Zahara de los Atunes
And a special thank you to my readers
I want to begin this letter by thanking you - my beloved readers.
I started this little Substack one year ago. I was searching for a home for my writing, but after all I found a community that I needed more than anything.
I intended to approach it with honesty, heart, and humor. I wanted to bring you along with me as I stumble through Portugal as a writer and mother and make something useful of it. Something light, loving, and worth your time.
But shortly after I began, October 7 and its nightmarish aftermath unfolded, and despite my best efforts, it has dominated my thoughts, feelings, and inevitably my writing ever since.
Becoming a new mother in a new country was daunting. But learning how to care for my first born while bearing witness to genocide of the Palestinian people felt insurmountable at times.
I have often turned to my writing to make sense of the world. Although many days even that felt impossible beneath the weight of the past year.
Thank you for staying with me through these heavy days. For reading and writing to me. For sharing your thoughts. For encouraging and supporting me even when grief and sadness hung heavy in all of my words.
I am deeply grateful for your loyal readership, and even more for your kinship.
After one year of starting this loving endeavor, I hope to continue to bring you more letters, essays, and ideas to challenge and inspire you, uplift you, and hopefully offer words that matter to you. I have my heart set on more interviews with authors, inviting you to join me for an international book club in the future, and more things I am thinking through.
Thank you for inspiring me in ways I could have never imagined and giving me a reason to keep writing.
Now, I bring you this week’s letter from Zahara de los Atunes in the South of Spain’s Costa de la Luz region, where I foolishly thought I would be vacationing for a week before quickly realizing that holidays with a toddler is less a vacation and more a relocation. (I wish I could take credit for this clever re-wording, but it was another brilliant mom on the internet where I learned and it and whose name I sadly don’t remember.)
After a rough stretch of solo parenting in Lisbon for the past five months, I was looking forward to a desperately needed vacation with my husband (who has been working and commuting from Madrid), and our son Jaad.
Little did we know, Jaad, had other plans for us.
I soon surrendered my vision of lavishly lounging on the shores of Costa de la Luz, and redirected my energy to chasing Jaad around while slathering sunscreen on him, incessantly hydrating him, trying to deter him from escaping our hotel room, and peeling pistachios for him while he sat blissfully on the beach.
I remained mostly calm while Jaad hurled verbal demands at us, first in English, and then in Portuguese as if to assert that he made himself clear.
Our most coveted moment of each day included a luxurious European style breakfast with endless jamón and cheese, which gave way to Jaad’s unruly resistance to eat and remain seated at the table every single time.
The culmination of our relocation came as I stared at Jaad’s bare body and my own pale skin and wondered why his tan was so much better than mine, and if he had somehow inherited some superior sun absorbing gene from my husband’s side of the family.
By the end of Jaad’s Summer Spain vacation, as we came to call it, he beamed with that fresh post-vacation glow and I plopped down hot and sweaty in the car, turned to my husband and asked, why do I feel more tired and run down now than I did before this vacation?
Because as my dear friend Doni once wisely advised me - that’s what we are supposed to do as parents!
For those of you who crave warmer waters like myself, I highly recommend Zahara de los Atunes. Also, you’ll have the most delicious tuna (hence the name Atunes) you can find in Europe.
Here are a few recommendations:
Hotel Porfirio - for spacious, comfortable rooms, (great for wild children to roam and climb) a lovely pool area, and an excellent restaurant for lunch and a decadent bar
CerveZahara - for excellent tapas and drinks and a makeshift misting system which I very much appreciated
Coffee & Roll Zahara - for delicious coffee and food, an in-house Frappuccino and excellent alternative to Starbucks ;)
L’Angolo Trattoria - delicious pizzas for the nights you’ll want to skip dining out (which are plenty with a toddler)
Some things to note:
*Most restaurants close at 4pm and reopen between 8:30-9pm for dinner so keep this in mind.
*If you are planning to road trip, many gas stations in the south of Spain are closed on Sundays so make sure you fill up well in advance.
*Cádiz, an ancient port city in Andalusia, is about an hour drive from Zahara de los Atunes and well worth a day trip.