TRAVEL FOR TWO: Beach and Beer in Peniscola
Roger Zubrinich and Judy Peters like to travel. A lot. Prior to the pandemic, the couple would escape the Australian winter and head to Europe for the summer, traipsing through countries via a hire car.
With overseas travel now something of a dream, Roger has decided to revisit some of their destinations in writing. The next instalment in the Travel for Two series sees Roger and Judy navigating traffic, sipping cold beers, and learning about the history of Peniscola.
Here’s a question. Driving into which of the following areas induces fist-pounding frustration: Barcelona, Spain’s second largest city with a population in the order of 1.6 million people; Valencia, Spain’s third largest city with a population in the order of 800,000 people, or Peniscola, a holiday resort located on the coast between those cities with a population according to official numbers of about 8000 people?
Peniscola, of course. If you drive into the town during the August high season, that is. Then, I estimate that around 100,000 holidaymakers, mainly Spanish with a few French, try to squeeze into about four kilometres of coast. Figures from 2018 represent the population density as 94 people to the square kilometre. My high season estimate is closer to 94 people to the square metre.
When we drove off the A7 motorway between Valencia and Barcelona to travel the few kilometres to Peniscola, we anticipated that within the hour we’d be in our hotel depositing our luggage, freshening up and casually wandering around the town checking it out.
Not so. Some distance out of the town we encountered a dense convoy of cars that had shuddered to a halt.
We literally inched forward in fits and starts, following the flashing brake lights of the car in front and the waving arms of two children fighting in the back. The aircon fan in our car began roaring as it pumped more air to combat the rising cabin temperature. The unmistakeable smell of an over-heating clutch permeated the cabin as I rode it to reduce gear changes. When we came to a curve in the road we saw the sun glinting off the windows of a sinuous line of cars stretching as far as we could see. Brake lights flashed like scales on a psychedelic snake.
We bravely endured the frustration and tenaciously followed the directions of our GPS, trusting that it would deliver us to our hotel. And it did. Sort of. We eventually arrived after a number of ill-conceived turns, one of which took us into a lane lined with restaurants and alive with people seeking and eating lunch. So close were some tables to the car I could have reached out and sampled the food.
About two hours or more after reaching the outskirts of Peniscola – population 8000 – we were finally in the hotel room fumbling with the remote for the air conditioner. Then after showers and a change of clothes, it was beer o’clock. A bar somewhere beckoned.
We arrived at the Avenue de la Mar and there, beyond the road, and the footpath, were palm trees, and beyond them a glistening beach and emerald green water. People were sprawled on the sand, others were swimming or paddling in the shallows. Children played at the water’s edge.
We also noticed a little bit of canopy-covered paradise to our right. An outdoor bar was set back from the road facing the beach. Five minutes later we were seated. A waiter, lean, crisp in white shirt and black trousers, apparently brusque (but not really) in the Spanish way, with a voice like tyres on gravel, took our order. Within a minute or so two very large frosted glasses of Mahou beer sat before us. A few more minutes and we were seeking replenishments. Around us the conversations bubbled and frothed like the beer in our glasses, and the tension oozed out of us in direct proportion to the alcohol entering our veins. Peniscola wasn’t looking so bad after all.
As we drank we watched the continuous cavalcade of swimmers and sunbathers crossing the road from the beach. Weary tanned children and fractious toddlers in bathers lugged plastic spades, buckets and large inflatable floating animals adorned with impossible colours. Loudly brash young males and scantily clad females mingled with the future – the middle-aged and elderly bulging and sagging with the consequences of too many years, too much tapas and too little exercise.
The air seemed almost tactile, so strong was the presence of sunblock, sweat and heat. And improbably, life seemed good. So good that we decided that only a swim could make it better.
One of the many charming attractions of Spanish beaches is that they are populated by the young, the old, the in-between, the large, the small, the buffed and the weedy. Indeed, every conceivable variation of the human physical condition is on display, and the beauty of it is that the Spanish holidaymakers appear largely unselfconscious. I did my best to mirror their insouciance.
We walked from the promenade, past the palms and elaborate sand sculptures lining the beach on to a boardwalk leading to the well-populated stretch of sand near the water.
We found a spot with a bit of clear space around it, dumped our towels, slathered ourselves with sunblock, sledged our way through the sand, and at the water’s edge, did the ritual 'ooh-isn’t-the-water-cold?' dance before splashing in up to our necks.
This is a beach to treat with reverence. Gentle waves tumble swimmers back and forth in a pleasant, calming motion. The water is clear, the temperature perfect. Children astride inflatable animals splash and shout with pleasure, women breast-stoke turtle-fashion to avoid wetting their hair, older males dive in and do a few bombastic freestyle strokes before they run out of puff and young males play-fight with shrieking girls in the attempt to get a half-legitimate feel.
