The humans in Team Basil awoke to a slight clanking sound. When Sarah stepped out at the unearthly hour of 7 am with the dogs, she quickly returned to report that the clanking was not Basil falling apart but rather a market being assembled around us!
The app I use for our non campsite stops usually makes clear which days markets take place if relevant, but not in this case. Bleary eyed, I got dressed just in time for a man to knock on the door and ask us to move. While our Scottish neighbours just moved to an adjacent street we decided to find a more salubrious location for our early breakfast. We did. LIDL car park!
We needed to do some shopping and it is not the first time we have combined a meal with a stay in a LIDL car park. It enabled me to nip in for a lovely croissant.
Today was really just a drive to a campsite on the coast near the Portuguese border, but recently I have discovered a website called Atlas Obscura which details the location of thousands of slightly unusual sights. So I programmed in two, which were just off our route, into SatNav.
The first, near Seville, was the Solúcar facility. It consists of acres of large mirrors which track the sun and focus it onto one of several towers to generate heat of up to 570 degrees Celsius at the point of focus which is then used to generate steam, drive a turbine and generate 2MWs of electricity from the largest tower. Eventually Spain wants to generate enough electricity to power about 180,000 homes.
Unfortunately when we visited the mirrors did not appear to be focused. In the photos I’ve seen, when they are working you can see sun beams reflecting from the mirrors up to the towers, either that or those photos have been photoshopped!
Another hour or so driving brought us to a large Spanish cemetery on the outskirts of the port town of Huelva. After a bit of searching I located the grave of Major William Martin, RM.
In 1943 the British and Americans were preparing to invade Sicily. British intelligence wanted to persuade the Germans that the real plan was to invade Greece and Sardinia to draw German troops away from Sicily. Naval intelligence procured the corpse of a man called Glyndwr Michael, a drifter who had died from ingesting rat poison. They dressed him as a Major in the Royal Marines and filled his pockets with a back story for a Major William “Bill” Martin, including love letters from his fiancée, banks statements, theatre tickets etc.
They handcuffed a briefcase to his wrist containing top secret plans for the invasion of Greece and Sardinia and then a submarine released the corpse near the Spanish coast dressed in a life jacket to make it look as if he had been involved in a plane crash at sea.
The body was found by a Spanish fisherman and the Spanish authorities allowed German intelligence to examine it before handing his personal effects back to the British and burying “Major Martin” with full military honours.
The deception seemed to work and the Germans increased their military presence and defences in both Sardinia and Greece, believing that the subsequent invasion of Sicily to be a feint and refusing to re-enforce Sicily for another two weeks.
So I was standing in front of the grave of Major William Martin, RM, a man who never existed. In 1988 Britain eventually told the Spanish of the real identity of the man buried in Huelva cemetery. Now has been added two lines at the foot of the grave stone: “Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin, RM” which I suppose, in a way, he did!
We finished our journey with a short hop to Camping Playa Taray (37.2055543, -7.2657307 €14 on ACSI). It is more our sort of campsite, small and a little disorgansied, on a much more pleasant part of the Spanish coast. No tower blocks, in fact little development of any sort and an endless soft golden sandy beach, which we have already started to explore, much to the dogs’ delight.
