Life in Cartagena

Cartagena is an important port on the Med. Cruise ships, tankers, gas carriers, container ships, fishing boats, pleasure craft and all sorts of warships are a common sight from the town's seafront. To the East and the West of us there is a lot of untouched coastline where rugged hillsides drop precipitously down to the sea. We can boast a natural park with unspoiled beaches at Calblanque but, to be fair, we also have the huge port and industrial complex of Escombreras with refineries and all sorts of stinking chemical works as well as one of the most polluted beaches on the Med at Portman. Heading a a fair way to the West out of Cartagena is Mazarrón and to the North and East you bump into La Manga, the strange narrow piece of land which seperates the Mediterranean from the inland strech of salt water called the Mar Menor. Around Puerto de Mazzarón, La Manga and the Mar Menor there are several typical low key Spanish seaside towns - low key in the sense that they don't ...

A caldero is a small cauldron shaped cooking pot. It has given its name to a fish and rice dish that is popular all along the Murcian coast and the Mar Menor. So caldero, like paella , takes its name from the pan it's cooked in. I am told that in it's original form it was a cheap and easy meal for fishermen. They were able to use up the fish or fish parts that weren't saleable. The fish, along with tomatoes, local peppers, garlic and saffron is used to produce a stock in which rice is cooked. It is the rice that is the essential part of the meal but, if you have any decent fish available, that can be cooked in the stock too. Normally the fish is served separately. So it really is rice with fish rather than a rice and fish mixture. The whole lot is served accompanied by ali-oli - an emulsion of garlic in olive oil - which lots of we foreigners mistakenly believe to be a garlic mayonnaise. Now Spaniards eat a lot of fish. Even the smallest of supermarkets often have e...

Julian told me that he had been busy on Thursday getting their house out on the coast ready for summer. He says that each year the family - mum, dad and two young children - abandon the town and head for a small house they own out at Los Nietos beside the Mar Menor where they will live until the children go back to full days at school in mid September. The San Juan celebrations are the trigger for them to start making preparations proper for the move because it is also the time, more or less, when children finish school for the summer. Some of my students had similar stories. As we drove away from Cartagena today Maggie pointed out a family loading up the trailer on the back of their motor with lots of beach gear. Maybe they are off to La Manga . Lots of Cartaganeros seem to go there or to the resorts on the Mar Menor and nearby Med. I've just been watching the nine-o-clock news. First heat wave of the summer, 40ºC all over Spain, here's some advice from a doctor. And som...

Yesterday we took our guests out to La Manga. We ate patatas bravas, watched the kitesurfers and drove over the bascule bridge that allows taller yachts to get into the Mar Menor before turning around and heading back to Cabo de Palos. La Manga is a sandbar about 19 kms long that separates a coastal lake - the Mar Menor - from the Mediterranean proper. It is an odd environment. In the 1950s a chap called Tomás Maestre Aznar set about buying up the whole strip and with a bit of political support and a few court cases by the start of the 60s he was ready to put his master plan into action; to build a major tourist destination in Murcia. The first photo shows La Manga in 1963. Tomás intended to build a private development aimed at the monied elite with a capacity for about 70,000 people. He wasn't going to urbanise the whole strip but wanted to conserve the original nature of the sand bar outside the walls of his complex. None of the biographies I can find on the Inter...

We went to San Pedro del Pinatar today which is a small town on the edge of the Mar Menor. The Mar Menor, the Little Sea, is a hypersaline lagoon linked to the Mediterranean Sea only by a series of locks and weirs. It's shallow and warm and, particularly at it's northern end, it has a mud that people like to slart all over themselves for its therapeutic qualities. Apparently Hippocrates, the oath man, recommended mudbaths sometime between 460 and 337 BC and what's good enough for him is good enough for we Murcianos. As if Hippocrates weren't sufficient a 1995 study by the University of Murcia "revealed" that the mud contains a high percentage of cations, anions, calcium, magnesium and potassium fluorides, chlorides and sulphates which can be absorbed by the skin to improve skin conditions like ulcers, boils, sores and acne. What's more it also eliminates toxins and reduces the inflammation caused by rheumatism, arthritis and gout. Good or what? I...

With the best will in the World no advertising copy writer could describe the Mediterranean Coast of Spain as untouched. So it's remarkable just how much variety, and beauty, there still is amongst the concrete hotels, the rows of identical houses and the industrial estates. A little while ago I mentioned the Mar Menor and la Manga strip . For those of you with longish memories that's the place where those poor Leicester City footballers were wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting some local women back in 2004. Anyway, we hadn't done the northern end of the strip until today. I thought it was pretty impressive. The weather is still warm and it was very peaceful as we drove down the little road surrounded on both sides by sparkling, shallow, salty water. The sea is let into the salt pans which are then sealed so the wind and sun can drive off the water to leave behind big fat salt crystals. A couple of JCBs and a lorry were working one of the salt pans. The racket fro...

Esther Williams, was a woman who made her Hollywood Career in a bathing suit. She made films that were a cross between those Busby Berkeley dance movies and a synchronized swimming event. Esther said that the Mar Menor was "The largest swimming pool in the World." Not exactly Voltaire or Churchill or even Marx (Groucho that is) but a useful, working hypothesis nonetheless. The Mar Menor is a coastal lake seperated from the Med by a sandbar called La Manga. We went to have a look at La Manga yesterday. The sandbar is 22kms long and varies in width between 100 metres and 1200 metres but it isn't quite complete so that, having driven up it from the Cartagena side at Cabo de Palos, we turned around by the hump backed bridge near La Veneziola and drove all the way back again. The strip is a bit messy to be honest, lots and lots of very piecemeal development and some very tacky shops and bars. But, on the other hand, you can often being see crystal blue and green water on ei...