But the most special thing of all is to mark time in the water and to look more or less southeast. There, sitting atop a rocky outcrop on the tombolo, is the fortified old town, and perched above that is the dominating, resolute and vaguely threatening presence of the medieval Peniscola castle. Built in about 1300 by the Knights Templar, the castle and the fortifications are evocative reminders of the town’s turbulent history which dates back some significant time before the castle was even a glimmer in the architect’s eye.
The area has hosted Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians and the ubiquitous Romans who gave the colony its name – ‘almost island’ – a synonym for tombolo. Peniscola existed under Muslim rule for about 500 years prior to the city being repossessed by James I of Aragon. Then in 1294 the Knights Templar pocketed the town and its surrounds as part of an exchange with James II, and promptly built the castle lest anyone tried to take the place back. But before too long James II did – by using the simple expedient of abolishing the Knights Templar. So much for the protection provided by the castle.
In 1417 Pope Benedict XIII – otherwise known as Pope Luna and excommunicated by the Catholic Church – took refuge in the castle, called in the renovators, and turned the castle into the (anti) papal palace.
Following his death, and after a bit more toing and froing, the fortress was back in the hands of the Crown by the end of the century, and during the Renaissance, the fortifications around the town were further reinforced – perhaps not such a bad idea because Peniscola found it impossible to stay out of trouble. In the early 1700s it became embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession in support of its Bourbon king, survived a siege, and then perhaps in the hope that practice makes perfect, about a century latter suffered another siege by the stampeding forces of Napoleon. This time their practice was less than perfect and the fortress was occupied. A couple of years later in 1814 Bourbon troops laid siege to the old city once again and the thousands of cannon balls rained down on it pretty much guaranteed its destruction thank you very much.
By the end of the 19th Century, and one assumes much to the relief of Peniscolians, the military relevance of the city had diminished to more or less nothing, and all the armaments were carted off to more needy establishments. During the 20th Century the vicissitudes of Peniscola’s development have been largely determined by frequent but much more benign sieges – by tourists and holidaymakers – as we discovered when we drove into town. Mind you, the town did try for the high life at least once more; it featured in El Cid in 1961 but thankfully, international stardom has eluded it ever since.
I didn’t contemplate these weighty matters while floating on my back enjoying the sensual pleasures of the waves. But I did experience a frisson of awareness, a sense of a tangible historical presence, whenever I looked at the imperturbable grey mass of the castle with the flags atop it flapping in the wind as they would have centuries ago, advertising the presence of its powerful inhabitants.
The steep climb to the castle that is perched 64 metres above the sea, through the winding streets of the old town, elevates the pulse exponentially in proportion to the incline. Middle-aged lungs wheeze like moth-eaten bellows and straining calf and thigh muscles proclaim their hitherto unassuming presence. This we discovered the next morning when we set off to the castle.
The narrow cobbled streets winding up to the castle are mostly lined with adjoining houses that were largely the original dwellings of fishermen and farm workers. They are uniform in construction: the narrow single fronts are topped by an additional two floors, both of which have small balconies overlooking the streets. The houses, some of which are now shops, are mostly painted white so that each appears to merge seamlessly with the next. Variation is provided by coloured awnings and blinds, and more frequently by window boxes of flowers, sprawling shrubs and cacti. Now and again the inner facades of windows, doors and arches have been painted a luminous blue, the effect of which is to provide definition to the facades and by some simple but obscure magic, to imbue them with a touch of the exotic.
The castle itself is interesting in a remotely stoic sort of way. The heraldic signatures above the stone entrance remind visitors in perpetuity that the Knights Templar organised the building of the castle but beyond that there isn’t much to remind the casual visitor of their presence, except of course for the no-nonsense austerity and fine construction of the building itself. The lack of decoration underscores the functionality of the structure; to provide living spaces, to keep airborne objects from landing on the inhabitants and to keep undesirables out. Its elevation made it ideal for raining arrows and hot pitch on miscreants.
Yet despite these attributes, despite its history, the interior of the castle resembles a eviscerated mollusc.
The sterility of the dim interior spaces, which are largely used for exhibits, denies imagination. There’s little that evokes the lives of the inhabitants of centuries long gone. If recalcitrant ghosts of the past do reside in the walls they resist attempts by the imagination to inveigle them out. It’s simply too big a leap to visualise the day-to-day bustle of times past: think commerce, trading, gossiping, fighting, declaiming, praying, cooking, fornicating, children playing, pouring pitch on enemies, hard wheels on cobblestones, turgid smoke-laden atmosphere, guards on the walls and everything else that would have constituted daily life.
