The philosopher Michael Marder says that during holidays, the external journey is as important as the internal one. In other words, the way you relate to the destination and its people is just as important as the way you relate to yourself. “Simply travelling to a city is not the same as doing so with books about its history, culture or gastronomy,” he explains. Reading about a place on the ground, understanding its idiosyncrasies, its past, gastronomy or simply delving into a novel set in that territory is an activity that completely changes your perspective. And it generates unique sensations whether you are wandering through the streets or spending hours on the beach. To travel around the Mediterranean there are hundreds, thousands of publications that do not fit in a library at home, much less in a backpack. But a selection offers a taste of six points of this sea to radically change the travel experience. Just as sending a postcard to loved ones does, in order to recover some romanticism in the age of Instagram.
The Malaga Costa del Sol is the starting point for this route. During the fifties, sixties and seventies this corner was a refuge for all kinds of people. Some ended up on the beaches of Torremolinos – like John Lennon, who spent two weeks in the company of Brian Epstein – and others, in the emerging Marbella, a city where, for example, the footballer George Best hid in the summer of 1971 without his football team, Manchester United, knowing about it – the footballer would also spend some summers in Mallorca. Fed up with the media pressure, he changed his training to share coffee with the retired people. This and many other stories are collected in Eccentrics on the Costa del Sola book by José Luis Cabrera and Carlos G. Pranger that allows us to revisit the area with different eyes. We can also close them to forget the beaches that are packed today, the shops of souvenirs or restaurants of dubious taste and, in exchange, relive the visit of Brigitte Bardot, the parties of Gamel Woolsey and Gerald Brenan in Churriana or dream of the tranquility that the first travelers to the Marbella Club hotel experienced between parties that are impossible today. The Costa del Sol in the pop hourby Juan Bonilla, offers mind-blowing images and stories. The other cityby the late Pablo Aranda, is today almost an anthropological account of the provincial capital, Málaga, which has undergone a radical transformation since 2003, when the novel was published.
For calm, the one that surrounds the El Fraile farmhouse, located “among the flat and bare hills, with no flora other than firewood, palm trees and atochas”, as Carmen de Burgos, born in Rodalquilar (Almería), wrote. On the outskirts, this farmhouse still stands where the so-called Crime of Níjar took place in 1928, which later inspired Blood Wedding, by Federico García Lorca and, before, Dagger of carnationsby the writer from Almería herself. “The beautiful Moorish land nestled at the edge of Europe, where my cradle was rocked, lives that primitive and beautiful life that I intend to present to readers,” she wrote in another of her works, The misfits. It is the one that the writer Juan Goytisolo also found when he visited the area in the 1950s.
Bulletin
The best travel tips, every week in your inbox
RECEIVE THEM
The posidonia that unites Almería and Ibiza
At that time, that was a coast “as astonishingly beautiful as it was unknown.” It was inhabited by extremely poor people in a desert where prickly pears barely grew, now transformed into an ocean of plastic. “The day they build the damn road, the houses will quadruple in value. In summer I will be able to rent them to tourists,” said one of the protagonists of Dagger of carnationsDon Ambrosio, already aware of the potential of Almería. Today the motorway is close, a network of roads and tracks reaches every village and, although the song of the cicadas continues to emerge “like a deaf protest from the ground”, this little piece of coast is unique for its administrative protection. The beaches of Rodalquilar, Agua Amarga or Los Genoveses and Mónsul are, for now, exceptions in a Mediterranean plagued by concrete that little by little is threatening an earthly paradise, but also a maritime one thanks to its posidonia meadows.
This plant that filters water and hosts an incredible marine biodiversity is also an emblem of Ibiza, another of those places so crowded that, unless what you are looking for is precisely to blend in with the noisy crowd, you need to approach the trip with a different mindset. Books are a great option. And there are very diverse possibilities. If the idea is to imagine this paradisiacal landscape in its best days (and with hardly any tourists) you just have to look at Walter Benjamin and his letters and texts during the two stages he spent on the Balearic island in the early 1930s. His Ibizan series is a tribute to the calm rhythms, the hospitality, the simplicity, the overwhelming nature. Vicente Valero collects some of them in Experience and povertylike the one Benjamin wrote to his friend Gretel Karplus where he describes an unknown cove. “And there we were offered an image of such immobile perfection that it had something strange in me,” he said, and then spoke of an interior territory “where one comes across the most cultivated and fertile landscapes.” It was a “reserved and mysterious” place that today has lost part of its magic, but lines like these allow us to reconstruct that utopia that seduced personalities such as Rafel Alberti or Albert Camus. Their travels and those of many others are reconstructed, also by Valero, in Contemporary travellers. Ibiza, 20th century.
