Everything is tickety boo.
The long weekend was over, so we headed further up the coast to a huge shopping centre where we had sourced an Orange telecommunications shop. “Habla inglés?”, smile……. “No”, was the answer. Dang! Here we go again. But as always, the lovely young lady spoke far better English than we could manage in Spanish. She understood what we wanted and took us to a machine where she punched in our mi-fi number and then pointed to a slot to enter money. We wanted to buy another 3gbs for €45, but interestingly the machine doesn’t give change and will only recharge one note at a time. So after doing the procedure three times with a €20 note, then another €20 note, then a €5 note, we had three receipts and now assume that we have received 3gbs. Who knows? There seems to be no way of confirming that, but we’ll see how long it lasts…… On our way back out of the shopping centre, we passed a stall manned by a young lady selling funeral plans. Thankfully she didn’t approach us; we obviously don’t look half dead, just yet.
Now we were off to Elche, or is it Elx? Yet another town with two ways of spelling its name. We were in search of ‘a paradise in Spain’ as quoted by Hans Christian Anderson when he visited the city in 1862. We drove through and around and back through, following signs that would start to lead you to places and then disappear. Strangely, we were getting the impression that it was a city of Irish pubs; we found seven at last count, but we weren’t finding what we were looking for, or ‘a paradise in Spain’. Finally we spotted a large campervan parked on an empty bit of land, so we bumped up the kerb and parked next to him. The very friendly Swedish owner came out for a chat and it seemed he was having the same problem, so we chatted about this and that and then Rodney & I set off on foot in the general direction of the tourist information office.
Now we were on track. With a brochure describing this ‘Mediterranean oasis of a living city’ and a tiny map in hand, we walked behind the tourist office and into the Parque Municipal; it was an oasis. Six hectares of palm trees, mainly date palms, for which the city is so famous. The old part of the city is surrounded by a river on one side and palm groves on the other three. They were planted by the Phoenicians, around 300BC and later expanded by the Arabs to be the largest palm groves in Europe. I’m not sure who counted them, but there are now supposed to be more than 250,000 palm trees in and around Elche.
From the park, we wandered around the Alcassar and over the road to the Basilica de Santa Maria, had lunch in a quiet plaza and then meandered through silent, Monday afternoon, streets. Palm trees randomly loitered on pavements and casually leaned against walls then finally we found the Huerto del Cura, Garden of the Curate. And there was our Swedish neighbour and his wife; they had sensibly cycled around, why didn’t we think of that?!!
The garden was smaller than we expected but rather lovely in its own quirky way. There are plenty of date palms and one incredible example that at some point in its 170 years of growth, chose to create seven trunks and now has to be supported to stay upright. It is quite weird looking and it is believed to be the only one in the world like it; though I’m not sure who has checked every palm tree in the world.
Exiting through the gift shop, I had to buy a box of really sticky dates; I’m not sure which tree they fell off, but they’re scrumptious.
