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 Ferries to Spain: ferriesspain.net he Costa del Sol is a region in the south of Spain, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, comprising the coastal towns and communities along the Mediterranean coastline of the Málaga province. The Costa del Sol is situated between two lesser known costas: Costa de la Luz and Costa Tropical. Formerly made up only of a series of small, quiet fishing settlements, the region has been completely transformed during the latter part of the 20th century into a tourist destination of world renown. It includes the city of Málaga,and the towns of Torremolinos, Benalmádena, Fuengirola, Mijas, Marbella, San Pedro de Alcántara, Estepona, Manilva, Vélez-Málaga, Rincon de la Victoria, Nerja, Torrox, the community of Sotogrande, San Roque and La Línea de la Concepción. Settlement in the region dates back to the Bronze Age, and it has been colonised and ruled by many cultures such as the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths and Moors, before the Reconquista. Historically its population lived in the fishing villages, and in the "white" villages a little distance inland, in the mountains running down to the coast. The area was discovered and developed to meet the demands of international tourism in the 1950s and has since been a popular destination for foreign tourists not only for its beaches but also for its local culture. The area is particularly famous for its towns like Marbella, which provides the Costa del Sol with its reputation ... 31365 views |
 www.visitcostadelsol.com The Costa del Sol came into being as an international tourism resort in the second half of the last century. That was a time when a few wealthy people in search of something different came to these shores, while at the same time, mass tourism began to change the coast from a fishing and farming-based rural community to what it is today.Nobody knows with certainty where the Costa del Sol got its name, although there are various theories, none of them entirely credible. We do know, nevertheless, that the name appeared as such in the advertising for the Spanish-American Fair in Seville in 1929. It is said that a certain Austrian consul in Cádiz, who used to travel along the coast to Almería frequently, dreamed up the name, due to the single aspect of the region that everybody is aware of, especially in the summertime: the sun shines a lot here. We can thus suppose that, if this is true, the Costa del Sol once described the entire coastline from Cádiz to Almería, and not only the Malaga coastal strip that we know today as the world-famous Costa del Sol. In any case, the real beginnings of tourism on the Costa del Sol bring us back to an Englishman named George Langworthy, known locally, and logically, as El ingles, who settled in Torremolinos with his wife at the end of the 19th century. The couple lived in the Santa Clara Castle, and in the beginning of the 20th century, converted it into a residence for foreigners, charging them one peseta per night ... 12978 views |
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 This is a lovely refreshing music from Final Fantasy VII that may make you feel relaxed on a white sand beach with Bossa Nova rhythm. i keep on uploading ff7 lonlonjp version. it is really, really fun. i could not stop arranging and playing... :) :) :D my next video will be "Aerith's Theme lonlonjp version" Thank you for your request and suggestion. XD i have completed arranging "Aerith's Theme lonlonjp version" as well. all i have to do is play it on YouTube... hope you enjoy more...copyright: 1997 by Square Co., Ltd Music composed by Nobuo Uematsu Arranged by lonlonjp Guitar: Manuel Contreras Madrid 1986 played by lonlonjp ファイナル・ファンタジー７より「コスタ・デル・ソル（太陽の海岸）」 lonlonjpによる編曲、演奏ですFor those who would like to play this arrangement on guitar, Level: "M", Moderate My tuning in this video is as follows; Capo = 5 Normal Tuning Please Enjoy! 106682 views |
 Viva Andalúcia! :-)) Virtual tour on one of the most exciting places of Costa del Sol. This is Torremolinos, where you can find nice people, sunshine and lot of fun. This is a perfect holiday ;-) 19381 views |
Costa del Sol
It’s been the mainstay of British tourists for more than 30 years, but what does the Costa del Sol offer holiday divers. We ask DIVE readers what they think.
