Carboneras

Where it sits. Carboneras is a fishing and industrial town of around eight thousand people on the Levante coast of Almería province, sixty kilometres north-east of the provincial capital, where the eastern edge of the Cabo de Gata-Níjar natural park meets open Mediterranean. Its bay faces south-east and is closed at the southern end by the volcanic headland of Mesa Roldán; the small Isla de San Andrés lies a few hundred metres offshore. The setting is a study in contradictions — one of the most protected stretches of coast in Spain immediately alongside a cement works, a power station and a large desalination plant, all clearly visible from the beach.

The story behind it. The coast here was raided so persistently by Barbary corsairs that permanent settlement was impossible for centuries; the town takes its name from the charcoal burners who worked the scrub, and it only grew after the Marquis of Carpio built the Castillo de San Andrés in the 1620s to garrison the bay. A chain of eighteenth-century watchtowers backed it up, including the Torre de Mesa Roldán on the headland, built to signal along the coast. Fishing, esparto and, later, mining and cement sustained the town into the twentieth century. Its most notorious modern landmark is the Algarrobico hotel: a twenty-storey concrete shell begun in 2003 directly on a protected beach, halted by litigation and left standing for more than two decades as the emblem of Spanish coastal overdevelopment, with demolition ordered and repeatedly delayed.

On screen. That same beach, Playa del Algarrobico, is where David Lean built Aqaba. In the spring of 1962 around two hundred local workers spent three months constructing a full-scale replica of the Red Sea port as it stood in 1916 for Lawrence of Arabia — some three hundred false-fronted buildings and a sea wall roughly a quarter of a mile long — because no suitable location could be used in Jordan and Lean wanted his cavalry charge to end with the sea behind it. The set was dismantled after filming; the beach is now bare except for the hotel. Half a century later the headland at the other end of the bay took its turn. In October 2015 the sixth season of Game of Thrones filmed at Mesa Roldán, dressing the eighteenth-century tower and the flat volcanic summit beside the lighthouse as a watchtower of Meereen; the location appears in Battle of the Bastards, the ninth episode, in the sequence where Daenerys Targaryen and her council face the masters' fleet and Drogon lands on the tower. Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke were both filmed on the headland.

What you actually see today. The town itself is unpretentious: a promenade, a fishing harbour, a Tuesday market and a long grey-sand beach that is genuinely used by locals rather than tour operators. The Castillo de San Andrés on the seafront now serves as a cultural centre. The real draw is the walking. A track climbs from the AL-5106 to Mesa Roldán, where the tower and the 1863 lighthouse sit on a flat-topped extinct volcano with fossil reef exposed in its flanks, and the view runs from Cabo de Gata's cliffs to the Sierra Cabrera. Below on the far side lies Playa de los Muertos, a kilometre of pale pebbles and clear deep water reached by a steep fifteen-minute path — no road, no services, and consequently one of the finest undeveloped beaches on the Spanish Mediterranean. The water off the headland and around the Isla de San Andrés is a well-known dive site, with volcanic walls, posidonia meadows and enough visibility to make the shore entries worthwhile; boats run from the harbour in season. The cement plant and its jetty north of town are not hidden and cannot be, but they explain the place: Carboneras has lived off heavy industry and fishing rather than tourism, and prices, bars and beaches reflect that.

Getting there and timing. By car, Carboneras is about fifty minutes from Almería airport via the AL-5 and N-341, and around two hours from Murcia; regional buses run from Almería several times a day. Parking at the Playa de los Muertos car park fills early in July and August, and the walk down is not suited to anyone unsteady on loose stone. Late spring and early autumn give warm water without the crowds, and the light on the volcanic rock at either end of the day is what photographers come for. Bring water and shoes for the Mesa Roldán track; there is no shade, and the last stretch is exposed to wind off the sea.