27Apr1997 UK: Light fantastic - Travel - Spain.

West of Gibraltar lies a Spain of magnificent dunes, windswept marshes, languorous villages and fabulous seafood. ROBERT ELMS sampled the delights of the Costa de la Luz - the coast of light

While the still, warm waters and inviting bays of the Mediterranean costas have been Spain's mother lode, the Atlantic coasts have remained remarkably untouched. And for the true lover of this land there is no seaside stretch as magnetically attractive, no part of this beguiling nation that pulls you back with the same elemental power, as the bedraggled corner of western Andalusia. They call it the Costa de la Luz, the coast of light, a blazing, lazy, ardently Spanish place, perfect for slowly trawling to absorb its insidious pleasures.
There are reasons why the swathe stretching from the Portuguese border almost to the contested rock of Gibraltar has remained so intact. And they are perfectly good reasons for not going there. The ocean is colder and choppier than the sedate sea round the corner. There is an almost perpetual wind; a battering, sand-blasting breeze, which offers respite from the intense heat but also makes the whole place wild, windswept and care-worn. In any conventional terms this is not a pretty area, poor and shabby, lost and long left to its own devices. A vast delta for rivers slowly seeking the sea, it is marshy, flat, veined with waterways that made travel and tourism difficult, but made it ideal for soldiers and sailors to play their games. Much of it was declared a " zona militar ", further deterring developers.
As a result there are few concessions to foreign visitors and little of the slick cosmopolitan patina that inevitably coats resorts. If you want posh hotels and groovy night life and fast food (or fast anything, come to that), and manicured beaches with sun-beds and umbrellas, if you want chic and showy, easy and organised, pampered and familiar - and why shouldn't you? - this is not for you. But if you want some of the most magnificent natural dunes in Europe for mile after drowsy mile, if you want to swim in a sea where you can't see the nearest soul, if you want to eat perfect seafood dragged from the ocean before your eyes, if you want access to some of the most flamboyant cities in Spain, while staying in languorous villages drenched in a vivid way of life little changed, if you want to immerse yourself in a unique culture that will not give in, then this could be the best place you'll ever go.
The most potent parts of the Costa de la Luz are in the centre, in the orbit of the ancient and charismatic port of Cadiz, and the core of any trip would be spent between them. But a huge splurge of motorway building in the extravagant 1980s means that this once isolated land has been carved open and you can now travel most of it rapidly by car. Because this is still a laconic, largely rural area few do. So you can exploit open roads to see it all.
AYAMONTE TO EL ROCIO
It is perhaps best to start at the end, although Ayamonte - as far south and west as you can travel and stay in Spain - is definitely not the best this coast has to offer. The edge of town is one of the many muddy, meandering rivers you gaze across in these parts, only here the other bank is another country. A few half-hearted "Cambio" stalls hoping to make a buck out of the border are a sign that this is a frontier town, but it's so dustily dreary that it feels more like the end of the world than just the limit of the nation.
This faraway feel has its appeal for a while as you marvel at the flat, bleaching light that gives this region its name, down a glass of the thankfully cold (you can taste it less that way) local red wine, and watch the residents of a shamefully poor shanty town herd their goats and bark at their dogs. There's beauty of a kind here, but it's bad beauty, relying on a poverty far too wretched to be romantic. The latest attempt to leaven this has been the construction of a golf course and a heartlessly opulent hotel stuffed with Germans on a sandy spur just outside town. It feels crude and soulless, like nowhere else on this coast, so you move on. Ayamonte does have a wonderful car dump, a true automotive necropolis. There are lots of rubbish dumps along this coast and you can become a true connoisseur.
Nearby Isla Cristina, another isthmus on another estuary, is a better place. A humble little andaluz port going about its business, which it clearly doesn't have much of, with a rusting, dilapidated charm. This is a fine venue to watch mollusc and crustacean hunters comb the mud flats and then devour their catch, to buy salt straight from the salt pans, to lie down and marvel at the brilliant Blue Flag beach. All of these will become habits.
Going to Huelva, the industrial city that is the provincial capital, is definitely something you don't want to do too often. Remorselessly ugly and brooding about the fact that sumptuous Seville is now less than an hour away on the shiny new motorway, it really is a runt. You do have to speed through on your journey though, as the coast road runs out at the great white sands and graceless modern development of Matalascanas. The Coto Donana, the largest natural park in Europe and an outstanding wonder, is a vast, impenetrable barrier before you.
