Week 2. 6th April – 12th April 2026. Buitrago del Lozoya to Nerja, Spain – 366 miles.
Last week, our journey started with an uneventful, pleasant sea crossing from the UK. Our first week also took us into the Rioja wine region, where we sampled some of the local wine and stayed in some lovely cities in the area. We are now pushing further south this week and heading for the Spanish coast
Monday 6th April 2026 (Buitrago del Lozoya to Aranjuez – 82 miles)
It was a peaceful night here in the hills north of Madrid, and we slept well. We have breakfast and bid farewell to our friendly host, after squeezing the night’s fee into his hand, and set off towards Madrid. Del is driving, and H is navigating.
Madrid has a very large and sprawling low-emission zone, which is very difficult to find information about. As a foreign vehicle, we think we are supposed to register before entering, but the only way is to email the government at least 20 days before, or it’s a €200 fine. Google Maps insists on taking us through the zone as there’s a sneaky little bit of it right across the outer ring motorway. This isn’t about greenness anymore; it’s just about catching people out and charging them. Because we have not been able to register, it means that we have to burn more fuel, go the long way round and create more emissions, just to avoid the emissions-free zone! Ah, but you see, what happens outside a city’s emissions zone is not their problem, it’s someone else’s, we’ve got your money…
H finds a complicated route avoiding the zone, passing through some small towns, but with some lovely scenery.
We arrive at the campsite just outside, and within walking range of the centre of Aranjuez (yes, the place of the concerto of the same name). It’s a very nice site with helpful staff who let us pick our place, so we find one and get set up in a nice, long, cosy pitch near all of the facilities. There’s a recommended restaurant overlooking the river, so we head over there and have an impromptu lunch that was rather larger than expected: a couple of salads, some baby squid, and fried pork.
We have 2 days at the campsite, so today is a bit of a reset day to do laundry and to give Jess her weekly clean. H does an excellent job of cleaning the toilet and bathroom, you know!
It’s a beautiful, warm day, so we have everything set up outside the van and are just chilling out. The temperature is just right, so for dinner we will try out a new bit of kit that we have bought. It’s an outdoor single-ring gas stove.
Every camper has one, and now we do too. We have some thin leftover chicken pieces, which we fry with onions and put on a baguette along with some asparagus and chorizo. It all works well, and we’re very pleased with our new purchase.
We sit out until gone 9pm in the warm air. Del gets another thrashing at chess… Oh, and cards too later on!
Tuesday 7th April 2026 (Aranjuez – Day 2)
We wake up to a cloudy day, quite a difference from yesterday, with the bright blue sky and hot sun. We take the 30-minute walk into town, which doesn’t really ‘wow’ us, it’s nice and all that, but just a bit ordinary… People come here mainly for the Royal Palace and the gardens. The gardens are huge and spread out over a large area, but at the moment they aren’t looking their best after the winter, and the grey sky doesn’t help. People are working on them, so by the summer they should look marvellous.
After a rather handsome and cheap three-course Spanish lunch, with wine, we walk back to the palace. Our legs are a little heavy… We have decided to pay the 9 euros admission fee and take a look. The history of the palace is greater than the town, which doesn’t look very old.
Some research shows it to be one of the best palaces in Spain and very ornate. We get our tickets and are checked in by security. This place obviously is set up for massive crowds in the summer, but fortunately, today it seems to be just us. Every room is spectacular and ornate, very impressive. It’s very good and well worth the entry fee, especially as we’ve got it mainly to ourselves.
We spend an hour admiring the various rooms, like the porcelain room where everything, including the walls, is made of porcelain and the banqueting room with its impressive frescos. A trip well worth making.
Today, we are tired, more so than usual. We are not sure what’s going on, and now it is catching up with us, having done a good few miles of walking and digesting our 3-course lunch, so we trudge, and we mean trudge, back to Jess, which seems to take forever. She will be a sight for sore eyes.
A good day today. A quiet night in on Jess.
Wednesday 8th April 2026 (Aranjuez to Noalejo – 199 miles)
A very nice stay in Aranjuez, we really enjoyed the Royal Palace. Today we are moving on to… We don’t really know where to yet. That’s the good thing about this van caper, with plenty of time. It’s good to have a basic plan, but when it comes to the day to day you can just make bits up as you go along.
It rained most of last night and was sometimes very noisy on the roof. It doesn’t make for the best of sleep, so we’re not in the best of spirits this morning. We don’t know how far we will travel today. Maybe to Valdepenas, maybe to Jaen or even further to a cute little privately owned park up in the Andalusian hills. We set off after breakfast and have our usual Spanish coffee from a restaurant on the motorway. We really enjoy this ritual of stopping on the motorway for a coffee. The coffee is delicious, and we intend one day to have lunch in one of these roadside establishments. They always have fantastic menus, and they are so cheap. M&S or Waitrose on the M6, it’s not… This stop this morning has a full fire and roasting rack for whole pigs…
It’s a dull drive in very gloomy weather and rain, and soon H gets bored and so swaps with Del, who can drive for hours and hours like a machine.
