An exciting day in prospect today – our friends Keith & Sue were coming to visit. They live for half the year in Valencia and were coming by train to spend the day with us. Having picked them up from the station, we returned to the site for a coffee and gave them a guided tour, then walked down to the promenade as it was a beautiful day.


The prom here would be award winning at home: completely traffic-free with patterned tiles & palm trees, pristine golden sand and backed by heritage villas from the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries. They were once the holiday homes of rich Valencians, and most are still privately owned, but one has been converted into a restaurant, which was our lunch destination.




Built in the 1890s, The Villa del Mar was sympathetically restored in 2012 and opened as a higher-end restaurant. The terrace is a lovely place to sit for a drink & watch the world go by, but we were there to eat as well; Keith & Sue had only visited Benicassim very briefly so it was nice to be able to introduce them to the area.







We all chose a tomato salad for a starter followed by Paella Valenciana, the traditional rice dish of the area with chicken and rabbit, not seafood. The salad was excellent but the paella was a little disappointing: overcooked rice which made it very claggy, with overdone and rather chewy meat. The service was excellent - they went & gave in our order for the paella before we even got our drinks so it could be freshly cooked, which made the underwhelming dish all the more disappointing. Also, the bill came to nearly €70 for the 4 of us, which made it by far the most expensive meal we'd had this holiday.


Strolling back to the site to collect the car, we paused by the entrance to admire the attractive red & yellow "Spanish flag” flowers there. I noticed a movement on one of the blooms & was delighted to spot a Zebra butterfly, which posed beautifully for me to take its picture.










As Keith & Sue have never been, we decided to take them up the coast to Marina D’Or. This was built with 10,000 rooms as the largest holiday destination in Spain but is mostly unoccupied as the developer went bankrupt. The main street and park WERE finished, however, and are of the over-the-top variety and strangely attractive, with Vegas-type glitz and lights.


The statues and seats in the seafront park are a really mixed bunch – some classical Italianate, some American, some like those of Gaudi and some just bizarre, but all very interesting to wander past. The beach shower continues the slightly wacky theme, being an elephant watering swimmers with its trunk, as does the stationary classic Chevrolet, but the plants and birds from 5 continents are impressive.


Wandering down the main street, we gawped at the elaborate shop fronts topped by millions of laser lights; they would look very impressive when lit, but looked rather sad as they were almost empty of shoppers. On the way back to Benicassim, we stopped at Oropesa for an ice cream, then at a clifftop viewpoint to view the town from on high, and were amused to find one of the parking spaces labelled "Robin” – Hubby’s name! The views were great though, with the sea and town in the foreground and misty blue hills in layers stretching away into the distance.







A bbq back at the van finished off a great day, marred only by the fact that their train home was nearly an hour late arriving - all announcements at the unmanned station were in Spanish, so it was a good job Sue is fluent or we'd have had no idea what was happening! Apparently if your train is an hour late, you get your ticket money refunded; rather to Keith’s disgust, theirs finally arrived 56 minutes later than scheduled....