BEYOND THE GATES

This story first appeared in 'Japanese Surfing World' magazine in 2005
CLICK HERE for photographs of this trip (opens in a new window)

The sun beats down and once again the wind blows with force, whipping up dust and rubbish and scattering it across the streets. Sometimes the wind can stay like this, day and night, for weeks on end, eventually, so it’s said, it will sap you of your sanity. I could certainly feel mine going, I’d been here for a few days now and the atmosphere of the place was dragging me down. I don’t know what it was, I’d just been expecting so much more than the drab streets of this rundown town, inhabited by a people, who to me anyway, appeared to be about to give it all up. And the statistics backed my thoughts up – this region has the highest suicide rate in the country.

Some kids passed me by, kicking an old Pepsi can in front of them, I watched them walk off round a corner and then let my mind drift away from Barbate and its drugs, smugglers and mafia bosses and return instead to the views I’d seen that morning from the top of the cliffs that had brought me here in the first place. Few places can stir the imagination quite like the cliffs above Tarifa, for off these wind blown ledges four worlds collide, ancient and modern. In front of you, and it seems within touching distance, is Africa, to the east, the old world of the Mediterranean and to the west the Atlantic and the launch pad to the Americas. But it’s Spain, where I now stood, that had captivated me, it’s a place that defies all attempts at categorisation and contains
elements of all the surrounding worlds. A modern, forward looking European country that embraces the idea of the European super state, yet struggles to comes to terms with its own identity. Spain has been invader and invaded, its influence and language passed onto millions across the world and in turn it can seem as though everyone throughout history has been here. Greeks, Romans, various Germanic tribes and of course the Moors, all are past visitors and their ideas and influences have been woven into the fabric of the nation. Today the onslaught continues, thirty million tourists a year descend onto Spain and like nearly all of the previous arrivals their first taste of this most flamboyant and romantic of countries is here in Andalucía, at the gates to the Mediterranean.

And it’s this that I had come to see. Andalucía is surely the birthplace of the Spanish imagination. It’s the home of Flamenco and bullfights, fiestas and sherry, and for many people it’s also the Spain of disappointment. Each year thousands of north Europeans see no more than a tatty Costa hotel block, whilst from just a few short miles away come the disenchanted of Africa, willing to risk everything and frequently loosing it all in a desperate journey across a continent to escape from a hell that is beyond our comprehension. Every day the body count mounts up as the bloated corpses of those who fell at the last hurdle are washed up onto the beaches of the Costa’s and quietly whipped away before the smells of frying food brings the holidaying masses out of their concrete bunker hotels. This definitely wasn’t what I’d been expecting too find when, just a few days ago, I’d left home and driven south, under the misguided impression that if I could figure out Andalucía then everything else about Spain would fall perfectly into place. After all Andalucía is where all the Spanish clichés begin.

Surfing is, I think, a great way to get to know a place. It takes you to areas of a country that you wouldn’t normally visit and this was a classic example. Andalucía is for many people the epitome of all that is bad about mass tourism, sure its brought unprecedented wealth to what was once one of Spain’s poorest regions, but the downside has been the almost complete destruction of the natural coastal environment and the swamping of the local culture under fish and chip shops and tourist tack. And for many people this is all they see of Andalucía, but surfing was revealing another side of the province to me, a much quieter Andalucía, a much more traditionally Spanish Andalucía. The winds that blow with enough vengeance around the town of Tarifa to turn people mad have at least one silver lining to them, and that’s the relative absence of tourists. The Costa de la Luz is the aptly named stretch of coastline extending from the gates of the Mediterranean to the frontier of Portugal and it’s a world away from the hotel complexes of Torremolinos. As its name suggests, this coastline has a near luminous year round light and ample room to breathe and aside from the clustered groups of windsurfers around Tarifa the beaches are largely empty of foreigners. The hard winds, cool Atlantic waters, military bases and a ban on resort development has prevented all but the most determined of the holidaying hordes from passing through the gates.

In fact it didn’t take long for me to realise that the town of Barbate is one of the only places on this coast that actually is worth avoiding, don’t get me wrong though, it’s still a fascinating place to visit, it’s just that Barbate has a dark secret that makes it a less than ideal holiday spot. For it is here that one of the biggest issues facing Europe today comes struggling up the beaches every morning and forces every single European to examine their values, morals and opinions. Barbate is a smuggling centre, but it’s not just the obvious Moroccan hash that comes through this little town, Barbate is the centre of the people smuggling trade, a trade that experts estimate has
actually surpassed the drugs trade as the worlds largest illegal business. Exact figures are, predictably, hard to come by, but it’s thought that every year thousands of African’s each hand over somewhere in the region of €1-3,000, a vast sum for most Africans, to criminal gangs to provide a passage over the Straits of Gibraltar in leaky old boats or packed like sardines into the back of lorries. Safety precautions are zero and it’s thought that five Africans a day die trying to make the crossing. Even if they do survive, they’re far from home and dry, each year the Spanish authorities round up and deport 17,000 illegal immigrants, but its thought that 20,000 do make it across undetected to start a new life, but with no papers and no money, it doesn’t take long for them to become aware, that for them at least, the streets of Europe are not made of gold. And so they find themselves trapped here, unable to return home and unable to move forwards, caught up on the very fringes of their dream with nowhere left to run.

