After two weeks in a nice little apartment on the edge of the old city of Seville, we switched apartments out on the edge of Triana. While the section of town is also quite old (with the first settlements dating to the Roman period), you wouldn’t know it from biking around. Most of the buildings feel like big, blocky 1970’s era construction, with a bit of Eastern Bloc mixed in.
In a painful twist for my “digital nomad” plan (i.e., continuing to work my day job using my laptop), the apartment that was advertised as having wifi did not (or, had it only intermittently while sitting at the head of the bed in one room, which allowed me to pick up wifi from an apartment two floors below). I was able to get some work done at the bar / restaurant at the street level of the building, but it was difficult, at best.
Enough of that! We’re off to the coast. Despite the beginning of Semana Santa, Holy Week and the most important holiday of the year for Sevilla, we decided to to leave town. We actually don’t feel like we’re missing that much: I talked about it a bit with Rosa (our first AirBnB host, who we’ve gotten together with a few times to let Zev and her son Antonio, age 5, play together), and it sounds like it’s “an experience” for an adult, but not so much for a kid: there’s hours of standing in a packed crowd, waiting for a pasos to be carried out of the church by the brotherhood, at which point, everyone crosses themselves. It’s a big deal if you’re Catholic, I guess. We’re not.
OK, so we headed down to the southern coast, to the little town of Zahara de los Atunes, where we rented an AirBnB apt from an old hippie couple, who lived next door. It’s been a fantastic reprieve from the hustle and bustle of the city, and the weather has been pleasant: while it’s suddenly spiked into the upper 80’s back in Seville, down here it’s been in the high 60’s to mid 70’s with a light breeze, mostly cloudy but the sun has broken through nicely at times.
The light breeze part is important: the area is often afflicted (or blessed, depending on who you’re talking to) with the Levanté, a strong wind that blows out of Africa and comes hot off the hills on the western coast. When it’s up, winds are steady at around 20 – 30 mph, and the beach is unbearable, with stinging sand.
Instead, we enjoyed a pleasant set of beach days, extending our stay from two nights to three to keep soaking it in. We took a couple day trips to explore the area, including a stop in Bolonia, a little fishing village that is also home to the best preserved Punic-Phoenician-Roman ruins in Spain.
As a bonus, it also has an enormous and dune that is perfect for rolling down, egged on by young Spanish children.
