It's beautiful enough here to inspire lyrics and melodies as lush as Brian Wilson's, though, with gaping bays of soft sand and vast breakers (Woolacombe beach was voted Britain's best by TripAdvisor last year), rock pools, ragged hills such as Baggy Point and pubs doling out frothy craft beer.
This is not the Italy of some Fellini film, it is a backbreaking city, you either go uphill or down; the people here are workers, hill-walkers, ragged, mangy-looking.
The site is now a ragged hole.
In her autobiography, Hill describes the community as "a ragged occupying army, annoying park rangers by eluding camp fees, overstaying their welcome, and comporting themselves like gypsies".
Ms. Hill surprised with a refreshingly manic and ragged rendition of "Piece of My Heart," a song she had covered, far more politely, on her 1993 debut album.
Mentions the squatters shanties and the unmistakeable queen of them who called herself Rocky Mountain Mary who would come down the long 123rd St. hill to Morningside Avenue bound for her weekly marketing, wearing a ragged costume.
Dwyer sold the mansion in 1938 to a developer who erected apartment buildings on the top of the hill, but the Seaman-Drake Arch survived, although in increasingly ragged condition.
Indeed, since I last visited this remote village five years ago on the eve of Zuma's election, precious little has changed: donkeys and cows graze by the roadside, boys in ragged T-shirts wield sticks, and modest mud-brick dot the hills.
Liberals act like associate producers at a folk fair trying to choreograph the welcoming dance of converging cultures failing to notice the ragged band of Conservatives lighting torches and running headlong towards them up the castle hill armed with pitchforks.
And it is this image - of the ragged, bearded revolutionary, carbine to hand, reading Hemingway in a Spanish translation in the Cuban hills - that has always clung to Castro and has aided him hugely.
