Burriana (Terry)

Along the coast of Spain are several marinas that were built to capitalize on the Valencia America’s Cup.  Timing, they say, is everything, and these were built just before “El Crise” and there is now substantial free space in them.  As a consequence, prices are way down on, say, the coast of Italy or the south coast of France.  Good for some.  Us, for sure.

We called in to one of these called Burriana in order to get our electronics checked and fixed after our lightning whack.  September is not high season but even so, €20 a night is cheap anywhere, in a very nicely laid out marina with good secure facilities.  The only problem is that Burriana the big town is about 3km from Burriana beachside.

Our electronics were in the capable hands of Eddie Mauricio Achoy Hernandez.  Ah yes you say, you detect the Achoy in there.   Indeed, Eddie is widely known as Achoy.  A Guatemalan by birth, of Chinese descent, living in Spain for many years, Eddie is happy-go-lucky, curious and very pleasant company.  Of course, chasing down electrical faults is a bit of a no-win career.  You don’t find it until you find it and it seems to take forever to isolate the issue.  As it turned out, it took several days to fix the VHF and the GPS/Chartplotter but the eventual cost was offset by the fact that we had Eddie’s company for several days.

Eddie Mauricio Achoy Hernandez

Eddie's LightSabre - lights up like a LightSabre, sounds exactly like a LightSabre and looks exactly like a LightSabre.  From the genuine LucasArts factory, too.

The waterfront of Burriana boasts a magnificent Escola devoted to sailing instruction.  Students come from all over Europe (EU, as it is partly EU funded) to attend the college and learn high-end racing stuff.  

Around the corner from that is a superb bar.  To cater for the possibility that they might run short of beer at any time, the management has wisely installed two massive beer tuns.

These, in turn, feed into a beer delivery pipe of industrial proportions, keeping drinkers’ minds off the possibility that there could ever be a shortage of supply.

To cap it all off, they wisely set the daily control in the capable hands of two delightful young ladies from Eastern Europe.  When they discovered my interest in a Spanish telecast of an NFL game on TV in the main bar, they set Carol and I up on the restaurant bar with our own large TV to watch the game. The two Spanish commentators were quite knowledgeable and ran a great side discussion throughout.

Thank goodness for foresighted management I say

We did go into Burriana-the-town on two days.  It’s a fair hike but on day one, we asked a lady exiting a parking spot on the beachfront where the bus stop was.  She insisted we get in and she then drove us into town, depositing us outside the shops in the main street.

If you go to Burriana on Google Earth, you can see how underutilised the marina is.

While in town, we wandered around the famous church but found it locked up.  As I was checking the opening hours, and my watch, one of the retired guys who sit around town squares and set the world to rights came over and said he’d open the church for us.  He was one of the lay assistants there.  He insisted we follow him and took us around to the priest’s office and asked the priest to open up for us, which he duly did.  We had a private tour and were most impressed.

Burriana also boasts The Orange Museum, celebrating the area's links to the citrus industry.  However, we couldn't find it and the population of Burriana was evenly divided between "it's over in that street" and "it closed down 2 years ago".  We still don't know who is right and we didn't find it.

A hard day's fishing, Burriana-style

One irritation we did come across was that when we tried to go back to the boat on the second day, we waited at the bus stop for ages until a lady who worked at the supermarket alongsdide told us that the next bus was not for 3 hours!  She helped us ring a taxi but we then found out that ALL the taxis were on siesta and would not be back for another 2 hours!!  We had never come across this before but it left us with no choice but to hoof it 3kms back to the marina.  With a stop in the bar.

There were several UK cruisers in the marina planning to winter over.  Made good sense for them as they already had cars with them and getting back to England on the RyanAir-type flights was cheap and easy.  Marina fees were very low and the marina is very sheltered.

A pleasant stop on our way down the Spanish coast.