As the weather is so rubbish, we decide to press on south. It’s raining heavily and 11 degrees, and we receive a text from a friend back home on the island showing her sunbathing in her back garden in the 22-degree heat.
As we head south, we soon cross into the province of Andalusia, and the roads become terrible, shaking Jess and us for a good 50 miles.
The park up tonight is in a little town of Noalejo, which is between Jaen and Granada, with views of the olive tree-covered hills.
It’s a lovely place with everything you need, and very nice showers. It is even colder here, though, as we are now over 1000m above sea level. It’ll be a cold night tonight.
H whips up steak and dauphinoise potatoes for dinner.
We have a glass of red in the cab seats with our super view.
The owner here is very friendly and has given us a little bottle of his homemade olive oil. We’ve bought a bottle of his red wine also to put in the cellar in Jess, (the back wardrobe).
Thursday 9th April 2026 (Noalejo to Granada – 30 miles)
The weather has improved today with blue skies and promises of 28 degrees later. We have a coffee and a simple breakfast before setting off towards Granada. We are staying at another private parking area just outside the city for two nights. The Camping Bellavista offers everything you need and is only 30 miles from where we are now. The plan is to stay there for two nights, it’s nice and close to Granada on the bus and tram routes. Granada is another city with a LEZ, so we won’t be going too close to the centre in Jess.
We stop for our morning coffee, and Del has a magdalena – a sweet breakfast pastry, and H has tomato bread – a toasted small stick of bread with olive oil and grated tomatoes, it’s delicious and one of H’s favourite Spanish breakfasts.
We arrive at the site. It’s basic but very well done. It’s not a campsite as such, but it has everything you need in a well-maintained place. A little shower block which is immaculate and all the services laid on, it all looks very new.
It’s a 20-minute tram ride into the centre. It’s now 28 degrees, so we have shorts and t-shirts on, but the locals all have big puffer coats on and warm boots. We stand out just a bit, but we don’t care; it’s hot. The Spanish must have a different idea of warm weather.
Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing the famous Alhambra Palace on this trip. We tried to book a few days ago, only to find that it’s booked until May 11th. It’s a shame, but it’s something that we’ve seen before, so it’s not a disaster; we will get the chance to see “other stuff“.
Del has broken yet another pair of sunglasses (probably the third in the last 4 months), so we need to find him another pair and a sun hat to protect his face. We walk around the souk/arab market area of the town and find both easily.
Of course, we can’t resist having a bit of southern food, so we dive into a restaurant bar and have Flamenquin – pork and Spanish ham rolled with cheese and fried. We also grab some fried aubergines with honey. The south of Spain is famous for frying a lot of its food, so we will have to be careful not to overindulge too much whilst we are here. We are also given a free tapa with our drinks, which used to be the norm in Spain, but tapas have now become very trendy and, in some cases, expensive. Granada is one of the few places to retain the tradition of a free tapa with your drink.
The backstreets are interesting here in Granada, and there are lots of lovely shops to look at.
We eventually stumble on the cathedral. It’s the 2nd biggest in Spain (after the beautiful Sagrada Família in Barcelona), and it’s very impressive. The scale of it is immense, and the decorations are incredibly intricate.
It was built after the Catholics overcame the Moors after nearly 800 years of ruling, during which Christianity was banned. They certainly made up for the long wait with this amazing building.
We get back to the van on the tram just as the sun has gone in and the visibility has dropped to about 200m. It’s quite surreal all around us; we suppose it must be a dust storm or something in the air.
We have a small supper of ham and cheese and some of the biggest strawberries you’ve ever seen.
It is Jess’s birthday today; she is 8 years old already. The time has gone very quickly.
Friday 10th April 2026 (Granada – Day 2)
The weather was pretty bad here last night, with strong gusts of wind, which meant battening down the hatches but also made the temperature inside Jess uncomfortably warm. Consequently, we’ve both not slept well again.
We’re slow to get going this morning, and it’s raining anyway. All the vans here are covered in sand after last night’s storms.
We head out, slowly, into town and get tickets for the tourist sightseeing train/bus thing; the idea is that we can just sit and get driven around all the major sites in the town.
The local tram takes us near the centre but not in as far as it probably should, and a lot of the streets are narrow and hilly, so there are not a lot of buses. The streets are cobbled in many parts, and with the flow of pedestrians, the pavements have the slippiest streets ever. We’ve not found it that easy getting around here. Granada is a wonderful place, but it’s very compressed and tightly packed despite the sprawling area of the city. We hope the tourist train will make things easier for us.
Like all these tourist trains it bounces us around and feels like it has square wheels. We get off and have a look around the oldest square, where they used to execute people and walk around yet another Arabic section. There are lots of them here, all selling the same stuff. We find ourselves in ‘tea street’ and go into one of the lavishly decorated Arabic tea houses.
The tea menu is amazing and H plumps for a green tea, flavoured with cinnamon, cardamom and ginger. Del has a coffee to help wake him up. We also try one of their pistachio baklavas and a slice of pistachio cheesecake (everything is pistachio here).
