Every summer we head to the pretty seaside town of Nerja, about 50kms East of Malaga. Its beaches have always been renowned, first among fishermen, then among the early tourists who started arriving in the 1960s.
Although the city beaches now get packed in the summer, if you drive just a few kilometres further east, to the little known Costa Tropical, it’s a small slice of heaven. This year we set a rule in motion that we have to discover one new thing every day and one of those discoveries was La Riajana, a wild, sun-bleached beach out towards Almeria. To get to it you need to walk through a tunnel, which gives the curious sensation of dropping down a rabbit hole into the ocean, but once through the other side, and past a ramshackle chiringuito where you can get a cold beer and a bag of crisps, cliffs the colour of Sahara dunes dip down to a sea the pale turquoise of icebergs. It’s wild and magical (and completely without shade so don’t forget a parasol) and completely out of this world.