Almuñécar
Judi and I did an end-of-the-summer trip to the beach town of Almuñécar, taking the back way down to the coast, instead of the interstate, and were awed by scenes such as this.
Somewhere, in those mountains, winds the road by which we came.
Our friends Jorge and Angélica were again our guides.
Almuñécar was settled by the Phoenicians in the 4th century B.C., and later by the Romans. This site is where they made their famous garum paste, a fishy, briny, smelly flavoring that was popular around the Empire. With the proceeds they built aqueducts, theaters and temples.
In 755 A.D. Abd ar-Rahman arrived from Syria and went on to establish the first Muslim emirate of Córdoba. It was from this same spot in 1493 that Boabdil, the last Muslim emir, whom the Catholic Monarchs had driven out of Granada the previous year, fled Spain for Africa.
For coastal cities such as Almuñécar, fishing was an important part of the economy for many centuries.
Nowadays these beach towns attract tourists from all over Europe. It’s not hard to see why!
There’s room for a lot of creativity in sand sculptures on the beach!
