It's one of those moments you daydream about at home on a cold, rainy afternoon in mid-January, or if you live in the Pennines quite possibly in mid-July. Parked on a remote Mediterranean beach, last night under a glittering starry sky clear as a planetarium, then waking before sunrise as the pale dawn light filters-in though the half closed blinds. You just have to get up to take a sunrise photo even though you know that somewhere in Google photo's archive you will have an another one taken from nearby spot more or less at the same time last year, but you still go click.
17th March 2023
10th March 2024
We first came here nine years ago. Taray Camper Park had just opened, before then people just parked on the beach. The area felt remote and half forgotten, the village of Punta del Calnegre looked pleasingly decrepit, a tad Greek looking we decided It still does.
The bay itself stretching away to the east towards Cabo Tiñoso is magnificent...
As are the mountains to the north.
You can take a walk along the shingle beach and there is just you and the sea and the sky. It's magical and soul restoring, but a little less so each year.
I wrote last year that much of what was barren wilderness when we first visited is now covered in plasticulture - square kilometres of salad vegetables and spinach. Even more has been shrink wrapped over the last year.
A few hundred metres up the road from the Taray Camper Park another site has opened since we were last here. Camping Playa Parazuelos is pitched at long-stay motorhomers here to over-winter. It is big enough to accommodate a couple of hundred I would guess and provides sanitary and laundry facilities. We drove up to it, looked at the serried rows of high end Cathargos and Concordes and decided it wasn't our thing.
A dozen or so vans were parked haphazardly on Taray Camper Parks rough gravel. We drew up there.
Not exactly a motley crew, but certainly a more diverse one than up the road with way more man buns on display than you might expect to encounter normally. I can't compete so far as man buns go, but I do have two faded Steely Dan tee shirts with me, relics of their 2007 'Heavy Rollers' tour, so I can claim some credibility as a grey haired hipster.
We had only just agreed that at least Taray Camper Park still exuded an engaging disheveled informality when the owner turned up to collect the €8 fee. He was keen to tell us about some planned developments. An adjacent plot had been levelled. "Next month", he enthused, "120 new pitches with electricity!" We struggled to contain our disappointment. So by the summer this once unfrequented scrap of coastline will have pitches for over 200 motorhomes.
Punta del Calnegre will remain a spectacularly beautiful place, but no longer quite so empty and soulful. I think we will probably opt to remember how it once was. I don't think we will return.
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