The Holiday
We booked our seven day holiday to Roses in North East Spain at the last minute. Everything was booked independently and we flew with Ryanair from Liverpool airport to Girona, where we picked up a car and drove to Roses. We stayed at the Hotel Goya in Roses, which was a nice hotel, though with limited facilities, about 100m from the beach. Everything went very smoothly, the flights in both directions landed 20 minutes early and Liverpool airport was a dream compared to Manchester. For example, on the return journey we were scheduled to land in Liverpool at 8:50pm. In actual fact, by 8:50pm we had not only landed, but had also picked up the luggage, retrieved the car from the car park and had started our journey home!
As usual, this was a family holiday, and with the family not being interested in birds, I had to fit birding into other activities. In practice this meant getting up early (6:30am) on three mornings, and a couple of evening trips while they were finishing off on the beach and getting ready to go out at night. The early mornings in particular were not as horrendous as they might sound, because in mid August in Spain, if you miss the first few hours after dawn, you really are missing the best part of the day, and birding becomes very difficult later due to the heat. By mid day you’re better off in the pool or the sea anyway. I also managed to persuade the family to visit Nuria, near Ribes in the Pyrenees for a day.
The weather etc.
Before we had left Britain, I had read a number of articles which suggested that Spain was in the grip of the worst drought for 60 years and that the region we were traveling to, the Costa Brava, was one of the worst effected. I can only say that we didn’t notice it. Everywhere looked dry, but no worse than you would expect in August in Spain, swimming pools were full, rivers were running, the marsh land reserve I visited had lakes, reed beds, and even flooded water meadows with Camargue horses splashing around. We had heavy rain one night and for two hours one afternoon. To be honest, there was much more water around than I would have dared expected in any year in the middle of August in Spain, let alone the year of the worst drought in 60 years. I guess the answer is that Roses and the surrounding land is heavily influenced by its close proximity to the Pyrenees, and that other parts of the Costa Brava would be much worse effected by the drought.