A real gem

A few weeks ago, I went to a winetasting in Perelada, a small medieval town near Begur. The event included a visit to the museum in the adjacent castle before the visit to the winery. I was dreading the museum visit, but it turned out to be fascinating!! The castle dates back to the mid-thirteenth century and houses a library containing over 100,000 books, including one of the largest collections of the works of Cervantes in the world. There are also amazing collections of glass and ceramics.

But the most interesting thing to me, and possibly to those who like old cars, is that the most recent owners of the castle (they acquired it in 1923) also owned the Hispano Suiza car company. Almost immediately I remembered two instances of seeing these old cars on display under vastly different circumstances. In 2016, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston hosted an exhibit of Art Nouveau automobiles from the 1920’s and 1930’s. The exhibit was exquisite and the cars were unique and modern for their time, and so beautiful.

Also, randomly, and I wrote about this in Costa del Sol Revisited, there was another Hispano Suiza vehicle in the permanent exhibit in Málaga at the Museum of Automobiles and Fashion, which I visited last year. The brand is known for its high-performance luxury cars and aircraft engines manufactured from 1904 to 1946. Hispano Suiza was recently revived in 2019 with the all-electric Carmen hypercar. The model sells for a mere $2.5 million.

The company’s emblem is a stylized stork. it pays tribute to a French fighter pilot who had a stork painted on his plane powered by a Hispano Suiza engine during World War I. His squadron was known as “Les Cigognes” (The Storks). But also, and it may be coincidental, there is a colony of about 30 stork couples that nest on the property. The family paid homage to the storks by creating its Cigonyes wines.

In addition to the museum, and the cars, the family hired architects to renovate the existing buildings on the property for use in its current enterprise of making high quality and experimental wines. It is definitely a unique destination.

To keep you up-to-date on my wildlife journal, I recently saw a fox one night on the road near Begur.

And in the grocery store, I saw something I thought interesting – they were selling celery by the stalk and sun-dried tomatoes in bulk. Maybe these things are not unusual, but you won’t find them in Kroger!

One of the best parts about living here is that I’m so close to other beautiful destinations, and discount airlines make travel fairly easy (is travel ever easy these days??). These photos are a sampling from my recent trip to Switzerland – land of glaciers (melting), clean air, and chocolate!!