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Sunfish sighting - Pamela Keenan
Pamela Keenan, 51, lives in Surrey and works as a fees accountant in the bursar’s office of a private girls’ school. She is married to Paul, a senior estimator at a construction company, and they have a son Simon, 21. Pamela and Paul are both BSAC sport divers, members of the BSAC club Seven Seas Divers in Epsom, and Pamela is also an assistant club instructor. They visited Málaga on the Costa del Sol in May 2001, where they dived with Simply Diving. We have a timeshare and did an exchange, which meant we had two weeks in Málaga. At the time, we’d only done nine dives, and as we were keen to do more diving, we searched the web and found Simply Diving. I emailed Anna and Nevin (who run Simply Diving), told them that we were not very experienced and asked them if we could dive with them. They said that was fine, and Anna gave us her mobile number to call when we arrived in Spain.
We did three days’ diving while we were in Málaga. Anna and Nevin picked us up in the morning, we arrived around 10am and did one boat dive, then stopped for lunch and did an afternoon shore dive. Simply Diving uses a local boat company which has a RIB and a hardboat, and the other divers were Swedish, Belgian and Spanish. The Spanish company’s boat handlers were very good, as was their dive guide. The water was warmer than I’d expected, between 17 and 20°C, with nice warm thermoclines at about 21°C. The shore dives were probably the most interesting because of the variety of the sea life: we saw octopus, cuttlefish, lots of blennies, starfish in different colours, nudibranchs, sea cucumbers and wrasse. These were wrasse with attitude – they’d come up really close and eyeball you. On one shore dive I found a dogfish egg cell, which initially I thought was just a bit of debris on the sea bed, but when I picked it up I could see the tiny embryo inside. I also saw a moray and, for the first time, witnessed an octopus actually changing colour. It shot across the sand, sat on a rock and simply disappeared, because it suddenly blended in with the rock. We did boat dives in First Bay, which is at Playa de la Herradura, and Cerro Gordo, and shore dives at Los Molinos and Cañuelo.
My favourite dive of the holiday was at First Bay. It was our last boat dive and we were at about 25m on the wall. The visibility wasn’t brilliant, but we spotted a large, upright fin. I could see that Anna was getting excited, so I thought it was a shark. We’d never seen one before and we weren’t sure what to do. Then we realised it was a sunfish, followed by another four of them. They were about a metre square, and were staring back at us. They shot off at speed, but then one came back to have another look. Sunfish are not common in that area – when we emailed Anna at the end of the summer she told us that they hadn’t seen any more that season – and they’re usually solitary fish, so it really was a very unusual sighting.
The real star of the show was Anna and Nevin’s dog, Eddie, who came on the boat with us on the last day – and disgraced himself. Luckily it was on Nevin’s gear!
We were chuffed with the diving and we’d definitely dive with them again, although our diving trips this year have already been organised to Cyprus and the Red Sea. Perhaps next year!
Happy diver - John Marriott
John Marriott, 46, and his wife, Anna, moved to the Costa del Sol four years ago, where John is a regular diver with Happy Divers in Marbella. John is an airline pilot and Anna teaches at the English international school in the area.
I learned to dive with Octopus Diving Centre in Larnaca, Cyprus, and because of my work I’ve been able to dive in a lot of different places: the Seychelles a few times, Grand Cayman, Florida, the Gulf area, Antigua and Barbados. On a recent dive in Mauritius, which was a bit of a treat, I saw a 2m moray, a huge stingray and dolphins on the safety stop, but it’s not like that on the Costa del Sol! You need a big, thick wetsuit, and, being the Mediterranean, in some places there aren’t a lot of fish.
I dive with Happy Divers – which has got quite a good set-up – just across the road from where I live. Divers who are here on holiday often stay at the Atalaya Park Hotel, where the club is based, but there are lots of accommodation options. The diving is Mediterranean, fairly cold water, with conditions that are quite variable: on good days the visibility is as good as a bad day in the Indian Ocean – something like 20m. On a bad day you can’t see your hand in front of your face. There are a few wrecks and some basic reef life. All you need is a decent 7mm with a hood, although I did dive one site with some Americans, who were wearing drysuits.
