We were en route to the last stop of Andy’s escorted tour and on the way we called in to Combarro, a picturesque coastal village with it’s tourist trap shops scattered along a couple of streets clinging to a hillside frontage.
Combarro provides an amazingly good, free área de autocaravanas, a motorhome park, in a superb location overlooking the harbour, made more attractive by the addition of a few palm trees. You can stay for 24hrs. The approach is a little tortuous round a sharp 90° turn around the corner of a large building [with a mirror to assist, which I failed to notice] thence through a car park. The motorhome area looked wonderful. We were curious to see some of the car folks unloading rakes and trolleys from the boots of their cars as we passed through. There was also a motorhome service point at one end of the car park.
Once parked up, the purpose of the rakes and trolleys became clear, there were huge amounts of very industrious cockle-pickers [my assumption] raking about in the sand of the harbour uncovered by low tide. There were well in excess of a hundred of them dividing their efforts over a couple of different sections of beach.
With the convoy gathered, we went to investigate the town itself, eventually threading our way through the gauntlet of tourist-tat shops. Liberally sprinkled among the tat were shops selling bottles of local wine, the default white grape in these parts being albariño. Our guides suggested the wine was quite reasonable and reasonably priced so we invested in a €14.50 3-bottle case. We’ll see.
Arriving at the main square, we gathered around some tables at one of the cafés only to discover that we had picked one with no coffee. Brilliant! I can only imagine that there was a problem with their coffee machine. It did, however, offer a few raciones including padrón peppers and pescaditos [small fish, sort of in between whitebait and sardines] which made a good lunch.
On our return to the motorhome park to continue our journey, one of our number noticed a pair of the industrious rakers rinsing cockles under a tap so my assumption about the harvest had been correct.
We resumed heading for Andy’s final stop of the tour, Baiona.
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