We were looking forward to our visit to Alghero. Our friends who had visited here really liked it, and the guide books raved about its mixture of Catalan and Italian culture. It is referred to as little Barcelona by some of the local inhabitants. Since we both enjoyed our visit to Barcelona immensely, and we love Italy we were thinking that we were in for a real treat.
For the very first time on this trip we were faced with the prospect of rain. So instead of debating how many windows and vents to leave open to try to keep François cool, we buttoned everything up when we left for town.
Alghero was conquered by the Catalans around 1340 and remained under their rule until 1700 when it was ceded to Spain. In the early 1800’s it was ceded to the House of Savoy in Italy and has been part of Italy since. It has retained its Catalan roots as 28% of the local population speaks a dialect of Catalan as well as Italian.
It is a pretty town, but as much as I tried I couldn’t see the Spanish/Catalan influence. Ton said I was being too harsh, but that’s not what I mean, Alghero is a beautiful Mediterranean city, but I was expecting it to feel different than the many beautiful Mediterranean cities we have visited over the last two years and it didn’t, it felt Italian to me.
Ton thought the city was really nice, and she took the lead in exploring it. She enjoyed window shopping and looking at the red coral jewelry that comes from this area. The town is very upscale with a lot of high end European brands lining the main street. It reminded me a bit of Taormina in Sicily which also had the same upscale feel to the shopping.
We walked around for a couple of hours, and while we saw a couple of Spanish restaurants, we ended up with a seafood pizza which was really good. We finished the day by walking the battlements of the fort covering the harbor. They had an interesting displays of the types of weapons that would have defended the walls from catapults to trebuchets to cannon. On a different day with a different set of expectations I think Alghero would have been a high light for me, but not today.
We headed back a little early as we had to make some decisions about our next couple of weeks. As we get closer to November, more and more of the campgrounds are closing down so the logistics of moving around is getting a little more complicated. I spent the next few hours looking at our options for camping, ferry schedules, hotels, and rent a cars to try to plan our next 8 to 10 days. So our first decision was to rent a car from the airport and base out of our very expensive campground for the next four days to explore northern Sardinia. The second is that we are going to take a ferry Friday for Corsica because of limited ferry options that I did not anticipate. It turns out the ferry I had planned to take which runs on a frequent schedule does not take motorhomes and we are limited to a single ferry that runs every three days, so our time in Italy is going to come to an end very soon. Corsica is going to be complicated also, but I will save that for later.
