Where the Spanish spend their hols

03/30/2002
The Times of London
Tony Kelly and his family infiltrate the hidden Costa de la Luz

HERE we are at the most famous fish and chip shop in Spain, and chips are not on the menu. Guidebooks define Spanish freidurias as fish and chip shops - but don't be fooled. In reality they are much more fish than chip.

Although I would like to pretend that my six-year-old son Adam is the kind of adventurous eater who knocks back gazpacho and garlic prawns for breakfast, he lives, in truth, on a diet of fish fingers with tomato sauce. After three days of Spanish omelettes, he had been promised fish and chips, and patatas fritas it had to be.
We were in Puerto de Santa Maria, a chic little resort and fishing port in the bay of Cadiz, known as El Puerto. At 9pm on a summer evening the place was buzzing and a funfair was coming to life.

We bought freshly made crisps from a fairground stall - Adam watched enthralled as the potatoes were sliced and tossed into hot oil - then took them to a bar where manzanilla (salt-dry sherry) came out of a barrel. Adam rode on the dodgems and the carousel, but now it was dinnertime and a crisis was in the offing.

Friends had said we must eat in one of the freidurias in El Puerto, where the fried-fish takeaway is said to have been invented long before it became a staple English dish. Romerijo, the best- known freiduria, has virtually taken over the town, with two huge shellfish emporiums and a restaurant on the promenade.

Families queued up at the counter to buy paper cones full of fish, taking them outside to picnic tables on the pavement supplied with plastic buckets for discarded bones.

Taking the easy option, we sat down on the terrace and ordered squid rings, pink hake and gallo (a flatfish similar to plaice) from the waiter. And would it be possible, I asked nervously, to bring us a plate of patatas fritas? No problem.

While Adam tucked into his chips, my wife Kate and I dipped calamari in mayonnaise, surrounded by Spanish families demolishing crayfish with their fingers and drinking sherry by the half-bottle.

We were spending our summer holiday on the Costa de la Luz, the Atlantic coastline of Andalusia. Unlike the crowded Costa del Sol to the east, this is wild, windy and deserted - except in July and August, when holidaymakers from Jerez and Seville descend on the coast, taking over the beaches with their parasols and surfboards, kites and buckets and spades.

The Costa de la Luz runs for more than 90 miles from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Portuguese border and is neatly divided by the Donana National Park at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. West of here, tour operators are building hotels in what is fast becoming an extension of the Algarve; the more attractive coastline is to the east around Cadiz, where you find family resorts such as Conil de la Frontera and Chipiona, its long beach overlooked by a ruined castle and the sanctuary of Nuestra Senora de la Regla.

The Spanish on holiday are gloriously unrestrained, with a lust for life evident whether they are flirting on the beach, drinking tinto de verano (red wine spritzer) or dancing at midnight to a band playing flamenco at a beachside bar.

After years of being embarrassed by the antics of the British abroad, it was liberating to see Spanish holidaymakers doing all the forbidden things; walking to the shops in their bikinis and riding around on their motorbikes with a baby tucked under one arm, not, just to make things clear, something that I would particularly recommend.

We were staying in a bungalow surrounded by cacti and palm trees, on a dusty lane which led from the local campsite to the beach. Each afternoon around teatime, as the early evening breeze began to take the heat out of the day, the beach would provide a focus for good- natured, old-fashioned fun.

Children would build sandcastles and clamber in rock pools; horsemen would ride along the sand; the teenage boys would smoke and do their best to look cool, and the pretty senoritas would lie on their towels wearing little more than a mobile phone, a pair of shades and a strategically placed tattoo.

The sand seemed to stretch forever, to the lighthouse at Cape Trafalgar in the distance, a lonely dune-backed spit where Nelson came to grief, from which the mountains of Morocco were visible across a hazy sea. Adam would have been happy to have spent all his time on the beach, but the grown-ups had other ideas. One day, after a rare shower of rain, we drove inland to the pueblos blancos (white towns), with their hilltop fortresses and narrow whitewashed lanes so redolent of the old, Moorish Andalusia.

At Arcos de la Frontera, once a frontier town between Muslim and Christian Spain, the church and castle are perilously perched on a limestone cliff, as if they might fall into the River Guadalete at any moment. Adam raced us to the top of the ramparts, then stood on a balcony gazing out over the valley where the fighting bulls grazed.

Later, in the old town of Medina-Sidonia, we came across a wedding party, and then sat in the town square eating yemas (Moorish- style cakes made from egg yolk, pine nuts and sugar) as the locals came out for their evening paseo or stroll.

"I thought it would be a boring day out, but it wasn't," announced Adam when we returned to our bungalow for a sunset splash in the pool.

Another day we took the steamer from El Puerto to Cadiz to explore Europe's oldest city, marooned out on its own little peninsula and hemmed in by the ocean on three sides. Columbus sailed from here, Sir Francis Drake singed the King of Spain's beard, but these days it is rough and ready, a peeling, slightly threatening city.

The highlight for us was the climb up the Torre Tavira watchtower, where a camera obscura had been set up in a darkened room, using mirrors and a light shaft to transmit moving images of the city on to a circular screen. Clothes flapped on the washing lines; boys played football in the street; a young couple sunbathed on their roof, oblivious to the fact that they were being watched. Even the waves rippling in the sea were visible in real time.

We saved the best day out for last. From Sanlucar de Barrameda, the sherry town at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, a steamboat crosses the river each morning to the Coto Donana National Park. This is the most important wildlife reserve in Spain and the last remaining habitat of the endangered Iberian lynx ("the weakest lynx," quipped Kate). The Spanish Government has recently pledged Pounds 5 million to rescue the last 500 lynx from becoming extinct. Fishermen were wading through the sandbanks looking for mussels and crabs, and fishing for prawns on the river from butterfly-shaped boats.

We gazed through our binoculars at herons, spoonbills and storks, and flamingoes preparing for the winter migration to Africa. Afterwards, we sat beside the beach at a fish restaurant, sipping ice-cold manzanilla and eating grilled corvina fish (similar to seabass) and urta a la rotena (perch casseroled with tomatoes, onions and sherry).

On the way back to our bungalow we stopped at our favourite beach to ride the Atlantic waves one last time. As the tide went out, Adam built a sandcastle and left it behind on the beach as a farewell present to Spain: "Goodbye Spain, and thank you for having us," he said.

He was in no doubt that this had been his favourite holiday ever - with or without the fish and chips.

Need to know

Getting there: Tony Kelly and family travelled with Spain at Heart (01373 814222, www.spainatheart.co.uk),

which offers the Chani

Cottages in Conil de la

Frontera from Pounds 795 for one week and Pounds 1,390 for a

fortnight in August. Thomson Holidays (0870-241 2526, www.thomson.co.uk) has

a week at the Rio Atlantico in Isla Canela from Pounds 429 per adult, Pounds 99 per child.

He flew with buzz (0870-240 7070, www.buzzaway.com), which has flights on Saturdays from Stansted to Jerez from Pounds 100 return.

Reading: Andalucia (Michelin, Pounds 8.99), Andalucia Handbook (Footprint, Pounds 9.99).