Vespa tour of Spain: Get your kicks activity breaks
In the second of our three-part series on energy-fuelled breaks, Clover Stroud gets her motor running in the wilds of southern Spain.
By Clover Stroud
It was a perfect film scene. The open road lay before us, a black slick of Tarmac shimmering in a mirage of heat and sun. Cacti sprouted along the road, their pink globes brilliant against cartoon-green leaves, and lizards darted over the red outcrops of rocks flanking the route. Nothing else there except a handful of caramel-coloured goats, the insistent clanging of their bells the only sound in an empty landscape. My boyfriend and I just watched, then pulled crash-helmets back on before burning off into the sunshine on our bikes.
This strange, burnt, hot landscape wasn’t Arizona, or New Mexico, but the Sierra de los Filabres in Almería, southern Spain, and our bikes weren’t Harleys but much cuter Vespas. Our journey started on the Cabo de Gata Mediterranean coast in the village of Rodalquilar, a village so infused with this potent sense of the Wild West that I wasn’t surprised to find a gold mine there.
We stayed a night at Los Patios, a Moorish gem of a hotel with a white terrace edged by jasmine and tangled with crimson-coloured bougainvillea. We ate black squid risotto and spent a day exploring the coast: glittering turquoise sea and meringue peaks of sandstone cliffs half a mile from the hotel. We swam, alone apart from a teenage couple flirting on a far rock, in a natural lagoon overlooked by a 16th-century fort, built originally to defend against pirates, who made merry with the girls and whatever else they could get their hands on.
Our trip took us inland, into a natural park, the road twisting into a mountain pass and then falling to a valley where we left the Tarmac, following a dirt track through almond groves that gave way to a lost valley of deserted houses. Abandoned olive trees and orchards were a quiet imprint of the forgotten life here, and it felt remote, like a real adventure. We stayed at another rural hotel, El Cortijo Alto de Cariatiz, nestled on the edge of the mountain village, below a fossilised coral reef. That night, I dreamt about cowboys and wild horses.
This is a hauntingly lovely and little-known corner of Spain, more like a west Texan landscape I know than anything I’ve encountered in Europe. It didn’t surprise me, then, on the final day as we did a loop inland and then headed back for a last night at Los Patios on the coast, to skirt the Tabernas desert, where many classic spaghetti westerns were filmed, including Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The boldest stretch of road ran through this landscape, the moment where buzzing around on a scooter really did feel like cruising on a Harley. But for all the potential for cruising this holiday gave us, there was still, thankfully, something slightly comic about travelling by Vespa. As much as they made me think of Henry Fonda, they’re also a bit Herbie Goes Bananas too, so you can still laugh about yourself while imagining your close-up. Combining adventure, romance and some awesome landscape, this is a brilliant holiday, the best short break, in fact, I’ve ever had this side of the Alamo
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