Last Post

This will be my last post on our winter nine-week cycle tour. I had intended to wrap this blog up sooner but what can I say - life was simpler on the cycle path!

During our last few days in Malaga, we moved from Julia’s place to Eva’s just down the street. Like Julia’s apartment, it is a lovely, well-furnished quiet apartment with a good kitchen as well, with a pretty garden and a resident cat. Eva was away visiting her daughter but we had the pleasure of meeting her son Nacho when we moved in.

We spent our last few days in between rainstorms enjoying our Pedregalejo neighbourhood. Behind the seafront paseo lined with restaurants is a village of small houses on narrow car-free streets, probably originally fishermen’s houses. There has of course been development and gentrification and some are now tourist apartments but there is still a real village feel to it. People live very close together with the beach as their backyard.

We walked along the sea for one last day in downtown Malaga. I love this walk or bike into town along the wide promenade and then around the port area with its huge raised louvred terrace at one end. You can walk for miles and we did.

Although the old town in Malaga is not as extensive as some other places, it definitely has its charms and the huge cathedral is one of course. But the streets and squares are great to wander, as is the long, wide treed park-like boulevard.

Malaga apparently has over 40 museums. We had been to several last year - the Picasso Museum; the Malaga Museum (also with a Picasso exhibit last year); and the Pompidou, housed below ground with a multi-coloured glass box above ground. We had enjoyed them all.

I saw banners for the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga so decided to check that out. It’s in a 16th C stately home with a central courtyard surrounded by arcaded galleries, with new wings added.

The permanent collection of about 200 works represents the various genres of 19th C Spanish painting with an emphasis on Andalucia. The paintings were displayed coherently in rooms dedicated to that period: Old Masters, Romantic Landscape, Précieux Style and Naturalistic Landscape and the Fin-de-siècle. It seemed a nice rounding out of our two trips through the Spanish landscape and it was fun to see paintings of places we had actually visited. It was not at all crowded. In no particular order, here are some of the lovely paintings we saw.

There was also an exhibit of huge paintings of female saints by Francisco de Zurbará, painted 1650-1650. Normally religious art is not to my liking, partly because there is just sooo much of it and it is usually so dark and depressing, but these were stunning because of the gorgeous clothing these women are wearing and the painter’s skill in making the fabrics come to life.

We finally made the trek home, enjoying more people watching en route. The annual Malaga film festival was just starting and a red carpet was rolled out in one of the main squares where people were having fun strutting their stuff. We have observed that Spanish women AND men are very well-dressed, well-shod - they like to shop - and well-coiffed. So many barber shops! I guess if you are going to be promenading about in the evenings with your friends and neighbours, you need to keep up appearances! Children are also well dressed and there are shops in every town selling beautiful children’s clothing of a type we just do not see here.

After packing up on our final day, we had a late and leisurely seafood lunch on the sunny beach. Being Sunday,every restaurant was packed.

One last stage on our 2025 1000 km “Tour de España”. We had a gruesomely early bike shuttle pickup at 3 am for our 6 am flight home. One bonus was that the highway to the airport was empty. And though we were expecting to pay for our bikes on the return flight, the check-in desk person for Air France could not sort out how to charge us and waived the oversized baggage fee. And we managed to make our connecting flight from Paris to Vancouver, unlike the trip down where we ended up enduring a 12 hour wait for the next flight to Malaga. We arrived in chillier but sunny weather. Our stalwart biking friends, Donna and Werner were there to pick us and our bikes up in Vancouver and we had a lovely overnighter and celebratory dinner at their place, coming back to Galiano with their van the next morning.

In summary, we had a wonderful time. We saw more than just Andalucia this time and really loved our time in Extremadura, the area north of Seville, a more remote, lightly populated area, with stunning landscapes and beautiful towns whose names we had never heard. A shout out to Eva and Julia in Malaga and the other lovely Spanish people we met enroute whose kindness helped make our trip so memorable. Would we go back to Spain? Definitely. We are currently looking into the possibility of folding bikes as they would allow us to move between good cycle areas more easily on public transit. Some final shots of beautiful plants I saw in various gardens. The orange trees were just coming into bloom with their intoxicating fragrance when we left. Thank you for following along!