We have read that one of the world’s largest stalactite caves is nearby, at Nerja which is 20 km west along the coast. We also plan to take the opportunity to visit Nerja, an old fishing village that has been transformed into a holiday paradise.

The day before we go there we order a taxi that will pick us up the next day at ten o’clock at the marina, they want to know which jetty they will pick us up at.

At five to ten, I see a taxi drive out on the pier and disappear into the turning area that is obscured from the boat, it seems to stop so I guess it’s our taxi. We close the boat and go there. There is no taxi there, what happened?

The taxi must have gone during the minute we were both down in the boat and picked up the backpack with the camera and jackets. We’ll wait 15 minutes, but no taxi arrives. We call them and wonder when our taxi will arrive, they say it has already been there and picked us up!

We manage to convince them that we are still in the marina and need a taxi, they send a new car that arrives 20 minutes later and drives us to The caves at Nerja.

Only part of the cave system is open to visitors. The caves are filled with several different kinds of stalactite formations, one formation is over 30 m high, other formations seem to have inspired those who designed the interior of the alien spaceship in the first Alien movie. There are large stalactite formations that have fallen during a great earthquake several hundred thousand years ago, cave paintings made by Stone Age people over 40,000 years ago have also been found. Those caves are not open to tourists so we only got to see pictures of the paintings.

With so many different formations, we found some that resembled petrified faces, what do you see?

There is a tourist train between Nerja and the caves that make it easy to go here or into town when you have been here. There are regular buses as well. The ride takes 10-15 minutes and along the way you pass an aqueduct (Aguila’s aqueduct) built in the 19th century.

The tourist train took us into the center of Nerja just on the outskirts of the old town. We go down to something called Europe’s Balcony down by the sea. Up here you have a nice view along the coast at Nerja. To the east is the cape with Del Este on and to the west are two of the beaches where there are several hotels and in fact some people sunbathing on the beach.

We find our way into the old town with winding alleys and have to look for a while before we find the restaurant with sea view that we saw when we were out on Europe’s Balcony. We are so lucky that even though it is in the middle of the siesta, there is a perfect table outright by the balcony railing towards the cliff down to the beach below.

On the other side of the house is a fantastic terrace framed by plants and with a lovely view of Europe’s Balcony, the sea, and the beach below. We have a wonderful lunch and stay seated for far too long to have time to see more of the city before it’s time to find a taxi that can drive us back to the marina.

The mystery with the taxi

We ordered a taxi to the marina that would drive us from the marina to the caves this morning. I saw it coming but it was gone when we got to the turnaround where it would be waiting for us and the taxi company said they had already picked us up.

When we got back to the boat, we got the explanation!

When we talked to Belinda and Peter on the boat Chili next to us, it turned out that they had also ordered a taxi for two people until ten o’clock. They had told the taxi company to be picked up at the same jetty as us and then the taxi company had assumed that it was the same order and only sent one car. The company had not cared that we were going to Nerja and Peter and Belinda to Almunecar in the other direction along the coast. When I checked the jetty number we were in, it turned out that I used the wrong one when I ordered the taxi, I had chosen the number that was between us and Chili, I should have chosen the one on the other side of the boat.

Up next

The wind becomes favorable again and we sail on to Almerimar, which is another 40 nautical miles east along the Spanish south coast. The idea is that we will stay there for a while so we have time to visit Granada before we continue east into The Mediterranean.