Family, Friends, and Fun!
Cartagena, Spain was a beautiful city. In addition to the amazing and rich Roman history, the city today is just beautiful. It was exceptionally clean, which we noticed immediately and kept noticing. The street cleaners were out at the crack of dawn to sweep and wash all the streets in the city centre. And there were constantly cleaning crews all day long keeping everything tidy. The architecture is beautiful here, with wide streets that are paved in marble, tons of cute shops and cafes, and plenty of parks and natural spaces.
Our apartment was situated right in the heart of downtown Cartagena and was one of the most spacious and nicest places we have stayed this year. It also had separate bedrooms for the girls. Hooray! Being so central, we were able to walk and explore all over. We stumbled across some amazing little hidden gems, including quite a few playground areas. Our girls are obsessed with every playground they find, even if it’s a toddler park. They can always find a way to make anything fun. They especially love to climb anything and everything, which they can do at pretty much every park!
Our favourite spot we found was this little square that was a few blocks off the main tourist street. This area seemed full of locals, but we rarely saw other tourists make their way here. There were two playgrounds, fountains, a skate park, a climbing structure, and some midway rides that were occasionally open in the open centre of the square. Around it were dozens of cafes and restaurants. We went to a few but mainly frequented two due to their line of sight to the playground areas that our girls preferred the most. It was lovely to sit outside at a café and have a café asiatico together while the girls happily played, climbed, and generally tired themselves out. There was an outstanding smash burger restaurant in this square, as well, which we ate at a couple of times. Similarly, the girls were able to run off and climb/play until their meals were ready. So perfect! We love how throughout Spain (and Portugal!), they seem to have a lot of cafes and restaurants next to playgrounds. They seem to really focus on making outings fun for the whole family. I wish this was a thing back in Canada!
We also loved getting out to Portman, a smaller town with a population of 2,000 in the high season (summer months) and 1,000 in the low season (winter months). My aunt and uncle came and stayed here for two weeks during our trip here. It was about a 20-minute drive from our place in Cartagena. Portman was such a cute town, with the beach a 15-minute walk from their condo, multiple cafes and shops within a 5-minute walk from their condo and set in a beautiful area where it was bordered by mountains on three sides and the Mediterranean on the fourth side.
My aunt and uncle came out to tour properties to potentially buy one. We toured several properties with them and were astounded by the cheap cost of housing in this town. We were so intrigued by a gorgeous, 3-bedroom condo with a private rooftop patio above in a complex with a gorgeous community pool. If only we were in a position to retire and not return to Canada, we would have been all over it!! We still dream about how nice it would be to own that property and live there. And we did buy a lotto ticket, hoping to win almost $200 million (CAD) and make our dream a reality. But alas, we did not win and so we will not be buying property in the south of Spain right now and living a life of leisure for the rest of our days.
It was so nice to catch up with them. They are some of our closest family, and we got together with them at least once a week for over a decade up until we left Canada. We missed them dearly and our card and game nights. They brought the five requisite decks to play Canasta and we played a lot of it, along with other card games, while they were here. We also shared meals together, toured some sights together, enjoyed cafes together, and went to the Portman beach together. We had the best time and missed them as soon as they left again.
In addition to getting to see family from back home, we also got to reconnect with friends we made in Oria, Spain in the summer. We are less than a two-hour drive from Oria. Our original plan until we needed to pivot last spring was that we would spend our time here in Cartagena and then go spend a month in Oria. But we shifted things around and moved our Oria time up to August, instead.
The girls were beyond thrilled to get to go back to Oria. They missed their friends, Maggie, Juniper, and Tamirand, all of whom live there permanently. They also missed all of Maggie’s pets, the four dogs and three cats we wrote about back in the summer! We also missed their parents, who we had become friends with.
We made two trips out to Oria. The first trip it was raining and not the nicest weather, but we all still had a blast catching up. We had to drag the kids away. The second time was gorgeous weather, and we spent most of it outdoors and enjoyed a delicious potluck together. The kids spent most of the day in the tree house area, creating quite the cozy home and inventing all kinds of interesting things, including a pulley to get them up and down. We all even got to assist in putting out an unexpected brush fire on the property!
They all gathered a lot of old almonds they found on the ground and cracked them open with rocks to get the almond nuts out. The almond trees were all blossoming with their gorgeous pink and white flowers that smelled deliciously of honey! It was amazing to see more of the life cycle of the almond tree since we were exploring that with the girls so much in August, just before harvest time. It also seemed appropriate, as we follow the York Steiner School still and noticed shortly after our trip to Oria that they had a post up about how the Grade 3 class was learning all about almond trees! Who knew we were following Waldorf curriculum learning so closely?
In addition to exploring Cartagena and Portman, we explored an area called La Manga. There wasn’t much open at the moment, but we understand it is party central in the summer. We still enjoyed walking around this sleepy town, exploring the open cafes, the plentiful beaches, the lighthouse, a playground, and generally getting nice, long walks in (mostly along the beach!). This area is a long strip about 21 km long and 100 m wide, with the Mediterranean Sea on one side and a lagoon on the other side. So, there are gorgeous beaches on both sides. And tons of holiday apartments. Hence why it becomes party central in the summer season.
We also made a trip to Murcia one day, the capital of the region we are staying in (also called Murcia!). It was a cute city, with tons of pretty buildings, a river running through the city in the core with a beautiful walk along it, and a nice area on the opposite side of the river that seemed to us to be the more local area. We found an amazing café that we sat at for our lunch, which had some delicious Spanish tapas to eat. We loved it all, but especially the braised beef cheek in a sauce that we got. Yum! The girls curled up with books until after the meal, when we let them run off to find a playground nearby while we had a coffee. While we are glad we explored Murcia, it was much like other bigger cities. The bigger European cities are quite pretty, and fun to tour around for a bit, but we were happy to return to our smaller slice of heaven in Cartagena at the end of the day.
We are so grateful for all the family and friend time, and getting to re-connect with people who are important to us. It made this month of travel extra special for us. Plus, the time to explore Cartagena and some surrounding areas. As well as all the amazing outdoor time we got here and the Roman explorations from our other blog posts. There was so much variety and every moment felt very full this month. We wish we could have won the lottery and stayed here forever, but instead, we will need to look forward to returning one day for another vacation and exploring this area even more. Because we will definitely be back in this area again!
