An Eggs-iting Special Delivery for Easter

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An Eggs-iting Special Delivery for Easter

Steve • 2 April 2021

Easter greetings, VP aficionados!

Hopefully you will be ‘eggs-tatic’ at the prospect of reading a new blog this Easter (don’t give up the dayjob Steve, Ed)!

Winter and spring is traditionally the most popular time to make renovations to properties here in the naturist zone, when there are fewer tourists and residents to annoy with all the noise and dirt.

And this spring we have been no strangers to renovations ourselves, especially to our beach rental apartment ‘Mediterráneo’.

Its amazing frontline position, benefitting from the most spectacular sea and naturist beach views, does however mean ‘Mediterráneo’ requires more care, attention and maintenance due to the elements than many other apartments in the area. Especially as we have 2 generous balconies and a large side terrace to upkeep!

Our building has a lovely design that incorporates blue beams or ‘vigas’ as they are called here in Spain. They would traditionally be used to attach shading material or grow climbing shrubs such as buganvilla or vines to help provide respite from the searing summer sun. Our original beams were made of concrete and had sadly contracted concrete cancer rendering them no longer repairable.

Each winter, Chris would make it his task to sand, fill and paint them in an effort to keep them presentable but this year he decided enough was enough, so we have now had the vigas replaced with brand new sustainably-sourced wooden beams, freshly painted in the building’s nautical blue colourway.

Our apartment’s tricky access and altitude meant the beams could only be delivered from outside the building via a big lorry blocking a tight passageway and airlifted in by crane! It gave the neighbours something to talk about while I was dying of embarrassment. But then everyone understands it’s the time of year to renovate so hopefully not too many people were inconvenienced. I have recorded this ‘special delivery’ in the photos below.

Nobody really knows yet exactly who will be able to visit VP this season but if they make it to our beach apartment then they will certainly have nice spangly blue beams to wonder at!

The bar and restaurant owners seem optimistic that they will do better this year and many have already re-opened since the last lockdown and have been doing steady trade with locals and over-winterers who had made it to VP before the pre-Christmas lockdown.

Indeed most of the café bars in the naturist zone are already open again: Puntonat, Paso Doble, Chiringuito Naturista, La Golondrina and Natsun Ina’s.

On the corner where Castellón meets Lerida, opposite Puntonat, is a previously unused scrappy plot of land that has now been cleared and is apparently earmarked for a new paddleboard rental shop-cum-bar venue. It will be interesting to see how this unravels and it’s good to see that there is still optimism for starting new businesses in the area.

Although Easter was effectively cancelled in Spain and travel between communities hasn’t been allowed for some time, this should change and hopefully we will all have more to look forward to as we approach summer. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was deemed safe enough by ‘the powers that be’ to ditch the masks at last, we have been wearing them in Spain inside and out since at least last June!!!

I know Facebook isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (personally we have always had a love/hate relationship with it) but there have been some lovely groups spring up or grow in popularity since all this started.

One such sweet page was started by a Belgian lady back in March last year called ‘View From My Window’. Her idea was to try and connect confined/quarantined people all around the world by posting their photos of the views they could see from their windows and to create a fascination between the countries and their differing landscapes/cityscapes. It’s a lovely feast for the eyes if you care to look at it here.

I often take photos of the beach from the terraces and balconies of our beach apartments that can sometimes be quite impressive. I wanted to put VP on the VFMW map by including a photo of the naturist beach. Instead of cheating and taking a photo from the terrace or garden like some blatantly do, I wanted to stay true to the original concept and ensure our submission was a snap taken from one of our seaview windows.

So it wasn’t the best photo I have taken but at least it was real and managed to capture a moment when there was a queue of 6 ships off Vera Playa naturist beach.

It wasn’t the most popular photo VFMW has ever posted but I would call nearly 7,000 ‘likes’ a success by our own standards! It was lovely to read all the comments from people all around the world, some of whom were tagging on their own beautiful views.

Meanwhile, Chris has been gaining design inspiration from a FB page dedicated to Spanish homes and gardens and posted his own project – an upcycled pine table he painted in Mojácar blue for our terrace. While comments from group members were kindly acknowledging his handyman skills, it was the sparkling Mediterranean in the background that stole the show.

While we are on the subject matter of social media we have started up our Tik Tok page in an effort to dedicate a space to share our short video clips of the naturist beach. As we attempt to ‘get down with the kids’ please bear with us while we find our feet, but you can see the early results here.

Talking of beautiful views, we are spoilt for choice in terms of mountain ranges to visit in Almería and now we are able to travel again more widely we are back to having our wonderful spring picnics and herb-foraging sessions. We know quite a few spots to collect the most wonderful fresh herbs, somehow they just taste so much better when they have grown naturally, wild on a mountainside rather than our terrace in a pot or purchased from the supermarket. But sorry reader, our hunter-gatherer locations are a closely guarded secret. You will have to just come and visit us and maybe we will let you know!

In the meantime enjoy what’s left of Easter and hopefully you will be able to make it here to paradise some time this year…don’t eat too much chocolate in the meantime, you have a ‘beach body’ to consider!!

Hasta luego!