Sun, sea and space - it's a trick of la LuzCassandra Jardine mingles with the Spanish on the Costa de la Luz
When you say you are having a beach holiday in Spain, the news is generally received with pity. "How lovely, which bit?" people say and you know that they have an image in their minds of hideously crowded beaches filled with bright red Brits and Germans knocking back the sangria and spending their evenings clubbing or hunting for somewhere that serves good chips.
Shore thing: you can find good family packages
Spain's costas - the Costa Brava, the Costa del Sol, the Costa Blanca and the Costa Packet (ha, ha) - have become anathema for the discerning tourist, but all children like to go to the beach so, when I was told that there was another costa, one untouched by the fell hand of all-inclusive, free-brandy-for-breakfast package tourism, I was game.
Named after the bright white light that shines off the Atlantic, the Costa de la Luz in eastern Andalusia sounded promising.
"It's amazing. As soon as you turn the corner on to the Atlantic, everything changes," said someone who had spent a wonderful holiday on the southern section. "The big blocks fall away and there are these wonderful beaches and fantastic old towns such as Cadiz and Arcos and Jerez de la Frontera."
I'll have to take her word for that: the only family hotel offered by Sovereign, the tour operator we travelled with, is on the northern stretch of the Costa de la Luz, between Huelva and the Portuguese border. The flamingos in the Coto Doñana National Park may flit easily between the costa's two sections, but humans will encounter a delta that takes a very long time to drive around.
Our arrival was not auspicious. London was sunny as we set off but Spain was hidden under thick cloud. We had taken off at dawn, and planes to Faro were booked solid, so we had a four-hour drive from Malaga to reach the promised land.
On arrival it was all too obvious that, although five years ago there had been nothing but dunes and umbrella pines along the Islantilla stretch of coast, five years is a long time in tourism.
Far from sitting in splendid isolation, the Puerto Antilla Grand Hotel was surrounded by rows of others to left, right and inland. It had been standing only a year, and its wispy-topped palm trees were still settling into their new homes.
When we found that the sprawling hotel pool was out of bounds because of an annoying rule about no swimming after 6pm, depression set in. So gloomy were we that my 15-year-old son spent the evening on the internet looking for cheap flights home.
But once you realise that you are in a place for a week, you look for the good points. We all slept extremely well on that first night, thanks to the sea air and effective luz-barring blackout blinds, so we awoke in a better mood.
Driving rain made us cut our losses and head to Seville (an hour and a half away on a new, empty motorway) for the day. That in itself was worth the whole trip.
The cathedral, the Alcazar and the bull-ring are all magnificent, as are the tapas bars. The flamenco bars might be, too, if you can stay up that late; but the Isla Magica theme park is something I would recommend only to those with a passion for concrete and queues.
When the sun shone the following day, we made the most cheering discovery of all: the beach. It is wide, stretches for miles and is covered in fine, golden sand. Even more exciting was to discover that we could swim.
I had been told that at the end of May it would be too cold for anything more sensitive than an anchovy to enjoy a dip, but that was nonsense. The water was far warmer than it has ever been in Cornwall and offered respectable waves - not big enough for surfing, but much more fun than the stillness of the Mediterranean.
Even in high summer, a Spaniard told me, the beach is empty enough to find space, and thanks to a cool breeze, it never has that feeling of a giant sauna. "Last year, when I was in the Costa del Sol," he said, "the towels were packed so close together on the beach that you had to wait for someone to leave before you could put yours down."
A Spaniard? That was the other revelation. The Costa de la Luz is packed with them. They formed the majority in our hotel, with Portuguese coming second; German and British families are only just beginning to arrive in bulk.
From the point of view of our children, who like to run in packs with other English-speakers, the preponderance of Iberians meant a limited social choice, but there were just enough Hannahs around - why are English girls always called Hannah? - to keep them happy.
From every other point of view, being surrounded by Spaniards is an asset: they demand food with a local flavour (lots of good paella and local prawns), and they have their extremely well-behaved children around them at mealtimes, which means that they tolerate rather less well-behaved English children racing about with plates of fried eggs.
Most important, they speak a foreign language, which prevents the Costa de la Luz from feeling like a microcosm of England with the heat turned up.
The Spanish come here from the nearby cities of Huelva and Seville. They have always done so in small numbers, but in the past five years the area around Islantilla has woken up to its new future as a big tourist destination.
Architects have devised ways of building on dunes, so the coast is developing fast, with every yard between the ocean and the escarpment boasting either a building or a crane.
Where there are tourists, there are also amusements. Islantilla already has one golf course and another is due to open soon. A small market in nearby La Antilla sells potato crisps made before your eyes. And, next to our hotel, the children could hire motorised scooters and bikes, which they raced at alarming speeds.
A further joy lies in discovering that Huelva province's modest income has, until now, been based on strawberries, melons and - transportable home if you get it shrink-wrapped - jamon and chorizo from inland Jabugo, where the pigs have arguably the finest flavour in Iberia.
To get away from the crowds at present, all you have to do is drive a mile down the coast to an empty stretch of beach occupied only by boys kite-surfing and locals dredging the sand for cockles.
Or you can head farther east over the Portuguese border to the part of the Algarve where, thanks to a sand-spit, mass tourism has yet to arrive. If development stops now, Spain has a major asset in the Costa de la Luz. But the signs are that local developers are getting overexcited...
