While Salobreña started their San Juan fiesta yesterday – it’s the patron saint there – Almuñécar and La Herradura start theirs tonight.

As any excuse to have a puente (long weekend) is taken, Monday is a public holiday because San Juan fell on a Sunday.

The official bonfire in Almuñécar is on Playa de Puerta del Mar, as always, while over in La Herradura it will be in front of the Manuel Vaquero children’s play park.

But the official bonfires are only a small part of it because just about everybody sleeping out on the beach that night will have their own, which is what makes the eve of San Juan such a magical night, especially if you’re young.

Don’t forget to buy your San Juan Loaves tomorrow; every baker will be churning them out. If you haven’t seen one, it’s a small loaf or bun with a hardboiled egg, complete with shell, embedded on the top. It’s calculated that around 15,000 will be scoffed before the long weekend is out.

As for people pitching tents today, you can’t do so before 12 o’clock midday and it must be taken down, at the very latest by 22.00h Sunday night.

You can’t have bloody-great speakers churning out music, so no improvised discos. You can’t set up generators, either, as well as furniture from your house.

Now, all these prohibitions have come about because people have been ‘taking the piss.’ Back in the 80’s people would turn up with their tents, light a fire, get out a guitar and at the most, a radio cassette.

But each year people started getting ridiculous, with people setting up a veritable tent city with booming discotheques every 20 metres, noisy generators for the music and lighting, as well as bringing down (and leaving behind) dining room tables and all other sorts of improbable furniture for a beach.

They spoilt the fun for everybody so that today there are all these restrictions. But isn’t that always the case?

Unlike Motril and Salobreña, it seems, there will be no live music or activities for children, such as foam parties and bouncy castles, for example.

(News:Almunecar/Herradura, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)