Sunset over Vejer,a surprise discovery in Spain.Credit:iStock
Vejer,pronounced Ve-her,is one of Andalucia’s famed pueblos blancos (white towns) at the southernmost fringe of mainland Europe. A short drive from Cadiz along the Atlantic Coast,it’s also within easy reach of Seville.
I’ve definitely hit the jackpot in scoring long-time resident,sherry educator and culinary guide Annie Manson as my new best friend in Vejer. On her high terrace,we’re sitting down to a very Andalucian feast that we’ve created. There’s mojama – a salted and air-dried tuna fished in the waters of the nearby Atlantic. In a nod to North Africa,literally just on the horizon,the octopus is served on a bed of hummus. And the peculiarly addictive atun en manteca Iberica – a pot of tuna preserved in Iberian pork fat – is spread on crackers as an hors d’oeuvre. Annie adds a warm,saffron-spiced orange cake to the table,a product of the citrus groves that surround Vejer,and our glasses glow with a chilled Palomino wine from Hornillos,further along the coast.
Not an hour before,I’d wrangled that enormous,marinated octopus into a giant stock pot of boiling water. I’m not a natural cephalopod handler,but Scottish-born Manson makes it so easy. “Dip once,twice,three times,simmer with a cork for 45 minutes and it’s done,” she advises during our cooking class of just three.
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Below us,the scene is an organic hotchpotch of 15th-century convents and 16th-century plazas,its skyline dominated by church towers and the thousand-year-old Castillo de Vejer. It’s all overlaid on Moorish mosques,Visigoth cathedrals,Roman fortresses and dwellings dating back to the Bronze age. Who hasn’t been here? Each civilisation has left a legacy for the latest wave of infiltrators,travellers.
However,compared with such tourism magnets as Seville,Vejer is still well off the trail and,noticeably,most tourists are actually Spanish.
“Spaniards love to travel in Spain – it’s not a new,COVID discovery,” says Manson. “In places like Jerez,Cadiz and Vejer,the tour groups I run into are actually Spanish. And why not? They have the best food,and they know how to live.”