Рокетас де Мар

Roquetas de Mar has lived three lives on the same shore. For centuries it was a fishing and salt-panning village on the Almería coast, watched over by the Castillo de Santa Ana — the sixteenth-century fort raised against Barbary pirates, wrecked by the earthquake of 1804 and now restored as a free cultural centre whose courtyard becomes a summer stage, forming with the lighthouse and the open-air amphitheatre what the town calls its cultural triangle. The second life arrived in the 1960s with tourism: long beaches, promenades and marinas that made Roquetas one of the principal resorts of the province.

The third life is visible from space. Around the town stretches the famous "sea of plastic" — the greenhouse plain of the Poniente Almeriense, one of the most intensive stretches of agriculture in Europe, which ships vegetables across the continent all winter and gives the region a prosperity the old salt pans never dreamed of. Culture has kept pace: the Teatro Auditorio on the Avenida Reino de España seats 1,300 in fine acoustics and carries a year-round season of music, theatre and dance. The archive records two visits by the Rousse ensembles, in December 2007 and November 2008 — Bulgarian opera and symphony on a coast where the audience may well have driven in past tomatoes growing in January.