Pimentón

We have taken the train to a seaside village where access to the ocean closes at sundown. They make certain nobody goes to the beach after dark with a system of tiled walls five stories high.

The walls were originally built with lots of windows so people could still look at the sea on nights with full moons, but long ago the town leaders lost patience with everyone sneaking onto the beach through the windows and put up a tall stone wall in front of the first. It has no windows, just gates that lock and officers that arrest anyone who tries to hide in the snake and iguana filled canals running under both walls.

The daughter of the shopkeeping family in charge of locking the gates each evening flaunts her privilege. Wearing a white blouse, and her long black hair down, she crawls off the label on a tin of paprika where she spends her days and up into one of the windows overlooking the now forbidden shore. There she waves at the tourists and townspeople as her old mother and father herd us all out through the gate while we desperately snap blurry and poorly lit photos of her, her parents, and the reptiles underfoot.