The Coto, or estate, as the locals call it, is only accessible in grandiosely entitled "safaris", in rows of Jeeps stuffed with overexcited twitchers. This endless miasma is home to more than 250 species of bird and far fewer unspectacular little four-legged things occasionally glimpsed in the watery distance. The four-hour trip is fine if you're a fanatic or you've got endless time. Otherwise it's best to see the man-made (with a little divine help) wonder of El Rocio.
This once tiny village is the site of a spectacular annual pilgrimage due to a propitious little statue that bleeds or weeps - or some such miracle. Then gypsies and grandees from all over the region flock in their painted carts for a few days' pious partying. To accommodate this they have constructed an enormous wedding-cake church and a picture-perfect film-set Andalusian village. The rest of the year it sits idle, eerie, mad. You can wander its dusty streets, drink a cold beer in the empty bar and gaze out into the endless wastes of the coto. I don't know whether the statue really has magical powers, but El Rocio certainly does.
Driving through the wobbling haze towards the glistening city, you begin to realise that you're in the deep south. Just as the Mississippi delta, a poor, burnt, slow rural land of indefinable allure, has given America an extraordinary cultural wealth, so the draining flats of the Guadalquivir, the last great river in Europe, is similarly fecund. These marshes are the bayou. Flamenco, whose plangent tones seep into you wherever you travel, is the Iberian blues. Gitanos, the impoverished, dark-skinned gypsies whose music this is, are both reviled and revered as the soul of this soil. And Seville, the high-stepping inland port of fancy architecture, flashing beauties and riotous fiestas, is an impossibly elegant old-world New Orleans.
SANLUCAR DE BARRAMEDA TO SEVILLE
You will visit Seville at some point on a trip to the Costa de la Luz and seek out its brio, sophistication and elan, but the point on the coast closest to Seville is just as magnificent. There's nothing to do in San lucar de Barrameda and little to see; it's dishevelled and dilapidated, indolent and out of date, noisy, querulous, unglamorous, untidy and unwilling to make any concessions to your foreignness. And these are just a few of its good points. The fact that it is also the sole producer of the most distinctive wine in Spain, the parched, salty manzanilla, whose aroma infiltrates every courtyard, and purveyor of the very best seafood you will ever eat, certainly helps. But it's more even than that.
Sanlucar, divided between the brilliant bodegas and crumbling aristocratic mansions of the high town, and the tumultuous squares and alleys winding to the sea, is one of those places with an intangible grandeur. Down at Bajo de Guia, its splendidly bedraggled estuary beach, there is a line of bars and restaurants, some derelict, some upmarket, where you can sit and sip a manzanilla, see the catch brought in and haggled over, watch local children start fires, gaze back at the coto over the waves, maybe spy some gitanos riding their horses along the littered sands. Then, as the red ball sun slips down and the blinding light fades to white and finally black, you can muse on the authentic wonder of it all, while munching a plate of grilled langoustines. The next day you might have swordfish.
All of this is an acquired taste. I've known people go to Sanlucar and not get it at all, but if you really like Spain, this is perhaps the most resolutely Spanish place left by the sea. You can stay at the artfully unmodernised Posada del Palacio in the high town and eat at the famed Casa Bigote on Bajo de Guia. You can also use this as your base to explore the many superbly shabby splendours nearby.
CHIPIONA TO EL PUERTO
Chipiona has a more salubrious beach than Sanlucar, a ruined castle and the feeling that somebody forgot to set the alarm clock that day. Playa de la Ballena, like so many along this coast, is little more than a natural sand dune up a dirt path, with a desultory camp site, but it is beautiful. Beach life here is decidedly do-it-yourself and you must do as Spanish families do; bring along something to lie under, lie on, eat and drink. Large, rumbustious working-class clans from Seville, Jerez and Cadiz will be your most agreeable companions on this trip. Oh, and a few cropped GIs and their glitzy brides. An important US Marine base at Rota produces the incongruous sight of these all American couples cavorting with the locals. It also means that Rota, which has a fine bay and marina, is a little more polished than elsewhere, a little more bland. You can actually buy hamburgers and hear pop music.
