The last three days have been cold and wet.  Fortunately we have missed the worst of the bad weather down here in the very tip of south-east Spain - but only just!  There has been snow on the beaches of Alicante and Murcia.  This has been the coldest winter in Spain for 33 years.  Even here in Almeria Province the last few days have been miserable.  Yesterday it rained most of the day so we went into the city of Almeria to visit one of the museums.

I love this city, it always reminds me of an elegant old lady who has fallen on hard times, shabby and worn at the edges, but still fascinating and beautiful in a down-at-heel sort of way.

It doesn't make the most of itself in terms of making money.  For S and I who are on a very tight budget, it's perfect as many of its tourist attractions are free - the stunning Alcazabar, the wonderful Museo de Almeria - and the bars are ridiculously cheap (you can have a fresh orange juice, a tostada, and a coffee for less than 3 euros) probably because the city is still very poor, just as it was when Goytisolo came here.  It's also very friendly, like most ordinary Andalusian towns.

We went into the Museo de Almeria which is beautifully laid-out and curated.  Because of my health problems, I can't spend too long looking round museums, so we had to strictly limit ourselves.  First we took the lift to the 2nd floor and looked at an exhibition about the Agaric people who lived in Almeria in the 2nd millenium BC.  I was intrigued by the socio-political critique that informed the exhibition; sadly, I can't imagine finding anything so explicitly radical in a UK museum!  The museum gives a clear economic analysis of the oppressive hierarchy of the Agaric people, with their idle ruling class that exercised rigid social control over the rest of the population, exploiting the work of the lower classes and keeping them on starvation rations.  The fact that the wealth of the ruling class was based entirely on inherited wealth, not on work or merit, was emphasised in the exhibition.  I wonder how much the thinking behind the exhibition is due to the longterm consequences of Franco's destructive fascist regime.

The tourist attactions in Almeria aren't only cheap but also don't make the most of tourists (perhaps because there are so few) and they never seem to have cafes or souvenir shops, so we had to head out to a bar for lunch (see above!).  It was good to rest for a while.
 After lunch, we returned to look at a beautiful temporary exhibition on the archeological finds from some of the numerous shipwrecks off this coast.  The rugged cliffs and rock formations have led to shipwrecks from the time of the Phoenicians and the Ancient Greeks to the modern period.
It reminded me of one of my favourite novels by a Spanish writer, The Nautical Chart, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.