Marbella and the Costa del Sol

I looked forward to seeing the famous sunny Costa del Sol even though it didn’t have any of the historic buildings of Lisbon, Seville, or any of the other cities we visited in Spain and Portugal.

No historic buildings? Well, there are some at Málaga, but in general this was a dangerous place to live.

One theme of my book The King’s Galley is about why that is so. In the early 1500’s the Mediterranean shore wasn’t a safe place unless you were in a substantial fortified port like Cádiz or Cartagena. The galleys of Moslem corsairs ranged the western Mediterranean robbing, pillaging, and enslaving people wholesale. Some corsairs, like Barbarossa, had large fleets, while there were many small operators as well. Many, probably most, of the Moslems evicted by Spain after the Reconquista ended up in Northern Africa. They didn’t harbor warm and fuzzy feelings about the Christians who had kicked them out. North Africa is only a day or two sail from the Costa del Sol, making the latter easy pickings. Hence this coastline was essentially uninhabitable.

Times are different now. Condos and hotels line the coast for miles as Europeans flock to the area in season to enjoy the sun. We were there in mid-late October and there were still a generous number of tourists even though there was only a bit of sun.

European temperatures in early October had been unseasonably high in the hundreds. Fortunately, they fell just before we arrived in Porto, but with the lower temperatures came rain. Lots of rain. And wind. Most our sightseeing was indoors so the rain didn’t impact us too much, although our poor driver had to penetrate a deluge on the drive from Lisbon to Seville. While in Marbella our hotel room gave us a front seat to a few storms that moved along the coast.

We had one full day and two nights in Marbella to…do nothing. It was a day to decompress and give our bus driver a day off. We needed it. For a week most days we were on the bus by seven or seven thirty and busy for much of the day. The Gran Melia don Pepe Hotel in Marbella was the perfect place to relax. Every room fronted the ocean! The food, like for all the trip, was excellent. Our dinner the first night was room service on our balcony looking out to the sea. Dinner the second night was in the hotel restaurant. See the picture of my delicious “apple” dessert. I took advantage of a sun break to take a relaxing stroll down the boardwalk to “old’ Marbella.