Which you certainly can't do in El Puerto. Its full title is El Puerto de Santa Maria, but everybody just calls it The Port. Before modern containerised methods, this was the place where sherry was shipped from nearby Jerez, and the docks still function, just. These days, though, it is largely a place to play. It's not exactly a resort - there are almost no hotels in town (the big exception is the very upmarket Monasterio San Miguel, once graced by the king himself) - but there are abundant pine forests, three good beaches, lots of holiday homes, and a positive plethora of bars and restaurants.
Cheery, light, almost saucy in the English seaside style, El Puerto boasts a palm-lined prom, a couple of carousels, a little toy-town train, a not-quite-glamorous casino and a nationally famous eating institution. El Romerijo sells fried fish on one side of the street and a dazzling array of boiled seafood on the other, and holidaying families queue up at midnight to sit outside around red plastic buckets and bask in the rudeness of it all. The locals head round the corner to the more discreet family-run Bar del Puerto and eat even better. El Puerto is great fun.
CADIZ TO TARIFA
Fun is not the first word you would use to describe Cadiz. Ancient, intriguing, mesmeric, arcane, all come to mind as you prowl its claustrophobic sailors' alleys and crumbling, once grand squares. It's also neglected, shadowy, slightly unsettling, a true port, suffering from 40% unemployment and a surfeit of dark sideways glances. Its truly breathtaking cathedral has recently been cleaned up, its dome gleaming Byzantine by the sea, but the warren of tiny streets directly around it certainly hasn't. Cadiz is a city deep in the old style, an almost medieval notion of urban life, and warrants many an hour losing yourself in its stories.
It is almost inevitable that you will get lost leaving Cadiz. Its extraordinary geography is such that it's hard to escape, but when finally you do, you find yourself travelling through one of the most moving terrains in Spain. Way below sea level, and invaded by the ocean on all sides, this sun-baked, saline land is useless for any agriculture. Once there was money in salt, but now it is a near desert, still carved up by rough canals, and crusted with a frothing layer of minerals. Derelict houses appear occasionally, and now and then a rough, but surviving shack, sign that someone is struggling to scrape, literally, a living from the desolation. Motorways now lacerate this landscape, but if you get a chance to leave your car and wander in this bleached and mournful other-world, you must.
There's no need to go to Chiclana. It's a happy enough place with a nice river and a propensity for erecting monuments to its not quite famous sons. But you don't have to go to Chiclana, you have to go to its beaches. From here on in, all the way from the spectacular sands of Playa de la Barrosa, to the windsurfers' paradise of Tarifa, you exhaust superlatives trying to describe how brilliant the beaches are. Essentially this stretch of the Costa de la Luz is one unbroken sandy bay; stop anywhere by the sea and you will find fine, clean, bright yellow sands decorated with curls of that agitated sea, and little else.
This stretch lacks coastal towns of the character of Sanlucar or El Puerto, but boasts the ultimate beaches. So the best way to explore it is to base yourself 11km inland in the stunning little hill fort of Vejer de la Frontera. Like so many whitewashed towns winding up an outcrop of rock in this part of the world, it was once the frontier in the ever-shifting war against the Moors. But Vejer still sports that Muslim heritage like few other places in Spain. Until a decade ago, older local women wore vast black cloaks, covering their heads like a yashmak, and to this day they rarely enter bars or appear at night. The early morning cries from the market sound remarkably like the muezzin calling the faithful to shop, and its steeply tortuous streets possess a stern, austere beauty reminiscent of north Africa, just across the way.
Vejer, declared a national monument, with its convent now a hotel, and a trickle of bemused tourists, has softened of late. Of a Friday evening the brazen local girls wear short skirts and flirt with boys on terrace bars surrounding their old Saracen castle. During the day no such excitement takes place. This is the high-altitude training ground for the national sport of hanging around. And taking time out only for the siesta, strictly male teams of dedicated synchronised loiterers line the main square, practising their leaning, loafing, slouching and staring out at the wondrous views of the surprisingly lush countryside below. Climb up to the ramparts, look the other way, and you can see the sea.
The point you're gazing at is arguably the most famous on the entire Spanish coast, and definitely one of the most beautiful. The Cabo de Trafalgar, site of that sea battle, is now a natural park, with a few gulls, a lighthouse and little else. It's possible, even in high season, to battle brimming waves here, to lie on sands as close to golden as you'll find anywhere in Europe, and do it in absolute solitude. Trafalgar is a place of some considerable stature.
