Los Barreros

Wednesday 5/4 An easy start to the day because we weren’t landing in Cartagena until midday and our tour of the town, Roman theatre and countryside wasn’t until 1.30pm. The ship was very close to the shore going south so we could see white towns strung out on the horizon, craggy hills, quite a few boats of varying sizes – and didn’t even have to leave the room because ours is facing the shore, a lucky break.

The tour was an included one so lots of people took advantage of it, several busloads leaving every 20 – 30 minutes and all had to be back by 5pm. Had a lovely guide, Carlos, who later told Pete he was a former triathlete, now doing a lot of cycling, and he certainly looked fit. He gave us quite a lot of information about the area, history, current situation, industry, which was surprisingly interesting.

We first went to the Roman theatre which wasn’t discovered until 1988, slowly uncovered by demolishing all the houses and businesses built on top of it, and opened to the public 2003, and a museum opened a few years later. It was built around 2000 years ago using the natural slope of a hill for its built-up seating. 3rd century a lot of it was re-used in building a market in the former stage area. 13th century a cathedral was built on the upper part of the slope and the remains of that are what you can see in the photo of me and Pete, above our heads. This theatre would have been used for plays and concerts, and they know there was an amphitheatre a short distance away which would have been used for gladiator fights.

Heading back to the bus past City Hall, no mistaking the bullet holes in the outer stone walls. We drove through the city along a mile-long yellow wall which encloses the Army and Navy presence – all new recruits go there each year to start in the military, it seems to be HQ for both, there’s a big shipyard where they’d built submarines and ships (apparently now builds big private boats), and on Google Earth the whole thing is pixillated because it’s classified.

It’s not an attractive city, looks quite run-down but is apparently an industrial/engineering centre, has a university that produces top class graduates who know they’ll have a job waiting on graduating. There are no beaches, all docks and industry, anyone wanting a swim has to go well out of town. What it does have is agriculture on the flats, grows everything from avocados to watermelons, stone fruit, vegetables, olives, a huge part of the region’s economy – the garden of Europe. We drove for about half an hour to the Cabo de Palos lighthouse, 54m high, range of 24 miles, on a little peninsula surrounded by beautiful dark blue water – climbed up the hill to the base and down again.

I found the landscape quite depressing in this area – dusty, rocky, greenish low pines and scrub, but then there were lots of wild lavender bushes on the side of the road, quite a contrast. There’s a kind of lake where there’s been salt production for ever, and we bypassed the new white towns to drive into history. The road was quite twisty in parts over hills and had big rock barriers, what a job they would have been to build. The area had been a huge mining centre for hundreds of years mining lead, silver mainly and at the turn of the 20th century there were more than 1000 mines, employment, export wealth for Spain. In the end Castro decided he didn’t want to trade with other countries and the mines gradually shut down, the last mid-70’s. There are lots of old smelter chimneys still standing (just), abandoned mine buildings all around. And there’s a wind farm on the top of a ridge catching wind off the sea.

In contrast there was a large upmarket resort/sports centre industry with hotels and accommodation, lush smooth golf courses, sports centres, mountain bike tracks, running facilities……..international teams go there to prepare for big tournaments in: soccer, cycling, tennis, athletics, triathlon and, would you believe, cricket?

So that was today’s tour. After dinner we went to the show in the theatre, this time the captain turned up to introduce himself and the management team, and then music from the resident entertainment team, all very professional. Might as well go to these things.Read more