Uhm yes, it is my favourite start of any Camino, no matter the suburbs and how dry the first stages are... I walked that stretch 3 times already. The outskirts of Alicante may look insignificant to the untrained eye, but I love the Ermita de San Pascual and Orito. I wouldn't trade it for anything...!
I'll have to row back a bit on my comments about the outskirts of Alicante, partly because I have never been there but also because they violate one of my own principles about walking the camino - you don't cherry-pick the nice bits: the camino goes where the camino goes if that happens to be slap bang through an industrial estate, that's where you go too. And anyway, you never know what you are going to find.
In my defence, I attach the following annotated (by me) poem:-
Genoa and the Mediterranean
O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,
Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee
When from Torino's track I saw thy face first flash on me.
And multimarbled Genova the Proud,
Gleam all unconscious how, wide-lipped, up-browed,
I first beheld thee clad--not as the Beauty but the Dowd.
Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit
On housebacks pink, green, ochreous--where a slit
Shoreward 'twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.
And thereacross waved fishwives' high-hung smocks,
Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks;
Since when too oft my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:
Whereat I grieve, Superba! . . . Afterhours
Within Palazzo Doria's orange bowers
Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.
But, Queen, such squalid undress none should see,
Those dream-endangering eyewounds no more be
Where lovers first behold thy form in pilgrimage to thee.
Thomas Hardy
This is one of Hardy’s ‘Pilgrimage Poems’, the pilgrimage being to Italy with its sites of antiquity and the graves and places associated with Keats and Shelley, Hardy’s poetic models. His aim was to somehow manage the transition from prose writer to poet, so not necessarily one of his best works. The poem is about the disillusion experienced by the traveller when they go off the conventional tourist track and discover that life in its ordinariness and banality continues everywhere. Spain has breathtakingly beautiful architecture and haunting landscapes, it also has industrial estates and residential suburbs which the camino often passes through because that is where the camino goes. We can’t complain if the Spanish paint their houses or have jobs or hang their washing out to dry.
The picture is of Gijón, early morning.
