Friday 19 February 2016

Thursday 18 February – Sanlúcar de Barrameda

Where’s Colin? Exactly where he was on the 17th.

A delayed post for yesterday, as I was too busy finishing Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil last night. I could also blame the book for yesterday’s lie-in, but I think that was more to do with waiting for the rain to pass, as a few showers were still passing through after some quite heavy pre-dawn rain.

With the skies brightening, we did eventually make tracks and this time we took ourselves up to the old town, passing, on our way, very close behind a council worker cutting up a substantial tree. I’m sure the UK Health & Safety brigade wouldn’t have allowed anyone without appropriate eyewear as close behind a man with a chainsaw as we (and many other pedestrians) were passing.

Once in the old town we could easily have unknowingly walked straight past what proved to be the most interesting (to us) feature. A small information sign outside explained the history of the place as being the old Orleans-Barbon Palace (summer residence of the Dukes of Montpensier), and said that the building is now used as the town hall and public library. I figured that if it’s a public building then we could walk into the walled garden for a closer look (it’s an impressive building for a town hall!) and in so doing we found another information sign which suggested that if we walked around the block we would find another entrance, giving access to its gardens. They were definitely worth a look – it’s just unfortunate that there was no good vantage point for a piccie of either the building or the gardens:

Back out on the streets, our heads (and the rest of our bodies, actually) were popped into the courtyard of the substantial castle, but we weren’t minded to spend €7 (or was it 8?) each to look around the rest of it, so back down to the new town we headed, getting distracted by a cake shop on the way, where the choices all looked so good that we failed to choose just one goodie apiece:

An afternoon stroll along the promenade, lying alongside the golden sandy beach which lines the estuary again put me very much in mind of Barmouth (“Almost identical” said Mick “Apart from the number of palm trees and the temperature”). As Mick had started his day with a run, I did an extra turn along the prom to bring my step count up, then the pull of my book was too great and, save for a brief interlude when I researched the night-stop options in Seville, the rest of the day was spent finding out what was going on with Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot.

 

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