Holiday reviews for Almunecar

We are regular travellers, but prior to this holiday, we had never spent any time in mainland Spain. We plumped for a large private villa in Almunecar on the Costa Tropical as it appeared to offer the best combination of features that were important to us.
Almunecar turns out to be a great place to go if you want to avoid the masses of other Brits in Spain, however, as a result, English is not very widely understood (even the majority of pharmacists could only understand the odd word);. In addition to the odd Brit, there is a smattering of German, French and a few lost Danes, but the vast proportion of the tourists during early August were the Spaniards themselves, and boy were there a lot of them! The town was completely choked up for two full weeks; It was impossible to find anywhere legal to park, and the illegal parking was very regularly subjected to the attention of an army of traffic wardens. The local council didn't appear to have done themselves any favours by having dug up large stretches of the main road through the resort in order to build new underground car parks. Apparently the projects ran out of money half way through thus leaving large sections of the road as narrow stretches of one way, littered with the usual array of illegally double parked cars, vans and scooters. We frequently found that to travel the 3km length of the town took 30 to 45 minutes, irrespective of whether we took the promenade road or the major N340.
I should point out that the situation improved significantly during the third week of August (the first two weeks built up to a crecendo with the festival of the Virgin of something on the 15th - the firework display was amazing!);.
The town itself has just about everything you could need with a couple of large supermarkets, hospital, beaches. water park.
The beaches are OK, but the mixture of grey sand, gravel and pebbles is not particularly attractive, and some form of foot protection is advisable when entering and exiting the sea as the rocks are pretty hard on the feet. Again due to the heaving crowds of Spaniards, we found that the best beaches to go to were the two local nudist beaches at Cotobro and Cantarijan, where there was plenty of space. The sea appeared to be pretty clean and there was a regular "sea cleaning boat" trawling up and down fishing out the odd inevitable plastic bottle and shopping bags.
Nightlife seemed very civilized, nobody really went out until after 10pm, dinner seemed to go on until about 1am, but as we're not much good at staying up I can't report what happened thereafter. Generally everyone appeared to be having a good time together, old and young alike, without anyone having to get drunk and hit anybody else. Even the regular traffic incidents seemed to be quickly resolved with a grin and a shrug - All a bit different to downtown Wakefield on a Saturday evening!
Nice trips out to the mountains, the local sierras are pretty impressive, but the Sierra Grande outside Granada were really something, worth a couple of hours drive.
All in all, go to Almucar if you want Spanish seaside without Brits, but only go in the first two weeks of August if you really love it crowded.