Short holidays at Cap Roig

Elisabet is member of the Tr3s C Club, a Catalan club for cultural activities which gives important discounts to its members and once per year offers them a present as for example free access to a rather expensive concert. By means of those presents we twice attended the Festival at Castell de Peralada during the last years and two weeks ago saw Kiri Te Kanawa at the Cap Roig Gardens. In order to get the most out of our trip there, we took our tent with us and spend two nights on a campsite.

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The concert took place on Wednesday and was great. As a cultural ignorant I am, I naturally didn't know Kiri. She's a worldfamous, half retired soprano from New Zealand who started her professional career in the early 70s. Since 2004, however, she only acts every now and then. I've learned that her speciality are Strauss Mozart and Liszt and she offered some of them, accompanied by a full scale orchestre stating 28 violins, 5 contrabasses, two harps and a piano among others. I certainly cannot write a critic about the concert, but what I can do is to admit, that it was spectacular. The song I liked most was El Amor Brujo. The whole gig took place at a real stunnung place - the Gardens of Cap Roig, but since we arrived at the location just in time for the concert, we weren't able to have much of a look at them and thence decided to return the next day in order to inspect them more thoroughly.

Posing above the beach

Immediately after the concert, though, Lisa showed me where she and her group had acted only a week before. Right in front of the beach of Calella de Calafrugell, there was still a stage and by passing it we arrived at the shore where we snapped some night pictures.

Calella at night

Rocked

On Thursday, according to the plans made the day before, we went back to the botanic Gardens.

Castell de Cap Roig, with a modern sculpture front left

In the cactus sector

Those, it turned out, as a matter of fact are a very beautyful park very well worth a visit. One finds different areas there, each dedicated to distinct types of plants, as for example palm trees, mediterranean plants and cactus etc. And always there's a good view over the Costa Brava of the Mediterranean Sea. August, as it turned out though, might not be the best month to pay a visit to the gardens, for the mercyless sun burns straight down on one's head and not much shadow can be found. Beside of the plantlife, the gardens are also famous for the many sculptures which call them their homes.

Colourful surroundings

Next to come was a trip to a lighthouse located on a hill, one village up the cost. Since for some reason we thought it would be impossible to get to the tower by car, we simply ignored the ongoing slopy road and parked it down at sea level. By no means did we have to go far up, but the sun once again made it a tough while for us. By the time we got to the lighthouse we were as tired and sweaty as had we climbed a real mountain. The lighthouse wasn't really worth the effort, because it was surrounded by antennae and virtually whirled up in cables which rested any interest it otherwise would have had. But next to it, there was an excavation site of an old iberic settlement we decided to visit. Compared to what we had seen in Ullastret a year before (the story of just another present from Club Tr3s C), the settlement was not all too interesting, but at least we had something to do on top of the hill which had costed us so much an effort to summit.

Back in Calella, and after a visit to the beach, we had dinner in a very, very good fish restaurant where we had fresh sole for Elisabet and sardines for me, accompanied by a chilled rosé wine. After a last night on Moby Dick campsite, we drove back to Catalonia's inland. 

Early near full moon