There is also an excellent opportunity to walk through the Santa Eulària des Riu of a century ago and enjoy the daily life of its inhabitants, their joy, their festivities, their effort and their honesty. Walk through Puig d’en Missa, the old town, with Life and death of a Spanish people, by American Elliot Paulis a fantasy. Also a shock of reality: if the first part talks about everyday life in paradise, the second goes into hell after the outbreak of the Civil War. The memoirs of Bonnie Cullen, When the Water SpeaksThey also allow us to travel back to the life of the towns in the 1970s before they were destroyed – except, to some extent, those in the north – by housing developments and hotels. My private Ibizaby Antonio Escohotado, begins in that era, before the explosion of tourism and with festivals like never before known. These are the ones that it collects Balearica work that multiplies the desire to experience some of those parties in the first versions of Pachá and Amnesia.
Picasso’s French Riviera
There are no excuses that prevent you from stopping off on the French Riviera and its surroundings. The Malaga native Pablo Picasso settled there in the 1940s. He was attracted by a light that also captivated Matisse, Van Gogh and Chagall. The artist used to escape there from Paris for the holidays until he decided to move there. In Antibes he was offered a job in a building that is now the city’s Picasso Museum. And he walked along its beaches with his children Claude and Paloma and his partner at the time, Françoise Gilot, who recounts those days in her excellent Life with Picasso. A famous photograph from those days, taken by Robert Capa, where the artist covers Gilot with an umbrella while his nephew, Javier Vilató, looks on, is the cover of the story of an extraordinary life, with both light and shadow, alongside Picasso, “a man Mediterranean enough to spend his mornings on the beach doing nothing,” wrote Gilot. The artist lived for seven years in Vallauris, a small town where he received visitors such as Brigitte Bardot. There he worked with clay with the team from the Madoura workshop and many of his pieces can be seen in the museum with his name in the town, which houses an extraordinary mural: War and peace. Cannes, Vauvenargues – in Provence, where he was buried after his death – and then Mougins are also stops in his biography. The story of his life, his visits, his anecdotes, his way of thinking or his stormy relationships, stepping on the same ground a century later, is a unique experience.
Two Picasso originals are on the walls of his house in Mongibello, southern Italy, to the surprise of his supposed friend Tom Ripley. His arrival in the then remote village on the Italian coast is described in Mr. Talent Ripleyby Patricia Highsmith, with so much evocation that it makes you want to get on a bus and repeat the journey through places like Torre del Greco or Sorrento. “The road ran along the sea and through a series of villages,” writes Highsmith, made up of “little houses that looked like breadcrumbs.” Mongibello is an imaginary place that could be any town on the Neapolitan coast. The series Ripleyreleased months ago by Netflix, moves the setting to Atrani —on the Amalfi coast— while the film The Talented Mr. Ripley He did so on the nearby islands of Ischia and Procida. To read this novel in its original landscapes, it is recommended to do so with a Martini and a portion of “miniature octopus” —which so surprises Ripley— and dream of a country that no longer exists: that of an immeasurable beauty and without the constant presence of tourists. The trips to Naples —and its squares with “wheelbarrows loaded with grapes, figs, cakes, watermelons”— and Rome are a way of completing the trip at the rhythm marked by the sentences of a novel that invites you to lose track of time. Just like Elena Ferrante’s, they strongly ask you to get lost in the streets and neighborhoods of the Neapolitan city where her famous tetralogy takes place. The great friend.
Jump to Malta
You can reach another island thanks to the writer Azahara Alonso and her experiences in a little piece of land with a name as summery as Joy. It is also the title of the fantastic book that he published in 2023. Located north of the Maltese archipelago, it seems like a good destination in search of a few days of disconnection. “Because it is so small, the island is almost water,” writes Alonso, who beyond his daily life and his reflections describes a destination of beaches, lighthouses and natural monuments. Of course, what was its greatest attraction, the Blue Window, the rock where the filming had taken place, is a must see. Game of Thronesfell naturally in 2017. This is a territory with 365 churches — one for each day — and a charming town where the bells ring every 15 minutes. The text clarifies that the ferry to this remote corner costs nothing because you only pay when you leave there. If you leave at all, because at this point, perhaps, the best thing would be to stay and do nothing. Or, at least, do little more than read.
Subscribe here to the The Traveler’s newsletter and find inspiration for your next trips on our accounts Facebook, X and Instagram.
#joy #reading #Mediterranean #Malaga #Malta #French #Riviera