From Mons Calpe to Calpe

By Ash Maer

There are pros and cons to a road trip across Spain.

The pros are exploring multiple old towns, sampling the food of different cities and the fun of checking into several hotels.

On the other hand, you’re constantly packing and unpacking suitcases, looking for parking and driving long distances.

Our plan was simple. We wanted to drive to a town called Calpe, which looked suspiciously like Gibraltar – whilst stopping in several places that neither my wife and I had visited before. This was with the exception of Granada on our first night, where we have been countless times, in order to visit friends.

Almuñécar
The initial reason for visiting this town, which is an hour south of Granada, came after reading Laurie Lee’s “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning” – as there is a monument to the English writer and former resident of the town here.

We stayed in the hugely underrated Hotel Casablanca, which overlooked the Penon del Santo – a large rock with a cross perched at the top that you can climb up to. We later found out that the cross commemorates the defeat of the Arabs and the surrender of Almuñécar in 1489.

We recommend the Tuk Tuk tour of the town by Francisco, which took us to mango groves, Roman aqueducts, narrow old town streets and a lookout point above the city.

Like Granada, free tapas appear thick and fast with beers here. We fell in love with this town.

Mojácar
This was our least favourite destination of the trip. Perhaps once you’ve seen one hilltop white village you’ve seen them all?

It was pretty, but not our cup of tea – the beaches were stony and the restaurants were pricey.

Cartagena
Home to the Spanish Navy and many a Roman ruin, we both agreed this was our favourite stop. The city wasn’t on our radar before, but it’s beautiful.

Although there are clearly tourists, it feels like a city that has not yet been overrun by them and the bars and cafes appeared to be filled with locals who knew each other.

Our highlights were our evening walks through the old town with our 15-month-old daughter, wandering around the Castillo de la Concepción, which boasted incredible views of the city, and the Roman amphitheatre, which was only discovered by accident in 1988.

I also tried my first Café Asiático here – an alcoholic coffee with condensed milk, Licor 43 (a Spanish liquor made in Cartagena) and cinnamon – which was nice enough for me to want to try another one.

An unexpected highlight was a dinosaur-themed “Parque Sauces” which was a lot of fun for our daughter (and me). We would return here again – but it is a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Gibraltar, so perhaps not too often.

Benidorm
After falling victim to a scam apartment on booking.com for a two-night stay in Altea, we had an emergency night in none other than Benidorm. And as we drove into the city on a Friday lunchtime, we were somewhat surprised to see a Gibraltar-plated car behind us!

“It’s not as bad as I was expecting,” said my wife, after a tour of the old town’s Tapas Alley

In my humble opinion, the variety of pinchos here are almost as good as those in the North of Spain. However, the city was absolutely heaving with people, so we were happy to leave the next morning.

Calpe
At first glance, this looks deceivingly like Gibraltar – albeit a lot smaller.

This eye-catching seaside town boasts a stunning old quarter complete with steps painted in the colours of the Spanish flag - similar to Gibraltar’s Referendum Steps (who knows which town got the idea first?), a salt-lake full of flamingos and a limestone rock that you can walk to the top of. We loved it here.

Elche
Everywhere you look you see palm trees – over 200,000 of them. Planted in Roman times, the Historic Palm Grove surrounds the city centre and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.

If any runners are reading this, it is a pleasure to run around the city centre.

Lorca
I’m not going to lie, we only stayed in Lorca as the Parador was just 82 euros for the night.

The stunning hotel is built into part of the Lorca Castle and offered hypnotic views of the town below, which we almost got to enjoy with a cold beer before our daughter decided we would enjoy our time more chasing her around the restaurant as she shouted at other hotel guests.

As for the town itself, which we wandered around for several hours, I believe my wife’s second most famous quote of the holiday was apt.

“This is the roughest place we’ve stayed in so far.”

Guadix
Our last stop involved a visit the Barrio de Cuevas, which the town is famous for. This is a 10-minute walk from the city centre and is home to around 2,000 cave homes, inhabited by 3,000 people – making it the largest cave complex in Europe.

There are bars, churches, restaurants – all carved out of the rock. An absolute must-visit and the main stop on the tourist train that leaves from outside the Cathedral – costing a mere six euros each for the hour-long tour.

We loved Guadix – a smaller, less touristy version of Granada.

We thoroughly enjoyed our road trip – but I think we’ll stay in one location for our next holiday.