The lofty perch of the low walls surrounding the building’s upper reaches provides a panoramic view of the arc of the north beach. Swimmers bob in the gentle surge of the waves. Distant baking bodies populate the sand between the colourful pinpricks of umbrellas. Beyond them, lining the road following the beach, hotels, holiday apartments, eateries, bars and shops are the vanguard for their ilk that cast back in an impenetrable sprawl to a belt of vegetation at the base of a prominent populated hill.
Peniscola is unmistakably a holiday town. Better to enjoy the castle for what it is – an interesting, well-preserved and exceptionally well-built fortress – and to leave the pleasures of indulgent imaginings to distant viewings of its impressive bulk from the soothing waters of the north beach.
Which is precisely what we did in the afternoon after the visit to the castle, and later, after recovering from an early evening bath and snooze, we went seeking food. Peniscola is well served with eateries, as you’d expect in a holiday destination. The streets behind Avenue de la Mar are lined with restaurants, so densely in places that it’s difficult to ascertain where the tables for one end and those for that next to it begin. Menu boards colourfully proclaiming each restaurant’s offerings stand sentinel-like in orderly rows in front of the eateries.
This concatenation of restaurants is familiar territory for visitors to beachside towns and resorts and is yet another of life’s inevitabilities. So too is the sameness of the food and the absence of quality. Peniscola does have some excellent restaurants in the castle area but we had no inclination then to sample them just then. We simply wanted to eat – now.
And a good thing too, because in our search for somewhere to eat we chanced upon Hogar del Jubilado de Peniscola. We initially walked past, intent on finding an inviting restaurant. We were so accustomed to equating restaurants in Peniscola with menu boards out the front and harried waiters in white shirts and black trousers hurrying between tables or spruiking for business that Hogar del Jubilado at first did not look the part. A few people were sitting at tables underneath a reddish awning but we assumed they were simply consuming drinks, as you do when the temperature is high and the coastal humidity glues clothes to skin.
Only when we reached the corner a little way past, disappointed that all we could see was a seafood restaurant, seemingly miserable in its emptiness, that we turned and saw Hogar del Jubilado properly for the first time. It’s an unusual but perfectly presented two-storied building. It stands alone, surrounded by roads on three sides and a park on the other – an oddity in this part of the town where the norm is abutting multi-storey apartments.
We saw also for the first time the name picked out in blue on darker blue in elegant cursive script on a roof level sign. But did they sell food? Oh yes they did. Lots of it. So we discovered when we entered with little expectation of being fed. On display behind the L-shaped counter was a seductive array of tapas: fish dishes, squid dishes including chipirones (deep-fried baby squid), meat dishes, sausage dishes, simple bread dishes, a variety of the inevitable tortillas, salads, cheese dishes, vegetable dishes and any number of variations on each.
We indicated what we wanted to a rotund middle-aged woman serving efficiently behind the counter and after a short wait our food was provided, nicely warmed. We carried our purchases to an outside table and tucked in. It’s difficult to conceive of a better feast for so little outlay.
By sunset a constant stream of customers had filled the outdoor area and most of the interior. There were young families with babies in pushers, singles, childless couples, Gen Xs, Gen Ys, the properly middle-aged, the elderly, some in wheelchairs or using walking frames, and others of indeterminate age like me.
Later when I entered the name of the eatery into an online translator I was perplexed to discover that Hogar del Jubilado de Peniscola translates into ‘Home for the Retirees of Peniscola’. I was convinced that something was lost in the translation so when we returned to Australia I consulted a Colombian friend who is fluent in Spanish. She agreed with the online translator.
Whatever the provenance of the name we found the home for retirees so good that we ate there for the remaining two nights of our stay, wallowing in a pleasantly soporific state induced by the food, the drink and the agreeable setting. And each night, after the sun had settled, we made our way happily and tipsily to the beach-front where holidaymakers promenaded under the lights along the wide and handsomely paved walking path between the road and the beach wall.
We’d find an empty spot on the sea wall and sit with others to watch the contented promenaders amble past with beach induced languor, occasionally interrupted by the attention seeking rituals of skittish youths and the squabbles of weary children. These sounds mingled with muted music from bars, the performances of buskers, the gentle slap of invisible waves on damp sand and the barking of dogs chasing their tails somewhere on the dark beach. To our left the softly lit wall of the castle, hovering above the amber lighting of the old town, presented a ghostly tableau.
On our final evening, sitting in precisely this situation enjoying the gentle, slightly humid warmth of the darkening night, we lamented the prospect of our departure the following morning.
But depart we did. Barcelona beckoned. After our breakfast we drove out in traffic that was rather less dense than on the other side of the road. It seemed that it was not only we who were reluctant to leave. As we drove away and bopped along with Segovia on our iPod we agreed to return the following year. And we did.