Why it good to travel in autumn On an empty Spanish beach, Nick Trend revels in his autumn holiday - no crowds, low prices and free sunshine.
SOMETHING'S not right. It is 10.30 in the morning and I am sitting in the seafront cafe at Calella de Palafrugell, one of the prettiest of a string of small resorts along this rugged stretch of the Costa Brava. My guidebook, now discarded on the table next to a half-finished caf? cortado, suggests that the shelf of pinky-yellow sand stretched between the promenade and a scattering of low granite outcrops should be packed with people. In fact it is half empty.
A pair of English girls have just stretched out on blue and yellow towels. Twenty yards farther on, a couple are introducing their two-year-old to the clear warm water.
A woman of about 50 - French, I think - is stepping off the boardwalk to join them, the back of her legs mottled pink and white by a wicker cafe seat. In all, I count about two dozen people on the sand. There are more beached fishing boats than sunbathers.
Why? After all, the weather is wonderful, the temperature is in the mid-70s, the cloudless sky is luminous blue and I have already retreated into the shade to write. And this isn't an "airport day" lull, when one lot of holidaymakers leaves and the next arrives. It is just mid-September - and the rest of Europe has decided that the holiday season is over.
The weird thing is that only 19 days previously it was a completely different story. Beaches were packed, sun-loungers were draped with towels from first light, and sights such as the classical ruins at Empuries were inundated with trippers. In the evenings at Calella de Palafrugell, you would have to eat early, book well in advance or wander long and hungrily down the promenade in search of a free table.
Then, overnight the whole character of Calella, of the Costa Brava, of most other Mediterranean resorts, changed. "It happens on August 31 every year," says Sandie Jones, a local resort manager for a British tour operator."You can sit and watch them all loading up their cars or coaches and simply driving out of town. The next morning you notice the difference immediately. Suddenly, it's possible to find a parking space again."
It is only the Italians, Spanish (and on the Greek islands, the Greeks themselves) who work to such a precise timetable. But by the end of the first week of September, says Jones, nearly all the British, Dutch, Scandinavian and German families have gone home, bound by school holidays. And by the middle of the month the young clubbers - the 18-30 crowd - have also left. Only couples and very young families remain, and peace descends on all but the biggest resorts.
We all know, of course, that once the school holidays are over, the crowds die away and it is a good time for a quiet break. But how many of us know just how good it is?I had not fully appreciated it myself until this month. Then my son started school and I began to realise what we as a family would be missing by having to synchronise our holidays with those of his classmates. Totting up the figures is a depressing exercise. The effect on prices as demand suddenly drops off at the end of August is immediate. Travel-industry people call this the "shoulder season", the halfway stage between the peak summer rates and the rock-bottom off-season bargains.
Take the hotel where I am staying, the little three-star Alga, a few hundred yards back from the seafront. Its peak rate for a double room is nearly £60. That covers the period from July 15 to August 31. On September 1 the rate falls to just over £40 - a 30 per cent cut. What's more, you are not obliged to book full board, as you are in peak season in many family-run hotels in Spain, France and Italy; you can book b & b and eat out at a choice of excellent harbourside restaurants.
The price of package holidays falls in the same way. As our table shows, a holiday in the last two weeks of September costs at least 20 per cent less than at the July-August peak. Child places can fall from £249 to £99. A typical offpeak saving on a French camping holiday is 75 per cent.
Furthermore, thanks to the fall-off in demand, you have a much greater chance of booking the flight, the hotel, even the room you want, and you do not have to book so early to get it. Big tour operators say that a good 80 per cent of their capacity for the peak summer weeks is usually sold out by the end of February; by July nearly everything will have been sold. So you either book months in advance or you end up with the dregs. In late September or October, on the other hand, it is rare to find a hotel that is fully booked.
