Salou, Playa de Europa

Today I went to Salou, the beach of Europe, as the old shabby slogan used to say. It is another place created to entertain drunk tourists. When I was a child, I used to play a game; trying to discover where a tourist came from by listening to his language. It was easier than nowadays, since most of them were just French, German, English or Dutch.
Now I can't recognize some of these languages, which I guess come from some lost former soviet republic, judging by the looks of the people that speak them. There are also those who live there but were born on the other side of the world. How did they find the way to this little corner by the sea?
My mother used to live here before getting married, working at a perfumery-photography shop that belongs to a chief of the local mafia. From her I've got the interest in other cultures and photography.
One of the most astonishing stories she's told me many times is the one about the way she got to study German. There was a Luftwaffe officer living near her place. He was a tall, blue-eyed, blond and extremely handsome middle-aged man, all year long tanned by the sun, the ideal Arian type from Riefenstahl's movies in a more vacational pose.

During the Spanish war he belonged to the Condor Legion and, among other places in Spain, had been bombing the coast near Tarragona. Strange enough, he fell in love with that place and years later, after fighing and losing the WWII, he eloped here with his lover, a heiress from the Von Faber-Castell family, leaving everything behind.

My young mother was mainly scared by some strange medals, crosses and pictures the old chap had, hanging on the walls of his apartment, but now they were just a jolly couple, most of the times completely drunk with schnapps, that spent their time exercising by the beach and lecturing German to girls for little money.

For me, that guy was a pure Romantische, a breave heart, leaving his country and his fortune, to live by the sea with his lover in a place where he had contributed to destroy.