Estepona Holiday

 During the February half term holiday we were fortunate enough to be able to take our nephew over to Estepona, near Marbella, Spain to see his Dad and spend the week there. As someone who does not do well with heat this was the perfect time for me to go as the temperature was low 20’s. It did feel strange waking up in the mornings to sun and warmth though.

We have never visited that part of Spain before and it was beautiful. Estepona is known as the Garden of the Costa del Sol and it was easy to see why. Even in February there was plenty of greenery and some flowers. Some of the streets in the old town were lined with orange trees which were full of  oranges and there were flowerbeds in the main street as well. There is also an Orchidarium in the centre of town which had some beautiful orchids growing.

As well as the flowers there is also a Mural trail you can follow. The town has allowed local artists to paint murals on the walls of buildings and there were some fantastic displays around the town. There is a map you can get which tells you where they are. It is continually being added to and at the time we went there were 62 murals to see.

As we had hired a car we decided to do a bit of sightseeing in other areas nearby. The first place we went to was Puerto Banus. We really only looked around the port area and there were some fantastic and very expensive yachts and the shops reflected that. I fell in love with a pair of Gucci sandals which I estimated laughably to be about £400 (you can tell I don’t do designer). They were in fact £750. Needless to say I didn’t get them.

I did enjoy a rather yummy cocktail in a boat shaped bar with a rather interesting design in the ladies bathroom though.

We saw some more yachts (but a little less grand) at Sotogrande where we experienced a bit of rain, which I found most welcome, to break up the monotony the daily sunshine. It was very quiet and so we only spent a couple of hours there as most places were closed as it was too early in the year. Matthew and our nephew enjoyed a rather large pancake each as they had missed out on Pancake Day a couple of days before.

Our favourite day was the Friday when we went to Selwo Aventura which was a zoo about half an hours drive away. It was my favourite as they had the most active Red Panda’s I had ever seen. I could have spent all day just watching them. It was a lot bigger than we anticipated as we ended up spending most of the day there and did lots of walking. I also loved the lemurs who all looked like they were meditating in the sun.

On our last day we went to Malaga as that was where we were flying home from. We had intended on visiting  the car and fashion museum but we had not allowed for the siesta closing times and we literally turned up as it closed. We took a walk along the promenade before going to Plaza Mayor which is a MacArthur Glen Designer village which was huge. We had called in to get something to eat when  we arrived on the first evening but we had not seen how big it actually was as we did not really explore due to the shops being closed and only the food outlets being open. If we go back then I will certainly plan on spending some more time (and money) there as well as in Malaga itself as we did not have the time to explore the town.

We hope that we can go back to Estepona as we really enjoyed it, especially in February. We would have liked to have gone over at Easter but the cost was triple what we paid in February which is absolutely ridiculous for exactly the same place, using the same airline just at a more popular time of year for holidays. That is the only problem with being restricted to school holidays. Something needs to be done to even things out in terms of cost so that maybe more parents could afford to go abroad and adults who work in schools who cannot take any other time off are not penalised as well.