The coastline is very rugged: Peter [Deth, who runs Happy Divers] has a RIB, which you swim out to with your kit. It can get a bit crowded, but it’s good fun, and the diving scene is very sociable. Occasionally it’s too rough to get the boat into the water, and in summer you get very hot kitting up. Even in the summer the water is quite cold. People who have learned to dive somewhere tropical can get a bit uncomfortable.
One of my favourite dives is a little wreck about 200 years old, off Bora Bora Beach in San Pedro. It’s in shallow water and, being wooden, there’s not much of it, but there are lots of moray eels lurking around it. One of the sites with more fish is a reef about 5km off the coast, which takes 20 minutes or so to get to. Down at 20–30m there are squid, octopus, eels and quite a lot of fish. Another site that’s good for fish life is on the other side of Málaga at Puerto Estepona, where a wall drops straight into the water, and you see tropical-looking fish in bright colours.
Hot and cold - Alex Jakob
Alex Jakob, 37, is a self-employed IT consultant who lives in Kensal Green, West London. He’s been a diver for three years, and dived the Costa del Sol with Diving Marbella on a trip organised by Subculture. He is single and owns an 18-year-old diabetic cat called Mia. I was doing my rescue diver course with Subculture [a UK dive centre that also organises diving holidays] in November last year, with two friends, Nick and Kelly. We decided we didn’t want to complete the course in a quarry in England, as it was so freezing. Instead, we went for a long weekend to Spain with Lindsay from Subculture, who was training us. She organised the diving and accommodation, and all we had to do was get the flights. The flights were really, really cheap: £20 one-way.
I went on the Thursday evening, getting to Málaga around 10pm – Nick and Kelly had arrived earlier in the day. Piers, who runs the dive centre, picked me up at the airport, we dropped my stuff at the hotel, and went to meet the others at a steak restaurant – I was quite sober compared to everyone else! On the second night we ate at a little bodega, which cost about £7 each for the house wine and loads of tapas, and on the last night we visited Puerto Banus, which is expensive, with wall-to-wall yachts and Mercedes.
On the first day we went to the dive centre at the marina, where Piers’ partner owns the café, so we sat around drinking coffee and having breakfast and then did a try-out dive close to the shore. I was surprised at the amount of life there, as I’d previously dived Paphos in Cyprus, where all the fish had been speared and put on the restaurant menus, so there was very little life. Marbella was quite different – I saw starfish, a big stonefish, lots of octopus, loads of blennies, which look like cartoon characters, lots of sea urchins, and a few grouper, which weren’t particularly big.
The first dive was shallow, round some pylons that had once supported a conveyor belt used in mining. Back on shore we had a café con leche to warm up again, as the water was 19°C and I was wearing a rented 5mm two-piece. In total I did five dives there, and didn’t see any big stuff, although the reefy bits had more fish. One of the dives, where we did the search and rescue as part of the course, was about 30 minutes by boat – a V8 speedboat – and the visibility was quite good. Piers is quite a character and he and Lindsay did a bit of acting for a final surprise at the end of the course. We were waiting on the line to go up to the boat after the dive, when Lindsay started to look nervous, pretended to panic and pulled her regulator out. We were pleased to have managed to get her to the boat when she started yelling that Piers was missing, so we recovered him, did mouth-to-mouth in the water and dragged him back on to the boat, which was hard as he’s quite a big guy and he wasn’t helping. Still, it was fun.
The trip was cheap and easy, and I’d definitely go again. Getting breakfast and lunch is really easy because of the café at the marina, so you don’t have to think about that. It’s only two or three hours’ flight from the UK, and a 45-minute drive from Málaga airport to Marbella, and I even found a cat-sitter who could give Mia, the cat I inherited from my brother, her injection each day while I was away!