Cliché

... which, as it happens, means "snapshot" in French. Today we went to l'Ampolla, the only corner of the delta we haven't yet visited. It turned out to be very like Sant Carles de la Rapita: a fishing village that has turned to tourism to earn its living. The coast is lined with medium-rise apartment blocks and hotels, and the port is full of fibreglass pleasure boats. Like Sant Carles though, one small section still has actual fishing boats in it. We wandered about in the hot sun but didn't find much to capture our attention and ended up sitting in one of the many bars lining the port for a drink. The port does look like a nice spot to sit and enjoy seafood on a sunny day. We didn't indulge, but went home and grilled the fish I bought yesterday on the barbecue, then lounged on the terrace in the shade.

A strange thing about the towns and villages around here is that none of them seem to have any there there (to quote Gertrude Stein). Usually when you approach a village you don't know, you head for the church tower, expecting to find a central square, shops, the town hall, post office and the like. But most of the villages here, while they do have churches, don't have a "centre" -- just an apparently random arrangement of streets where small cottages and barns full of tractors mingle with the odd shop or bar, interspersed with blocks of flats.

Deltebre is particularly flagrant in this respect. We weren't surprised to learn that it wasn't a place at all until 1977, when two neighbouring villages decided to merge into a municipality with the invented name of Deltebre because they didn't want to be governed from Tortosa. As for Riumar, it's never been anything other than a holiday location. Still, given that l'Ampolla was described as a "fishing village" we were surprised at its almost complete lack of traditional housing around the port.

I did have another dune blip today, but I decided to spare you.