If you do want company, you can find a few hippies up the road, in a bar overlooking the beach at Los Canos de Meca. They're on their way to Tangier, but they chill here for a month or six, adding a dishevelled exotica to the scene. Barbate is exotic in a different way. If you've ever wondered where Spaniards go on holiday, wonder no more. This roaring little town is the equivalent of, say, Clacton or Whitby, a no-nonsense, no-shame, buckets-of-fun seaside place where families promenade and play football, grannies paddle, teenagers snog and babies scream. But in a thoroughly Spanish way. Which means noisily, sociably, lazily and late.
Barbate, which also has a row of excellent and astonishingly reasonable seafood restaurants, is the last unreservedly enjoyable town on the coast. Zahara, which follows it, is pretty good, too, with a fine beach, but trying a touch too hard to cater to the few northern European backpackers who make it this far west. Their true home is at Tarifa, the end of this particular road. But before that there's another couple of wondrous beaches.
Where the road runs out, by the lighthouse at Punta Camarinal, is an extraordinarily idyllic little bay, sheltered from the wind, with green hills rising steeply from the smooth yellow sands. This is the site of a giddyingly upmarket housing development, mansions by the ocean, and a perfect place to lie and plot how you are going to make enough money to buy one of these Southforks on sea. Then, further round the bay, and a hefty excursion off the main road, at Punta Palomas, is another very different, very lovely beach. This is the site of the Roman ruins of Bolonia, and of a weekend pilgrimage by scores of locals. This is your last chance to see these exuberant people at play, to revel in such unsullied Spanishness.
For Tarifa, long an impoverished village of little repute, has traded in its one resource and pretty much sold its soul in the bargain. You've undoubtedly grown to know the wind on this journey, but nowhere does it blow with such righteous ferocity as this bleak point at the very foot of Spain. So scores of those lofty modern windmills, the ones Don Quixote never fought, have been erected all along the clifftops, scarring the sky-line. But the true harvest is down at sea level where the wind and subsequent waves have been flogged to blond boys with big boards who wish to ride the sea and sit in cut-off jeans listening to rap music and eating veggie burgers. In almost any other context, at the end of any other journey, Tarifa would be okay. It's better, less developed, less marred than almost anywhere on the sunny coast round the corner. But such staunchly memorable places have gone before that it is best to remember those. To picture perhaps the blanching haze hovering over Sanlucar, or El Puerto, Cadiz or Trafalgar, Vejer or Barbate as you sit down to do nothing whatsoever bar wonder at the wayward majesty of it all.
* Robert Elms flew to Seville as a guest of Iberia (0171-830 0011) and to Gibralter courtesy of GB Airways (0345 222111)
TRAVEL BRIEF - SPAIN
Getting there: Iberia (0171-830 0011) has scheduled flights to Jerez for £135 next month and into Seville from £159. British Airways (0345-222111) also flies on both routes. Or fly scheduled to Gibraltar with GB Airways (0345-222111) from £209, or check with your travel agent about charter services.
Tour operators include:
Mundi Color (0171-828 6021) has one-week fly-drives from £470pp and will tailor-make holidays to the region, as will Unicorn Holidays (01582-834400).
Travelscene (0181-427 4445) also does fly-drive packages.
Magic of Spain (0181-748 4220) has several hotel-based packages along the coast including a week in Chipiona in a three-star from £625 B&B. Travellers' Way (01527-836791), which specialises in unspoilt Spain, has a range of self-catering villas and apartments; for example, a single-storey Spanish town house in Conil for £260pp in May, excluding flights.
Other operators specialising in rural properties or upmarket self-catering include CV Travel (0171-581 0851), Hidden Spain (0171-813 1159), Individual Travellers (01798-869485), International Chapters (0171-722 9560), Spain at Heart (01373-836070) and Vintage Spain (01954-261431).
Where to stay: Posada de Palacio (00 3456-36 4840), Sanlucar, has rooms from 6,000ptas (about £25) to 8,000; Monasterio San Miguel (56-54 0440), El Puerto de Santa Maria, has 150 rooms, costing from 16,300ptas to 22,000.
Hotel Convento San Francisco (56-45 1001), Vejer, has rooms from 8,000ptas.
Driving in Spain:
Motorists with old-style green licences should consider exchanging them for EU versions. Drivers must carry a set of replacement bulbs and the AA recommends that those who wear spectacles carry a spare pair (which is the law for locals). Car thefts and break-ins are particularly common. Use secure car parks overnight. You can be fined up to £80 on the spot for minor traffic infringements and up to £266 for serious offences