Independent travellers also do well at this time of year. Flight-only fares on charter airlines are not only cheaper but there are many more last-minute deals, because tour operators are still operating the same number of aircraft as in peak season, with perhaps a third fewer passengers. Scheduled flights are cheaper, too - sometimes much cheaper, as our table shows. In the end, though, I suppose I will come to terms with higher prices for family holidays. Just one more financial burden to bear in the name of family life.What upsets me more is the prospect of peak-time journeys. After the squalor and delays of airports in August, getting to the Costa Brava proved a rare pleasure. Check-in at Heathrow was so quiet I could almost hear my footsteps echoing up the hall. No crowds, no queues, no tension.
The flight took off 10 minutes late - but it arrived at a half-empty Barcelona airport five minutes early. The plane was barely two-thirds full - we got our drinks and meal quickly, and the cabin staff even gave us a short break before they wheeled out the duty-free trolley. It is a similar story at charter airports - in the autumn, delays to holiday airports are less likely, queues are shorter. In short, the whole experience is infinitely more civilised.
And once here, it is not only the beach that is so blissfully quiet. When I left the hotel after breakfast, the loungers around the pool were clear of towels - no one needs to reserve a place when the hotel is only half full. I could even swim lengths without getting someone's flipper in my face every other stroke.
Sightseeing is a pleasure, too. Yesterday, I pulled into the huge car park at the Greek and Roman ruins of Empiries, just along the coast. There were perhaps 20 other cars there, their owners lost to view, scattered thinly among the network of excavated streets, stone foundations and exquisite mosaics that form one of the most extensive and best-preserved ancient sites in Spain.
It is not only the costas that are at their best now. Think of autumn in Tuscany or the Dordogne - not just the mellow afternoon sunshine but the temptations of the market stalls, the abundance of produce: mushrooms, grapes, figs, plums, walnuts, apples.
But what I will miss most of all is the wonderful autumn weather. The greatest irony is that from the moment that most of Europe deems the holiday season to be over the weather - in my view, at least - actually gets better.
At the height of summer, the coast of Spain roasts in the mid to high 80s. The sand is painful to walk on. That's fine if you want to be baked to a tan of deep mahogany, but too hot for me and, according to all the locals I chatted to, too hot even for the Spanish.
For perhaps three or four weeks from mid-September, however, there is a window when the sun keeps shining but the heat and humidity of high summer ease. Average temperatures still peak at a blissful 77F, the equivalent of a hot summer's day in Britain - warm enough for sun-bathing but not oppressive.I've been here four days, and apart from one cloudy start with a few spattering of rain, each morning I've been woken by sun streaming through the curtains. This is nothing unusual. According to the weather statistics you can expect an average of seven hours' sunshine a day on the Costa Brava in September, and while it is more likely to rain than in August, it is rare for things to turn bad for more than a couple of days at a time.
At some point in October, of course, the weather is likely to break permanently. Exactly when varies from year to year, but you can mitigate the risk, and still take advantage of bargain holiday prices, by picking your destination carefully. Head further south, for example - the Costa del Sol, Cyprus and Crete are all good options.
The sea stays warm, too; in fact, the temperature peaks in September and is several degrees warmer than in June. (In Cyprus it remains tepid through to November.) And the sun is kinder: not the searing white glare of the August fireball, but a warm, yellower light that fades to a pinkish glow somewhere between 7.30 and eight at night.
All this is extremely frustrating if, like us, you have children of school age. And things are going to get worse. The definition of high season has become blurred in recent years because of a trend by some parents to take their children out of school for a week or two at the beginning or end of term. The Government has said it wants to discourage this - good for the children's education, no doubt, but bad news for peak-time holidaymakers, who will have even more of a fight for space on the beaches.
If you are one of the fortunate ones who can travel in autumn, to enjoy space, bargains and better weather, I envy you. Cyprus in October averages around 80F and nine hours of sun. In Malaga it will be 73F. As you relax on the empty beaches, think of me - condemned for the next 15 years to family holidays in high season.
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