"A map of Tarifa's location" Top 5 Page for this destination Tarifa (Cadiz) Favorite Tip by Bwana_Brown

Favorite thing: By this stage of our 3-week Christmas/New Year get-away to Spain, we were past the two week mark and had already covered almost all of our 'orange' route shown on this map. We then awoke to rain for the first time, in Nerja on the Mediterranean Sea coast, with weather prospects not looking good for a few more days. That was when we made the decision to simply drive west to the start of the Atlantic coastline of Spain where the Strait of Gibraltar empties - if it was going to rain we might as well be where we really wanted to be!

It did not take much effort to retrace our steps as we cruised down the coast on Spain's beautiful divided toll highway system (there is another excellent highway beside it without tolls if you want to save money but not as much time), enabling us to reach Tarifa by about 4 PM. Like the Mediterranean, this part of Spain also has mountains fringing the coastline but the Atlantic is a much more unrelenting foe than the tamer Mediterranean Sea - making for some great weather memories!

Fondest memory: After enjoying Tarifa itself on our first night in town, we headed on up the coast, eventually reaching Vejer de la Frontera, south of Cadiz where we spent our second night before returning to Tarifa for another go-round. On that return trip, we took the time to detour toward the coast once more to take in the hippy-ish town of Bolonia and the next-door 2000-year old Roman ruins of Baelo Claudia. We enjoyed everything about this part of Spain - especially the fact that the weather began improving as soon as we arrived! The morning after our tour of Baelo Claudia found us facing New Years Eve with no place booked for accommodations and our time in Spain running out, so we headed east again to the Mediterranean coast where we were lucky to find a room in Torremolinos (just outside Malaga) at the hostal we had stayed in near the very beginning our our trip.