Peñíscola and its Castle in the Sea

Our travel day was quite the day! It all started well. We walked to the Vilanova train station, bought a ticket to Benicarlos, the nearest town to Peniscola, and caught the train at 10:50 a.m. We paid about $20 Cdn per ticket that we think is quite inexpensive for a 4 hour train ride.

The train took us along the seaside and then into olive and mandarin orange groves. It’s orange season here and the trees were loaded with fruit. At one point the train started going backwards and we wondered whether we were headed back to Vilanova. But no, the train was just changing tracks..

We arrived at the empty Benicarlos train station at close to 2 o’clock. It’s kind of out in the middle of nowhere. We knew we had to take the bus to Peniscola (Pen-yis-cola)b ut we may have just missed one, as we saw that the next bus was coming in an hour. A friendly young lady was there with us and took us under her wing. She told us to follow her to a busier bus stop, 1+ km away, and we went off at a fast clip. This is when our ‘light’ backpacks felt awfully heavy. Haha. We made it to our accommodation, called Chiki, by 3:30 pm and what a surprise it was.

We knew that it would be within the walled city around the Peniscola castle but didn’t really know what to expect. We had to walk up lots of stairs, through a tunnel entrance to the town and then up even further on cobblestone streets past whitewashed houses.

Finally we found it. Sonia, the owner met us and showed us our room, which was actually a small apartment. Our bedroom was probably in what was the living/dining room. There was a kitchen and bathroom too. The original bedroom was closed off. We had a microwave and beer fridge as well as a coffee machine. It is a great little place in the labyrinth of the town surrounding the castle.

Once we put our bags in the room, we went off to find a place to eat. There were a ton of places here. We decided on a seafood restaurant outside of the wall and enjoyed eating a fish, squid, fries and salad dinner. We took home some tiramisu for later.

Then off to find a grocery store. Apparently, it isn’t open on Sunday, so off we went to find the store and buy bagels, cream cheese, peanut butter, yogurt and fruit for breakfast and lunch. A kind man showed us the way and enjoyed telling us the history of this place. He even offered to take us to a park but we told him that we only had a day here and we wanted to see the castle. If we had been here longer…

By the time we got home, the beautiful Xmas decorations were on and the castle streets were magical with twinkly lights. We were pretty tired so we just relaxed, made plans for visiting the castle, watched a Reacher episode and went to bed.Read more