After a 40-minute wait at the train stop, we eventually set off again, bouncing around up to a viewpoint. It seems that there are not enough trains on this route, and there are about 50 tourists at the next stop trying to get on, and it starts to rain. Realising that that could be us if we get off, we decide to admire the view from our seats and stay on board the square-wheeled train.
It’s not been the best experience on the train; we can’t imagine how it will be in the summer when it’s really busy. We head back to Jess just in time as a vicious wind storm with some rain is upon us. We have had enough of today, really. We are both tired, Granada was a nice city but packed and tiring and the train was rubbish, so we have a light dinner, shower and then turn in, earlyish…
Saturday 11th April 2026 (Granada to Nerja – 60 miles)
We wake up this morning, after, finally, an excellent night’s sleep We have woken up though to find that we have an orange van! A lot of rain fell in the night, and it contained a lot of sand. We’ve never seen Jess so mucky. All of the vans here are all looking a bit… orange.
We slowly pack up. Today we are heading, finally, for the south coast of Spain to a regular stop of Nerja. We stop at a coffee stop on route for our usual full Caffeine hit and a jet wash. She needs it. So does Jess… It’s only just over an hour away and a spectacular drive, mainly downhill through the Sierra Nevada and past huge reservoirs and dams, which are full of water. We’re not surprised after the rain we have seen recently.
We did enjoy our stay in Granada, we had a great place just 20 minutes from the centre via an excellent tram system. We don’t think that we did the place justice, really. First, we were both absolutely worn out from lack of sleep, but also the town is rather exhausting, and that’s in the spring…! It’s a very beautiful city, very tightly packed with streets just weaving around randomly; there appeared to be no “centre”. Also, like all cities now, Granada too has a LEZ (Low Emissions Zone) and again, some of it is designed to catch you out.
As we start our journey, Del reminds H that we seem to be heading back towards the town, and that maybe we shouldn’t, unless we want a 200 euro fine. Quick off the mark, H soon has us re-routed, burning more fuel and polluting the air outside of Granada. They don’t care, though… It’s someone else’s problem now.
At last, we can see the sea, and we arrive at the campsite that we have pre-booked. We’ve been here a few times; this is probably our 4th time. We love the rusticness of it. It’s full of fruit trees, including avocado trees. We set ourselves up in the sun very quickly, and with a drink. We are getting slick at this.
We always seem to plan our next trip while on one, and this trip is no exception. We have a plan brewing for next winter. H settles down with a computer and starts some travel planning, which keeps her quiet for a while. Soon, the rain starts again, so we take everything in. We planned on a walk to get some exercise, but that’s been dashed. Oh well…
Dinner is a rather splendid pesto pasta and salad with a glass of wine from the camper spot in Noalejo, a couple of days ago, it’s rather nice.
The rain is off and on for the rest of the early evening, so after showers, we just settle in for the night. Tomorrow is another day.
Sunday 12th April 2026 (Nerja – Day 2)
We had our fair share of rain last night; the weather forecasters are not doing a good job at the moment.
The morning is cool and fresh, but pleasant. After breakfast, we get ourselves ready and set off for a good walk along the seafront. The sea is huge and crashing on the beach, and more wind is forecast for later in the day with a peak overnight.
We’ve never been to Nerja this late in the season; our visit down here is normally around January. It’s also much quieter than we’re used to, with lots of empty pitches.
We have a coffee at a beach bar and discuss where to have lunch. Priorities first and foremost!
There’s a good beach bar further up the beach that does barbecues and a lively restaurant a mile further on; unfortunately, both of these are being blasted by a fierce wind coming off the sea, not quite how we imagined our Sunday lunch. So we walk into town and wander through the backstreets looking at the tourist shops.
It’s busy today; the sun is out now, with good, clean, fresh air and a strong wind. It’s lovely. The Balcon de Europa is a viewing point overlooking the coast. It’s very busy, but while we are there, down below us, we spot a restaurant on a private beach that belongs to a hotel, it’s tucked away out of the wind. Fearing that they might be fully booked, we head on down and to our surprise, there are plenty of places, so we book ourselves in for 1pm.
We walk around the town some more, exploring the bits we haven’t seen before. It’s a lovely place, Nerja, very popular this time around with the Brits. Soon it’s time for lunch. We are given a nice table just a few meters from the sea which crashes into the nearby rocks before settling on the small beach.
A lovely place for a Sunday lunch where we share a tuna salad and a Fideuà (like a paella but with noodles). It’s a very pleasant afternoon. This is helped along with a glass of Cava, followed by a glass of cold white wine each.
The wind is now straight in our face as we battle through the strong wind back to the campsite, and Jess, we share an ice-cream in the hope that it will take the edge off the wind… It doesn’t…
Tonight the wind is predicted to be 52 knots, which is a severe gale, and already it’s started to build up. We put everything away outside, the table and chairs, etc., and sit inside, only for the wind to stop and the sun to come out again, so we get the chairs out again and get the last sun of a very good day.
Tonight is games night. We have a collection of escape games from UNLOCK, so we get on with that, ending with Del getting beaten at cards… Again.
To see more of Del’s photographs from the past week, have a look here…
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