Spain has carefully managed de-escalation from the lockdown, and now we are on Phase 3, which is one away from the “New Normal”. We are allowed to eat out in restaurants, and drink in bars while maintaining social distancing. We visit the bank in gloves and mask, and the same applies to supermarket shopping.
Last week we celebrated Jeannie’s birthday by driving over to El Repilado, next to Jabugo. It’s a small ungainly place which started out as a railway town. It’s the station for Jabugo, and jamón was originally sent up to Madrid by rail from here in the late 19th Century.
El Repilado spills up the slope from the railway station in a tide of whitewash and cobbles, along the main road, where polished stainless steel tankers rush past, carrying olive oil from Portugal to Italy.
Nowadays the railway operates a couple of passenger trains every day, linking, charmingly and ineffably slowly, small mountain villages or mining communities with two urban centres; Huelva and Zafra. The latter is a town of spires and monuments on the southern edge of Extremadura; a landlocked beautiful place full of palaces and churches and porticoed squares.
Huelva is very different, a large port on the south west coast, east and west of which stretch miles and miles of sandy beaches. The city is not far from the border with Portugal, and bounded by a lagoon full of marsh bird life; sea eagles, flamingos, a grand dabble of ducks. Tiny chameleons conceal themselves in the brush. That remarkable natural environment is besmirched here and there by industrial development, a huge port, a fishing port, a ferry port and a growing town where new developments and tall apartment blocks conceal a simple heart of low built dwellings, and a few excellent shopping streets with some modest examples of modernist architecture, and a grandly overblown neoclassical theatre which opened in the 1920’s.
The spanking new El Carmen food market is a gourmet’s delight. Vegetables of every kind, giant pale pink tomatoes, shiny purple aubergines, green or white asparagus, and salads galore. We especially love the stalls where silvery fresh-eyed fish, hake, bream, sardines and fresh anchovies are displayed alongside, sole, dabs, red mullet, scarlet “urta”, drab but delicious turbot, pale pink shrimp (las gambas blancas de Huelva), scarlet carabineri (giant prawns), heaps of coquinas (delicate smooth pinkish clamshells, with very sweet meat), razor clams, cockles, and here and there a blue Atlantic lobster or a red Mediterranean crayfish. Other fish stalls specialise in fresh tuna.
But I’ve drifted off course by going to Huelva, and the subject of fish brings me back to where I was. On the 18th of June, we were not adventuring out to Huelva, but to that small railway town, El Repilado, which is about 20 minutes from here by car. Five of us off to meet a friend and celebrate Jeannie’s birthday at Bar Camacho. At first sight, it’s an unprepossessing place on the edge of the main road to Portugal, where you can watch the shiny trucks hurtling by. Outside, on the cobbles, and shaded by huge market umbrellas, fenced off from the road by metal Iberian pigs, we know that we will eat well and that we will be eating fresh fish and seafood, perfectly prepared. The look of the place is deceptive; it’s run by the most delightful family, and waiters and bar staff manage to convey a smile though their obligatory masks.
We soon realised, post hand sanitising, that we would not have to strain our food and wine through our face masks, so we relaxed, slipped them down to our necks and tucked in to two dishes of Huelva prawns, a couple of plates of coquinas cooked with garlic and parsley, fresh grilled sardines, and fried anchovies. Oh yes, and some squid gonads and a couple of tortillas de camarón, little red-hot crunchy pancakes of tiny shrimp in chickpea flour.
A few bottles of Verdejo later, a crisp white wine from the Rueda, and we felt for the first time in months, that life could return to a certain kind of pleasurable norm. This was our first outing to a public eating place, and boy, was it good and fun to boot!