San Pedro

Waiting For The Bus

We had one of those days the other day. One of those days where you misstime your arrival so that you have to wait the maximum amount of time before catching the next bus.

The objective of the day´s travel was to get from San Pedro to Granada. The walk from San Pedro to Las Negras took about an hour, and we took no time at all to hitch-hike from Las Negras (Litterally ¨The Black Women¨, a fishing village so named after most of the men from the village died at sea sometime around 1900 and all the women in town wore black in mourning) to Campo Hermoso.

From there it all went wrong. A three hour wait for the hour-long bus ride to Almeria. Then it was another two hour wait for a bus to Granada. We then had to waste an hour waiting for the bus to Monachil where Fred lives. In all we were travelling for 11 hours, and I was a bit grumpy by the time that we got home.

Paridise Without Shade

It was all worth it for the four nights that we spent in San Pedro, an abandoned fishing village on the desert coast of Cabo De Gata (Cape Cat). The decline of the village began with the aforementioned boat disaster, when the majority of the population moved to the village of Las Negras which had just been given road access.

By the 1950s the only inhabitants in town were the Garda Civil, Franco´s right-hand police. When the Garda Civil left hippies slowly started to move into town to have a go at building their own little paradise(Garda Civil and hippies are not compatable, not by a long shot).

The coast of Cabo De Gata is the driest place in Europe, and one of the hottest. The village exists due to two fresh water springs that pop up in a little valley the ends in a small beach. They flow all year around, and provide a little oasis in the middle of the dry rolling hills with nothing taller than your hips growing on them.

It was hot enough when we were there, and that was the middle of winter. In summer it must be very difficult to get through some of the days. There is a little bit of shade, but not much. Certainly staying in one´s tent would be impossible any time after sunrise. In fact, I didn´t sleep in the tent, preferring to roll my sleeping mat out on the ground so that I could enjoy the perfect startscape in the desert.

Where Is The Community?

Of course a bunch of hippies building a little town basically translates into a bunch of folk doing their own things with a minimal amount of coordination or communication. One thing I have learnt from living in such places, it is that community can be a euphimism. More like squatter´s rights, and a great place for prison leavers, mental patients and drug addicts to hide from the greater world.

That said, there is always a core group of interesting folk who have a different take on life. Unlike El Chorrito where I spent a month during the summer, the police have very little interest in what goes on in San Pedro. In El Chorrito the police came by every couple of days to kick out anybody who was camping in the forest above the beach. This made it impossible to set up even any semi-permentant dwellings.

In San Pedro people are left to create whatever structures they please, and they also have the skeletons of the original town buildings to work with. As a result there is all manner of dwellings, and also a panaderia (bread shop), and bars serving cold beer (solar panels and generators provide the power).

The most impressive place that I saw was by far the cave house built by a German guy named Tilo. He had lived in San Pedro eight years, and had spent the last two years constructing his cave. It was a three minute scrample up a very steep rocky slope halfway up a cliff overlooking the bay. If the rock face he had carved out a cave using a chisel. He had built terraces, and steps chiseled into the rock lead from one level to another. The crowing touch was a stone BBQ that had probably the best view from a kitchen anywhere in the world. To top it off the house was completely invisible from below and one would only know about it if they were invited up.

Another character named Rubin, had recently left jail, where he had spent the last eight years. He was twenty eight, but he told me when I met him that in fact he was twenty years old as far as he was concerned. Krys and I enjoyed many a cup of coffee in his little hut, and grew to be good friends. Krys is a tattooist by trade, and has an impressive collection of tattoos on herself. Rubin revealed that he was a tattooist in jail, and told us how he made his own tattoo machines from pens and walkman batteries.

Characters like Rubin and Tilo are a highlite of places like San Pedro. But there are also people who keep you on your toes (I have met some jail-leavers and the like in such places that I would run a mile to avoid). Whoever you meet, it is bound to be interesting and educational.