Barbate was an attractive seaside town with a long promenade and a good variety of shops and restaurants. The port was a major centre of the tuna fishing industry.
As a rule we tried to learn how to pronounce a place name before our brains were locked into the incorrect pronunciation. We failed miserably and Bar Bait was in our heads for days until we finally replaced it with BarBatay.
We stayed at a camp site at the top of a wide sandy beach five minutes drive from Barbate. The site, Campo y Mar was small – each of 12 or so pitches was defined with gravel and the ubiquitous AstroTurf. Our hosts were an English couple with two teenage daughters plus four rescue dogs (and two cats, I think).
Tracie and Gary had run the camp site for five years, it was open all the year round and the whole family worked extremely hard looking after their guests ensuring they had everything they needed. One day they gave us a lift into Barbate for lunch at a local restaurant, collecting us a few hours later. They both spoke reasonable Spanish but their daughters were impressively multilingual.
At the local fish market we bought a piece of tuna loin which chef Tony served raw, chopped into a salad.
The local supermarket sold Larios London gin for €11.85 a litre bottle. We knew it wouldn’t be the same quality as the gin our profligate daughter bought from her Gin Club but we were very pleased to pay just about a third of the UK price for this essential item.