After some days I exchanged depressing Barbate and the flapping windsurf sails of Tarifa for a beach further to the north, the wind was less fierce up here and the beach, El Palmar, had an air to it that was both wild yet beautiful. El Palmar forms the heart of Andalucían surfing, it’s about the most consistent wave on the Costa de la Luz and is a popular spot with the local surf crews with the weekends getting pretty busy as everyone chases after one of the playful, sandy tubes. If you want to get away from the crowds altogether then pick up your board and walk southwards, away from the main beach car park and down towards the cape, off which Lord Nelson won a war, but lost his life, and you’ll pass by a dozen empty peaks. The nearest town to El Palmar is
Conil and one afternoon, after surfing, I took a stroll around it. My initial impressions were unfavourable, at first it seemed just as tatty as Barbate, but gradually I became aware of a change in the air. I first noticed it in the bars and cafes where people held their smiles longer and laughed more often than further down towards the gates. And then I noticed something else, the hollow and uncaring eyes were missing, African features were less common and those that were here seemed somehow more confident. They’d survived the crossing, they were getting over the shock, they were thinking of the future. Maybe Europe did have gold streets. English pubs were fading, wall-to-wall beach crowds were missing, and a holiday rep was nowhere to be seen. Spain was taking over. Things were beginning to make more sense to me.

The swell hung around for a few days whilst I was in Conil, at first it was just small and clean, ideal conditions for fun waves at El Palmar. Slowly though the swell begun to build and with the increasing swell came increasing opportunities. On the biggest day of the trip I was given a choice between a slightly bumpy but solid reef break to the south of Conil or a long and soothing right point. Beyond these are other waves, shore break wedges, hollow reefs and a very rare river mouth left with miniature pretensions of its more famous Basque cousin. On the whole though, the general feature of this coast is of long beaches and largely deserted waves. These beaches continue right up to the walls of Cádiz, Spain’s oldest city, and onwards through the Donãna National Park, a vast area of sand dunes and marshes whose in-accessibility keeps almost everyone out, but certainly hides plenty of waves. For me though, as the swell peaked and then begun to fade away again, I moved - for my final Andalucían days - into Cádiz,
on whose raw and gritty streets a real air of eastern exotica prevails. This was especially so during my visit, when the noisy alleyways of the old town were filled with the creatures of fairy tale fantasies and nightmare monsters. During carnival, as any Spaniard will tell you, Cádiz is the place to be. It’s easy to forget the purpose of your visit at a time like this, surfing becomes an after-thought as wine, food and girls send you off into a week long whirl of vague memories, but if you can somehow make it through the night with energy to spare then the next morning you’ll have the waves of the city beaches all to yourself. I didn’t manage this, but I did find myself coming out of the whole carnival experience with a new perspective on Andalucía. The Spain I’d been hoping to find here did exist, you had to look a little harder than in other parts of the country, but it was there, some of it was hidden away under the hotel complexes of the Costa del Sol, some of it could be found in the grey back streets of Barbate, some of it was disguised as a goblin in a late night bar in Cádiz and some of it was just about visible in the desperation and gluttony of the two very different sets of invaders who everyday line the beaches of Andalucía with towels and body bags. And as I drove northwards, back home, over Spain’s high central plateau I reflected on how, in all truth, I was still no closer to understanding this wonderful country and its charismatic people, but I could at least comfort myself with the thought that of the many others who have come and gone before me, few others have discovered the secret of the Spanish soul and most have ended up leaving as dazed and confused as me. And some, like the Ancient Greeks, just couldn’t understand it at all. When they arrived here they thought that they’d discovered the entrance to Hell on the rock of Gibraltar, sometimes you can only agree, but go through the gate and on the other side you’ll discover something very different. With ample winter sunshine, playful waves and the outrageous Spanish lifestyle, some would say that what the Greeks actually discovered was the entrance to Heaven. And in Heaven the streets are paved in gold.

Thanks to Andy at Winterwaves, www.winterwaves.co.uk, in Conil and Wes at Pure Vacations, www.purevacations.com, for their input and generosity in both putting together this article and their help with compiling the Andalucía section of the new Oceansurf Guidebook: Spain, www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk, from which much of the information and inspiration contained within this article comes.