On This Day – Romilla in Spain

On 23rd April 2016 I was in the village of Romilla in Andalusia, Spain…

When touring and looking for accommodation my first priority is to find one somewhere that is affordable (cheap) and when I have a hire car I prefer somewhere where I can park the car close by.

We were going to the city of Granada and that didn’t satisfy either of these criteria so I found a reasonably priced guest house in the nearby village of Romilla, El Soto de Roma, about ten miles west of the city.

We arrived in the late afternoon and we knew immediately that this wasn’t going to be very thrilling. This place was like a cemetery for the living and apart from the excitement of the visit of mobile vegetable shop our arrival was most likely the only thing that had happened in Romilla all day and possibly all week!

Romilla is small, very small, it doesn’t feature in guide books and doesn’t even have a page on Wikipedia. On the positive side we had a good room in the guest house and from the balcony we began to adjust to the pace of the place which, it has to be said was dangerously close to reverse.

The sun was shining now so we went for a stroll at what I would describe as a sort of normal walking pace but which seemed to startle a couple of the locals who were busy sitting around doing nothing and who broke out into a sweat just watching us amble by and then we came across a bar who seemed surprised to suddenly have some customers.

Anyway, it was very pleasant sitting in the sun at last and we stayed for a second beer and the barman prepared us some complimentary tapas which was nice of him.

Actually, it was a very pleasant and traditional Andalusian village, immaculately clean with white washed and pastel coloured houses and balconies and metal window grills and orange trees decorating the pavements. I rather liked it but as I enjoyed the beer and the tapas and the sunshine I could see a problem coming up just a short way ahead.

I was reluctant to raise the issue of the obvious absence of shops and restaurants in Romilla but despite my efforts to avoid it conversation inevitably turned to evening dining arrangements. These were so limited that our only real option was to return to a service station at the side of the nearby main road in the village of Cijuela which, by the way, gets a one line entry in Wikipedia.

This could have been a real disaster for me let me tell you but luckily it turned out just fine, there was a motel on the site and an excellent reasonably priced restaurant where we enjoyed an unexpectedly good meal.

The guest house served a very good breakfast and we spent the day in Granada where it became obvious that perhaps we should have stayed there after all but it was too late to reverse that decision now so at the end of the day we made our weary way back to the village and the El Soto de Roma.

We rested a while and with no alternative options available made our way back to the village bar for wine and tapas and later we returned to the motorway service station for evening meal where we reflected on a really excellent day and looked forward to moving on to Malaga.