As another summer draws to a close (I’m sad but not that sad, temperatures have been 95 here almost all summer and there’s no AC anywhere!), I just wanted to drop a note about a fabulous beach town that my boyfriend and I visited in late July.
We stayed in the town of Benicarló, a quiet non-touristy place where we quite literally had the beach to ourselves.
One afternoon we decided to venture out of the quiet town and drove 20 minutes north to the town of Peñíscola, which has a winter population of 7,000 and a summer population of 100,000. No joke. There were dozens of people still on the beach at 8pm, swimming and enjoying the water until much later than I ever have.
There is also a castle at the top of a large hill, which as you can see, offers amazing views both when you’re at the top and admiring from below, and after touring the castle, we also toured the gardens, which I’m sad to say, although they had lots of plants and trees that were beautiful, they also kept hawks and other birds chained so that people could see them. I’m really against zoos and animal cruelty in general, and watching the birds try to fly but not be able to truly hurt my heart.
And of course, on our way back to Palencia, we stopped in the city of Tercel in Aragón, which offers a few sites to the interested visitor. These include the “lovers of Teruel”, a tomb of a man and woman holding hands, and also an ancient aqueduct that while not as big or as grand as Segovia’s, was still a pretty cool thing to see.
On the way home, driving through villages, we stopped at a field of sunflowers (they are all over the place in Spain in the summer!) and my boyfriend cut me a sunflower to take back with us.
Happy end of summer, hope it was a good one!
