A young driver nearly caused a disaster after leaving his car without first applying the handbrake at the Peña Parda end of the bay. It didn’t help that the hapless young chap also left the vehicle in neutral.
A short time after the driver wandered off, the Peugeot 206 started its driverless jaunt down the beach towards the sea. Miraculously, despite the beach being crowded with families, the vehicle managed to squash a couple of sun-beds, trounce a few towels and burst a beach ball, but completely missed the sunbathing adults and children at play.
However, there was a certain amount of panic amongst the bathers, as they threw themselves from sun-beds, and whipped up children out of the patch of the trundling vehicle.
The vehicle, which had obviously seen some obscure James Bond movie and thought it was some sort of aqua-car, then decided to cool down with a dip, and rolled majestically into the gently lapping sea.
The gold coloured Peugeot, managed to get about 10 metres out when it realised it was not a James Bond aqua-car and started to list alarmingly to starboard in preparation for a watery grave.
That, of course, is where the story should end, with the vehicle wallowing in eight feet of water, with a couple of Grua men standing on the beach scratching their heads… but no! Despite the cars obvious attempts to squash all before it on the beach, a whole host of swimmers decided the vehicle deserved another chance, and in what can only be described as a bizarre turn of events, they all crowded round the floundering vehicle and started pushing it back to shore.
This was no ill-thought-out attempt at rescue by a couple of fat hairy blokes in Speedos, oh no! These guys, only described as ‘several’ in number, had amongst them some hefty lads, who not only managed to ‘swim push’ the car back to the beach, but them pushed the damn thing far enough up the beach to be out of reach of the small waves, and put some rocks under its wheels to prevent any further suicide attempt by the wayward motor.
A couple of Guardia turned up, followed shortly afterwards by the young driver, who is a 25-year-old resident of Barcelona, who works in a local Hotel. The jovial young man could not see the serious side of the incident and quipped, “ I parked up, forgot to put the handbrake on, and then popped off for a coffee with some friends. The next thing I knew was when I got a call saying my car was floating around in the sea”.
As there were no injuries, and very little damage, the young driver will not face any fine or lose any points from his licence, although the Guardia Civil are still looking at the circumstances to see if there may be any future prosecution.