Youghal, Co Cork
I live in a summer town. Youghal is half medieval walled town and half Victorian beach resort. Steam, then diesel, used to train in tourists all summer long. Unfortunately, the last train to Youghal left the station in the late 1980s. Fortunately, the tourists are back in force under their own steam. Now in high season the beaches and the town are jointed as they say. They say – I can’t say as I’m just a blow-in – and although seaside summers are delicious, they are not why I fell for this old beauty.
Off season, Youghal’s long beaches fall back into the hands and paws of mostly well-mannered dogs, stray runners and all-weather swimmers swotting for the town’s Iron Man. I might join them for a long walk, loop back by the lighthouse and down to the quays. I might, or join them in my head and cop out for a movie in The Regal, the town’s glorious little refurbished cinema, a perfect picture house second only to Dublin’s Stella. Or cop out too for the most precise cold creamy pint and overloaded toastie in the land from the hands of Kevin in Moby Dicks overlooking the day boats outside the pub’s door.
There’s a generosity in the bones of old Irish summer towns. It’s a generosity that doesn’t leave with the crowds, and that ease and welcome can be the same abroad. Off season is my season.
Walter Raleigh Hotel, O’Brien’s Place, Youghal, Co Cork or The Lighthouse Keepers on www.airbnb.com.
El Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain
High season in Andalusia. Nothing new to an Irish man but there aren’t many Irish men or women in El Puerto de Santa Maria at the height of August. The streets are wall to wall with Spanish families with their unique constitution built for dining at midnight while speaking over each other at lightning speed.
This Irish man was in the middle of the throng, making a balls of eating lupini beans one-handed outside a bar, trying to master pushing the skin of the snack between my finger and thumb then popping the seed in my mouth. Seems easy but when it goes wrong it’s somewhere between comedy and assault – lose purchase and the bean shoots from the skin like a bullet. I’m wondering if there are many lupini-related injuries in Spain. Lupinjuries. And thinking that if bean injuries are where my head is at then it’s probably time to go home. I’ve been having too much of a good time. When I ask for the bill, the five glasses of excellent wine, an addictive seafood stew and the lupinis come to six euros.
Then there’s the beaches. Playa de Valdelagrana and its jazzy stilted lifeguard huts, 4 x 4s and managed white sands has an LA vibe. A strip of hollibops shops border the pristine sand from residential areas and where residents meet the sea is always better than any hotel strip. Residents mean food and drinks that have to be good enough for the locals, not just the blow-ins. The California comparison ends there though, as you’d get lunch for two in El Puerto for the price of a Venice Beach cocktail.
Past the civilised Spanish street parties, the riverside seafood restaurants like Romerijo and the expert ice cream parlours, the town is quiet and full of treasures like Bodega Obregon, decorated with chalkboards, sherry barrels and flamenco or bullfighting posters papered decades deep. I’ve rarely seen a town that can better manage the masses. I’m already booked to go back and see what it’s like free of them.
Hotel Duques de Medinaceli, Plaza de los Jazmines, 2, 11500 El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz, Spain; www.hotelduquesdemedinaceli.com.
Furore, Italy
I drive on both sides of the road every month, from the insanity of Dakar, to the choose your own adventure lanes in the sticks in Mexico. And without much drama, apart from some silent screaming. The Amalfi coast though is
a trip – amalfi being Latin for blind corner – and anyone who’s driven that most romanticised 30-mile stretch of car ad roads knows that it is zero craic.
What if you could go back to an Amalfi coast of 30 years ago – less crowds, fewer locals weaving through scarified tourists? It’s easy – set your clock to off season.
Sorrento should still be ignored forever, Positano only seen from a boat or through the eyes of Steinbeck. I can’t point out a secret Amalfi hideout – nobody can – but if you aren’t as rich as Croesus then the price of villas in Furore falls off the cliffs in low season.
Above Furore’s famous fjord is your dinner. The long craggy stepped sweep of gardens with black volcanic soil supercharged by intense summer sun and crazy monsoon-type rain are one endless pergola, a latticework of stripped-trunk scaffolds for vines and every other thing that likes to grow. Legendary lemons, sweet and sharp, live here and go well with nearby Cetara’s anchovies. Add them to the tomatoes that think they own the place, local olives and mozzarella and wine from Marisa Cuomo’s hard-won vines and you’re all set. Thankfully there’s not much else to do here off season bar counting the boats or stars in the total silence.
Santa Caterina Hotel, Via Mauro Comite, 9, 84011 Amalfi, Italy; www.hotelsantacaterina.it.
Charleston, South Carolina, US
Summer towns are all very well unless summer means supercharged humidity hair and holiday hordes. I love Charleston in November. You can breathe during the mild winter and get a clear-eyed look past the horse and carriages at real life and the complex history of this town.
Before you dive into days of chocolate box antebellum houses and garden tours and boat drinks, spend some time getting your moral coordinates in the Old Slave Mart Museum. Then you’ll only need your feet for Charleston’s slower pace, and your appetite.
Charleston’s exteriors might be perfectly preserved but the city has been transformed by a restaurant revolution kicked off by chefs like Sean Brock. His focus on Southern foodways and heritage ingredients mean that new takes by young chefs sit beside soul food kitchen institutions like Bertha’s or Hannibal’s. In America’s newest food town, in with the old and the new should be the city slogan, and drinks in the Tattooed Moose or at the white-jacketed southern belle of the ball, The Dewberry, will give you a feel for today’s Charleston.
The Dewberry, 334 Meeting St, Charleston, SC 29403; www.thedewberrycharleston.com.