Costa Brava

I remember Naipaul saying to me, He had been in Spain.

He was in the Costa Brava and the Costa del Sol.

And he said someone should write about Spain as a corrupted seacoast with tourists.

He said that could be a whole subject.

He was kind of dazzled by it.

And that was one of the motivations for me to write.

the Pillars of Hercules because I thought, well, I'm going to go to Spain, but I'm just going to go along the Costa Brava, Marbella, the place where there's tourists, mainly, you know, Germans, English, whatever, and write about that.

So I wrote about that.

Oh, great question.

I think the Costa Brava is beautiful.

So the area we were talking about before, like going up towards Girona and Figueres and basically riding up towards France, you could follow the Eurovelo 8 towards France.

So that's one of the ones I recommend.

I would argue overdeveloped.

Um, you know, early on the Germans and the Brits really, really developed that before the rest of Portugal got, uh, let's say before the rest of the Portuguese coastline got, you know, really, uh, developed and, uh, the rest of Portugal basically has avoided some of that coastal development, uh, because of subsequent laws that were introduced, uh, after the Albuquerque had been kind of, you know, developed along with this, you know, the, the sort of Costa Brava of, of Spain, um, you know, sort of that area from like, um, Malaga all the way to, you know, Gibraltar, um, uh, that area got, you know, extremely coastal soul, Costa Brava, that, that area got extremely developed along with the Southern, you know, sort of coastal corridor of, of, of Portugal.

Uh, and the rest of Portugal go, you know, north of that is really, it's the most pristine coastline in all of Europe, like hands down.

It's not even a question.

Last Show with David Cooper.

We are going to go to Spain's Costa Brava.

Costa Brava? I have a bone to pick with that area, by the way, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Where waters are heavily polluted and a sponge might be the answer to cleaning it up.

But even better than this story is the name of the sponge, which I absolutely love.

It looks like a kidney as well.

So this sponge is found along the Mediterranean coast.

And a couple of years ago, they started research along Costa Brava in Spain.

Me and Linda took a coach tour when we were very poor.

We travelled by coach to the Costa Brava.

And we took our own food and we stopped off at...

The coach stopped off at a petrol station in La Junquera.

That's what we used to go on our holidays.

And I told Peter Richardson from the comic strip about it and they used to go and visit it as well because they were...

They used to holiday in the Costa Brava, yeah.

They used to go and visit our pate.

and you put it in the notebook where it is.

Many of the sunken ships in the Costa Brava have been plundered.

Tourism and lax legislation made these boats an easy prey until the 80s of the 20th century.

El Triunfante, very close to the coast, is a paradigm of this plundering.