Across the road, where cars and occasional lorries pass, indiscriminately hurrying from A to B.

Beyond the open air restaurant, the tables and chairs stacked haphazardly under faded awnings, awaiting the beginning of the real year. Beyond the little garage with its stained concrete forecourt laden with dead tyres.

Past even the trees and bushes that grow surprisingly greenly despite the general water shortage and the thin soil that coats the pocked limestone of this rocky shore, that forms the roots of the mountains that rise precipitously close behind.

There, in the distance, lies the sea.

Today, in the rapidly fading evening light of this early part of the year, it is a murky turquoise, fading to a thin line of deeper grey-blue, which merges into the blue-gray of the cloud filled sky. The day’s unexpected rainstorm has churned it, clouding the usually clear waters and obscuring the vegetation that lies below, and a stiff breeze ruffles the surface, leaving it tipped with splashes of bright white spume.