Spain

It’s carnival season around Caleta de Vélez, Spain, where we are house-sitting.  I went to the carnival at a nearby town, Vélez Malaga, for the local experience.  

The carnival consists of local people dressing up in imaginative and outlandish costumes and dancing in a parade along the streets – it’s a lively and colourful show!  

I love watching flamenco performance.  While there’s good flamenco at home in Australia, I’m now in the home of flamenco – Andalusia, in southern Spain, so it’s great to get to see it here. 

We’ve landed in a good location for flamenco here in Aguadulce – there is an intimate flamenco venue here in the entertainment precinct next to the harbour; it’s called Entre Flamencos del Puerto. 

Churros are a favourite snack all over Spain.  They are so popular that there is a specific type of shop for them: a 'churreria'. 

Generally, I'm not big on churros - deep-fried lumps of sweet dough are not my sort of thing, even when they are made in Spain.  However, churros are part of Spanish culture, and Lonely Planet particularly recommends Churreria Manolo in the La Chanca barrio of Almería, so we decided to give it a go. 

We are currently house-sitting a little apartment and a cat in Aguadulce, in southern Spain.  It’s a nice long house-sit (two months) so there's plenty of time to settle in and really get to know the area.  Aguadulce is primarily a tourist town that relies on its long and wide beaches and calm clear Mediterranean water to attract vast summer crowds from northern Europe, the United Kingdom, and Russia.  

We are currently house-sitting in Cazorla, in southern Spain. This house is a small hotel called Cortijo los Abedules, which incorporates three self-contained units of various sizes. It's the end of the season now, and the owners have shut the business down while they've gone away for their own holiday, so we are looking after their house and their dogs.

I've been moving across northern Portugal and north-west Spain by bus and train over the last few days, and I've seen such vast numbers of Australian gum trees that it is almost frightening.  Their density is far greater that it was in the south of the Iberian peninsular.