"If you looked around carefully, as you walked through the supposedly least touristy barrios, you could identify young Americans whose lives were structured by attempting to appear otherwise, probably living on savings or giving private English lessons to rich kids …" Our narrator isn't so bothered about the usual sorts of American tourist, the "barbate backpackers" and the ones with "fanny packs".
The eastern part of the province is crossed by wooded spurs of the Baetic Cordillera, while the west-central part is a low plain crossed by the Guadalete and Barbate rivers and their tributaries.
Cork is obtained from the mountain forests, and fish are caught off the coast (at Algeciras and Barbate) and salted for export.
Set on the hilltop Andalucian town of Vejer, Annie B's six-day course includes four classes, a visit to the Barbate fish market, and a Spanish wine and sherry education, not to mention daily power walks.
Barbate, in fact, has found itself caught in a perfect storm: a fiscal crisis that has sunk public finances, a dwindling fishing industry that has exacerbated one of Spain's worst unemployment situations, and a revival of the drug smuggling that has long plagued this area because of its proximity to North Africa.
BARBATE, SPAIN — In the police station of Barbate, a port town in the southern region of Andalusia, officers have pinned a poster to the wall that reads "they owe us April," referring to the late payment of their salaries.
In early 2006, along with 10 other men, Paco said that he was arrested trying to smuggle into Barbate a boatload of 600 kilograms, or 1,320 pounds, of hashish.
The mayor of Barbate, Rafael Quirós, garnered national attention during his recent re-election campaign by suggesting that a young person who could not find a job and turned to drug dealing should not automatically be called a delinquent.
Hundreds of fishermen whose jobs have been put into limbo protested on Monday in Barbate, a battered Andalusian fishing town, and the Spanish government has called for European money to support the affected fishermen.
Miguel Molina, the 39-year old local leader of the center-left Andalusian Party, said that "some people seem determined to give Barbate a bad reputation, but in all my life here I have never once been offered drugs".
Barbate itself ranked as the town with the second-highest joblessness in mainland Spain at the end of 2010, behind Ubrique, which is also in the Andalusian province of Cádiz, according to a separate study published this month by the savings bank Caja España-Caja Duero.
