With Africa's coast on the horizon (pictured) and my mother-in-law on board, the offshore wind blew my paddleboard away from the shore.
The biggest megaflood in history had severed the beach – near Spain's southern tip – from Morocco's mountains five million years ago, creating the Mediterranean Sea as the ocean gushed in.
This patch is where Spaniards go on holiday; the 'wrong' side of Gibraltar, where the chilly Atlantic throws bodysurfing-perfect waves onto expansive yellow-white beaches backed by dark green bulb-like stone pine trees, olive-green bushes and orange earth reminiscent of Australia's Outback.
And there's not a sunburnt Brit in sight.
It's the proper Spanish experience - and that means Spanish hours, of course. Lunch at 3pm, beach sunbathing until 9pm sunsets, and hotel kids' shows until 11:30pm.
Native-only guests ensured flamenco and food of the highest quality. Ordering squid and expecting a few battered rings, a foot-long beast was slapped on my plate.
Days earlier, our train had rushed south as Spain's sun-bleached dry heart flashed by at 156mph.
Wide plains and scrubby hills looked like Western movie backdrops (many spaghetti westerns were filmed in Spain), dotted with crumbling abandoned farms and factories.
And it was no less otherworldly in our destination, the Costa de la Luz, with sunset light creating a War of The Worlds scene as we drove through whole forests of giant wind tripods, sorry turbines.
A who's who of the biggest names in maritime history had their sails filled by those same winds, whistling through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Christopher Columbus left from here to discover the New World, Sir Francis Drake singed the King of Spain's beard here, and Britain's biggest ever naval triumph, the Battle of Trafalgar, was just offshore from our hotel.
Leo's focus, however, remained on dunking me, collecting shells and pebbles ('Daddy, Daddy, look at this beauuuty!'), and beach volleyball practice.
CHURROS AND KIPS
I knew it would be a good food holiday when, within minutes of arriving in Madrid, a cheery 'churrero' maestro had clamped a giant rolling pin to his chest to squirt dough through a metal funnel, creating churros - Spain's famous tube-like fried pastry snack - for Leo to gobble.
Green salted padron peppers and Spanish tortilla could happily be on my plate every day of my life. And to drink? Sweet sherry from Jerez, down the road from our hotel.
After a couple of restaurant stuffings, we found even 'half-rations' on menus were meals in themselves.
Stopping at a 'figs for sale' sign one day, a lady farmer showed us her family's dry but bountiful plots.
As we tried not to trip over – among other delights - three melon and two watermelon varieties, she insisted on gifting us tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes and sweetcorn – all of which Nati's mum promptly whipped into a giant veggie Peruvian paella.
No-one can accuse this blog of shying away from the big issues of the day.
Churros, dunking daddies and sherry – they're all here.
Now, an even harder-hitting subject: Do Spanish people still have siestas?
Cruising down Seville's utterly-deserted residential streets in the afternoon, I'd say a big fat yes.
Our generous female farmer friend also said yes, but it's only a 20-minute nap, in summer not winter, only in sizzling Andalusia, and mainly only older people.
And that's pretty much what studies show as well. The two-hour snooze is sadly a myth, but four in 10 Spaniards do take short kips.
Don Quixote never snoozed though - the habit only began in the 1930s, as people juggled morning and afternoon jobs.
HOT AND COLD
Drinkers are fanned with fine mist outside bars in Seville – and with very good reason.
Just 34C when we visited but with 42C summer highs, a 47.4C (117F) new record Spain temperature had been set weeks before our visit near Andalusia's capital.
But our coastal spot 70 miles away was just 25C, and cool in mornings and evenings. Why?
The epic Canary Current, which chills 2,000 miles of the eastern Atlantic Ocean from Spain all the way to Senegal.
Staggeringly, it means north-west Spain's summers are often cooler than Britain.
And sea temperatures in northern Spain, Portugal and Morocco are often just 19C in summer – colder than southern England.
In our southern tip of Spain, the sea was 23C - regarded as the minimum to comfortably swim - but still felt chilly.
Doesn't the Mediterranean's 26C water warm our cool Spanish hideaway, I wondered? No - the Med's water is saltier than the Atlantic, so heavier, sinking as it spills out of the Strait of Gibraltar into the ocean.
MARITIME MASTERS
Europe's oldest city, Cadiz, founded 3,100 years ago by Phoenicians from Lebanon, is an old town gem squeezed onto a Venice-like island.
Romans built the most spectacular fish-processing factory you'll ever see, with temple columns and a forum adjacent to south-west Spain's most famous beach, Bolonia, backed by a giant sand dune spreading past vivid green trees.
Muslim Moors named a rocky outcrop Jabal Tariq (Say it fast = Gibraltar) in honour of their army general, as they conquered and controlled parts of Spain for over 700 years.
Columbus left from our patch in 1492 to discover the New World, meaning most of the first Europeans to step foot in the Americas - his crew – were from a nearby town.
(The explorer would never have made it back to Spain had he not understood that Canary Current above. It creates one side of the clockwise triangular trade winds pattern spanning the Atlantic. Two hundred years earlier, Genoese adventurers Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi had also set sail for India – but, as Atlantic trade wind patterns had not been discovered, and it was impossible for them to sail north into the wind, they reached Africa and were never heard of again).
Home port for Columbus, and Spain's riches which followed from the Americas, was Seville. We saw fine colonial buildings, and, in inadvertent box-ticking, the bullring and a hen party wearing famous red-with-white-spots dresses.
But Spain wasn't ever master of the seas. Drake frazzled the king's beard by sinking 20 Spanish ships at Cadiz in 1587 – delaying the disastrous Armada invasion by a year – and a British raid destroyed Cadiz and Spain's anchored treasure fleet in 1596.
Barbary pirates from north Africa also terrorised coastal inhabitants - kidnapping a million Europeans in the 1600s and 1700s to take home as slaves.
Our local beach would have had a grandstand view of Trafalgar's 1805 battle, three miles out to sea.
Nelson's ships captured two-thirds of the Spanish-French fleet, halting Napoleon's plot to invade Britain.
Victory was due to the brilliant one-armed and one-eyed Nelson having more battle-ready sailors, and unusual tactics - sailing straight into the arc of Spanish ships in two lines, rather than sliding up up side-by-side for the usual kamikaze cannon exchange.
Soberingly, 5,000 mainly Spanish sailors died not far beyond the scattered kitesurfers we watched.
And right next to our hotel, 2,000 British and 3,000 French died in a day in in 1811, in another Napoleonic epic.
PLATES AND PADDLES
Spain's position at the gateway of Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean pretty much guaranteed its tumultuous history.
Eventually, that door will shut, as the Mediterranean evaporates when Africa's north-moving plate joins with Spain again.
But right now, Morocco's stretch of pine-clad hills, whitewashed towns and glimmering lights thankfully remains 20 miles from my paddleboard and mother-in-law, as I paddle hard into the wind and we rejoin Nati and Leo beside our sunset sandcastle.
ends
