Evoking Memories On The Spanish Costa

I open my eyes to find the first light of day creeping into the room; Michaela is still soundly asleep by my side. I turn to look out at the new day. Pale pastel shades of sunrise decorate the horizon with colours too delicate for the camera but pleasing on the eye. The rippled surface of the sea rolls gently towards me, kissing the shore below with a gentle, rhythmic swoosh which is more like a layer of peace than a layer of sound.

Laying in bed listening to the waves. Surely one of life’s great pleasures.

We couldn’t control our broad smiles as we got off the train and saw what is now before us, this is just fitting the bill completely. The train station is right on the beach, sand and blue sea one side, whitewashed buildings climbing the hillside on the other. To our right the sand stretches off towards a beach bar, the other way the surf curves round to a rocky, pine-clad headland. In between the two, the small town nestles in the sunshine.

You see, you can’t do a trip around the Med without “doing the Med”, and we always intended to calm the pace of this trip with breaks at the coast. Mini holidays within the long journey, if you like. Such a thing is not without certain obstacles in Spain: what we really don’t want is a stop in an ersatz city rammed with high rise hotels and club music throbbing in a town created by tourism where the whole Costa del Brit thing is in full swing.

We’re not, though, kidding ourselves that we’ll find a secret undiscovered fishing village where the locals have never heard of tourism, such a place no longer exists and we aren’t fool enough to be chasing that particular shadow. Somewhere in between those extremes there’ll be something great, and the small town of Sant Pol de Mar ticks a lot of our boxes. There’s no high rise, there is still a rough-around-the-edges look and feel to the place – and just a handful of restaurants, catering for visitors from the city.

Just an hour north of Barcelona on the train but slightly too far south to be on the Costa Brava, Sant Pol is obviously more of a day trip destination than a magnet for package holidays and so retains at least some of the character we were seeking. But there is a special reason, one of nostalgia, which is the real trigger for our beaming smiles as we alight the train and take our first look around.

You see, we are reliving our respective childhoods – we both enjoyed holidays in Spain as children; me in the 1960s long before mass travel and package deals (my Dad must have been brave with our Mum and us three kids in tow – we used to come all the way by train), Michaela a bit later in the early 70s (sometimes by air, sometimes by road). Some of the first things we see here in Sant Pol just bring those happy memories flooding back: the pine trees on the headland, the blue of the Med, the curve of the bay…even the railway track running along the back of the beach. We are fortunate to have travelled as children, lucky to have these memories.

Life has changed immeasurably for everyone since 1963, but to come here and find that there are enough signs of familiarity to bring those memories racing back is such a lovely feeling. I suddenly find myself wishing my Dad was still alive, just so I could tell him. I’d tell him that the milk is still creamy, the beer is still cold and gassy, the fruit is still extra juicy, and the tomatoes still taste of sunshine. I am almost tempted to buy a football.

Our suspicions of Sant Pol’s status as a place for city dwellers’ days out is soon confirmed. Saturday evening, the platform for the train back to Barcelona is hilariously rammed with people – that’s going to be one seriously crowded train – but by Monday morning the beaches are quiet and there is plenty of personal space. They’ve nearly all gone back to their schools and offices and only a relative handful remain.

The trouble for us is, the good folk of the city seem to have taken the sunshine with them: with the beach pretty much the only thing in town, we are left sitting on the balcony watching choppy grey seas under equally grey skies for a big chunk of Monday. While we’re doing this, the media back home in the UK would have the population believe that the whole of southern Europe is under some kind of infernal purgatory in which everyone is fearing for their life. Here in little Sant Pol de Mar, it’s well short of 30 degrees and the locals are complaining of a slow start to the summer, not of imminent hellfire and damnation.

Tuesday morning teases with a little glimpse of the Spanish summers we remember from childhood – cloudless sky, crystal clear sea – but it proves to be nothing more than a tease and by mid morning the sky is once again a deep shade of grey. It’s funny, these reminders of those holidays years ago are great, but the biggest memory of all, those endless days of guaranteed hot sunshine, is conspicuous by its absence. We called in here for a brief Mediterranean beach break and copped two dull days which are definitely not hot by anyone’s judgement. Heatwave? What heatwave??

Still, it’s been a nice little interlude and a welcome pause to a full-on trip, and the memories it’s evoked are great ones. Nostalgia rocks. And we like Sant Pol de Mar. We like its ordinariness. We move away from the coast again now to a very different destination, one which has one characteristic which is unique in the world. More of that later.

I do think though that the experience of all this has been getting to Michaela a bit, on the evidence of the following conversation as we studied the menus in a Sant Pol restaurant:

“Hey”, she says, “look at the word they’ve used to describe this dish – ‘monkish’. Do you think that means it’s a traditional Catalan recipe with its origins in the monasteries?”

“No, dear. I think they’ve missed the “f” out of monkfish”.