower cranes, and site excavation was well under way.   

Now that the fully open supermarket has claimed that empty space, it presents nicely landscaped gardens flourishing around the edges of the building. It seems quite low-rise, but is actually dug into the hillside with underground and open air parking below. A polished accomplishment, fitting fairly unobtrusively into the modern if traditionally styled housing of the urbanizacion close to it.

There's a small red advertising panel on the pavement, close to the corner of the building. It was there then too, advertising then as it does now the SuperSol on the opposite side of the road two hundred metres away. It's hard to imagine that the town would be under capacity for new supermarkets at times when it's not inundated with visitors, but I guess there must still be money to be made in providing such swish big convenience stores to big spending visitors.

Down the rio Chillar to the sea

Apart from a visit to the shops in the morning I stayed in during the hottest part of the day, and today was several degrees warmer than yesterday. Getting acclimatised takes me a good while. Finally I went out at six and walked for a couple of hours, this time down the Chillar river valley to the sea, along un-metalled road linking market gardens, horse stables and builders' yards, with the rest of the town's infrastructure, by way of a tarmacked access strip by the main town road bridge. There's even the imposing ruin of a tall building, which is most likely to have been a cane sugar refinery from the 19th century. 

 The riverside is a sort of pre-modern industrial zone, and perched on the thirty metre cliff over the east bank are buildings that represent modern times - apartments and holiday homes of the tourism industry era.

You pass under the tall viaduct of the town centre's by-pass road. Under its massive beams hundreds of swallows and swifts roost, and during the day swarm relentlessly in search of insects. Here the river runs slower and spreads out into streamlets, which I imagine are a good breeding ground for midges and flies. Modern scale hospitality caters for visiting birds en masse as well as humans. 

A quarter of a mile further on, is the century old town road bridge, flanked by a supermarket and other buildings that show you're close to the heart of the modern town. 

From the other side of the road bridge, right down to the sea are nicely constructed promenades on either river bank, providing pleasant places to stroll of an evening and links to recreational facilities. as well as to Playazo and Torrecillo beaches. 

 These improvements to the river banks stop flash floods inundating lower lying residential areas created for tourism and so the area benefits from tourism. Here the river run is channelled with concrete making it easier to clear of debris, also providing shallow areas where birds can safely drink and keep an eye out for predators.

By the time I reached the sea, the beaches were almost empty. Visitors would now be in their hotels or apartments getting cleaned up and ready to go out for the evening stroll and supper. The walk full circle back to church house through the town took me another 45 minutes. Two and a quarter hours out in full sun left me feeling scorched and much tireder than yesterday's walk upstream into the Parque Natural. Despite this, it gave me an interesting view of how Nerja has developed.