The pig in a small patch of paradise.

The pig is one on the right.

We have really good memories of Camping Pinar from our stay here in March 2015. It's a pretty site on a quiet part of Costa del Luz between Conil de la Frontera and Barbate, a couple of kilometres from Capo de Trafalgar.

Whereas Portugal has miles of empty, undeveloped coastline, outside of Cantabria and Gallicia in the north, much of Spain's seaside is highly populated and somewhat overdeveloped. The Costa del Luz is quieter than many and most developments are low key. The tangle of lanes between the campsite and beach wend their way past single storey white villas hidden behind stuccoed walls draped with bougainvillea. It reminded me of Greece.

The beach itself is beautiful, a strip of yellow sand backed by beach bars beneath the palm trees. It looks sub-tropical, which is not such a surprise, the grey smudge of land on the horizon beyond Trafalgar lighthouse is the coast to the west of Tangier. It really is the end of Europe here.

The campsite itself has big natural pitches in a forest of umbrella pines. The woodland stretches beyond the perimeter fence. The land is used by the stables next door, occasionally white horses wander through; the effect is magical. The late afternoon sun slanted through the trees, horses glided through the dappled light, it was one of those moments when the mundane mysteriously conspires to become profoundly beautiful.

What pushes the place from simply enchanting towards the uncanny is the presence of a very congenial pig. The beast has worked out that the campers on the other side of the fence offer a ready supply of snacks. Miss Piggy trundles by snuffling along, if presented with a morsel of two through the mesh she rewards you by wagging her tail furiously like an over-excited pooch.

I remembered my porcine friend from last time. When she turned up by the van again today I was inexplicably delighted. Though the black Iberian sow did look identical to the beast from three years ago, I am not so sentimental to believe it was. I suspect my former piggy acquaintance has gone on to meet her destiny, rewarding her human admirers by becoming jamon Iberica. As Gill remarked, 'whatever happens she will be cured'.

Having said hello to the pig, admired the beautiful horses, watched big silver waves crash onto the beach, observed distant clouds drift across the coast of Africa, cycled back to the van though an alley of bougainvillea draped walls, photographed badly the yellow evening light glimmering through pines, then watched the full moon slowly ascend above them, I was prompted to remark, 'it's a small patch of paradise here.'

So we had a conversation about paradise, how we imagine it in our own image, a celestial city, the garden of Eden, or in my case, a forest of umbrella pines, home to an affiliative pig. Surely one of humanity's greatest feats of reverse logic is the notion that we are made in God's image, when the opposite is the case, we have created the gods in our own.

As night fell I reflected on my patch of paradise. Though its constituent elements were natural much of it in fact was a product of human invention - the umbrella pines had been planted, the pig and the horses bred for human use, fenced in for our convenience, the bougainvillea adapted to our taste, draped for our delight across constructed walls. Though we are a couple of kilometres from the beach, it's quiet enough to hear the sea, the ocean at least remains wild, even if it is full of our plastic. I wonder if humans do ever a truly experience the wild, that really it goes on behind our back. Simply perceiving the wild tames it, culture domesticates it, and language enmeshes it in meaning.