Los Gigantes

uh, so that was Sunday.
Monday we took the bus to Las Gigantes.

These impressive cliffs have become so popular that the tourist town next to them ruins the effect. All those beautiful photos are very carefully cropped to delete the buildings rising higher and higher on the hillside, and even cutting into the cliffs themselves. The highest complex is an abandoned mess.

Yeah, I should talk. I myself am staying in a monstrous building that blights the view of the landscape for miles around.
What we're most interested in here is finding the head of a hiking trail that goes along the cliff face for a couple kilometers before heading inland to a town where we can surely catch a different bus home. We've borrowed a hikers' guidebook from M's friends, and it says that the trail is officially closed, and that parts of it are dangerous and it's really not for those with vertigo. Oh, and there are a couple of long tunnels, so you'll need a light for the 5-hour hike.
I don't intend to do the whole thing, I just want to get out of town, appreciate the landscape, and turn around.
But we don't even seriously look for the trailhead, which is somewhere along the road our bus just took. M doesn't want to. I don't get that, but there's no forcing the issue.
Fine. We look around the town, and for lunch somewhere along the spectacular coastline.

Lunch in the tourist trap is pretty lame. Boring, big-hotel food; not a cozy local joint in sight. But you can get a shot of the Giants without their creeping urbanisation, and a good look at one of the blowholes.

After lunch, M is so sick of the town that when we go to the bus stop for a trip out of here, she decides on a bus back to our lodgings. So I decide, well, why not stay and find the trailhead after all? And there was a beach promised, that we haven't seen. See ya later, alligator.
The map in the book is pretty lame, but it's not a big town, how hard can it be to find? You can see the scar the trail makes from here. The thing is, I'm trying to follow the directions backwards, and it's written "50 meters after the big rock, turn right" and suchlike, so you have to anticipate.
YEA I found the trail!

And it's a perfectly good trail.
Any time now, it'll take a left and get back to the cliffs.
A really hard left.
Er, no, I've gone the wrong way, this is the loop heading to the town.

But it's pretty, and it's quiet. Just like I like it.
An hour later, here we are. The trailhead to the part across the cliffs.

It really is closed, and hasn't been maintained for years. I try a bit, but I'm not a goat. Even the parts that look ok are covered with pebbles just waiting for you to slip on them, and then there is not much between you and the sea. So never mind. But I'm glad to have found it, and tried.
Oh, look, from up here you can see the beach! There really is one, tucked away between the port and the foot of the cliff. We passed just 50 yards from it earlier.

It's after school now, and most of the beachgoers are local teenagers and families. It's nice. Not noisy with radios or shouting or anything. When I get there, there's a jellyfish warning posted, so people are just playing or sunning on the sand. Once they take that down, people immediately get out there on bodyboards (for what surf?), or just get their feet wet.
Sun's going down - time to go catch a bus.