But for the heat, it was like Cork

TODAY, when we woke and opened the curtains, the skies over the Straits of Gibraltar were again peerless blue. The sea, azure and sparkling below them, broke on the sand in a white, crinoline frill.

The sands stretch for miles and the only soul availing of them was a solitary beach fisherman sitting beneath a large sombrero, watching his line.

It was hard to believe that only 48 hours before we had stood on our third floor balcony and watched the elegant trees in the formal gardens below us lash and bend as if they would be rooted from the earth and sent flying over the turreted rooftops and Berber-style chimneys of the small apartment buildings in the complex. The wind howled and the tops of the palms tossed like demented Medusas’ heads, their leaves reflecting the street lights and clashing and slashing like swords in the turmoil of battle. If any late-migrating swallows wanted a tail-wind to carry them across the Straits to Africa, they certainly could have found it. The sheer ferocity of the gale was awesome and all night long the sea, 200 metres from our windows, soughed and boomed.