After our visit to El Rocio and Almonte we finished our day in El Puerto Santa Maria. We chose to base ourselves in El Puerto Santa Maria which is a small town on the Rio Guadalete for the next 7 days. From here we plan to visit the city of Cadiz, somewhere we had wanted to visit for some time, and to also spend a day exploring the coast up to Sanlúcar de Barrameda which sits on the Guadalquivir River and is famous for its sherry and it’s horse races on the beach.

El Puerto Santa Maria was a relaxing town to stay in. It’s very authentic, friendly and easy to walk around. It had an abundance of traditional bars and a lovely promenade along the river.

It is also home to Osborne which is famous for its brandy and sherry and its black bull adverts you find throughout Spain.

We loved it and the whole region and if we return to Spain we both agreed that we would consider basing ourselves there long term (Or perhaps Cadiz hard to choose)

We stopped at this tiny bar (hole in the wall) to try their casero vermut. There were a couple of very old guys holding up the bar drinking a glass of sherry but not much else was happening. The barman showed us a bottle of gin explaining it was the “magico”, as he poured half a glass of gin before topping it up with vermut. As we drank our very strong vermut we noticed this certificate on the wall which we believe is a business registration from 1940 for the Hijos of Jimenez (children of Jimenez) Varela S.L. We thought it was something about a social club but after further research discovered that the SL in Spain, stands for Sociedad Limitada, is a private limited company suited for most small and medium size business. Where it says “Accion a favor de Don” the writing is faint but we think it says Don Pedro Luis … not sure of the next name and then Jimenez. Finishing our vermut, we could hardly walk to the next bar!