Finally the other day a crab pinched me. I was drying myself, I had just come out of the sea, I put my foot in a crack in the rock and the crab was there, the size of a lizard, emerald and shiny like a jewel. I appreciated the pinch, it had never happened to me, it took a long time, I have been bathing in the same cove for decades.For decades I have been bathing in the same cove, which, precisely because it is always the same, is different each time. This only happens in nature. The cove has its best day every day. I can assure you because over the years I have gained a physical, territorial, and sensitive knowledge of it like a second skin. Perhaps too sensitive. Over the years I have witnessed the changes: how the mother-of-pearls became extinct, how a large part of the seagulls and sea urchins disappeared, how the water warmed up, how the dinghies and kayaks, groups of swimmers, and, this very summer, tent camps multiplied. Massification is fatal in the only place on the planet and the only moment in history when the word densification has been sold in a positive light. The administration is already like a private business. I am from a family of hoteliers, but one of the happiest days of my life was when Mayor Collboni announced that he was taking to Barcelona the Thyssen painting collection that was to be installed in my city.
The cove fills up suddenly with good weather. Visitors queue up at a via ferrata there, clinging to the rock with their helmets on, like puffballs (this year they will definitively close the route for ecological reasons, but before they will let it run for the season), or they follow the coastal path with their mobile phones in hand (and still get lost in the pine forest), plant umbrellas on the rocks, play music and take millions of photos that I don't think they will ever look at.I wonder what these tourists who travel the world, who have trodden the five continents and visited all destinations, must see. What must they see that they wouldn't equally see with Google Earth? With this blinding sun, they would see the cove better in photographs. It must be the fact of bathing there (the few who do), but even that makes sense after many dips (when you learn where each type of fish moves, and where the stars and submerged cities are located; meanwhile it's not much different from a swimming pool).I happened to be born here and I was lucky enough to be able to stay. Years ago, I realized that the islets and granite rocks of this coast tend to be pyramidal in shape. But it wasn't until a week ago that I discovered that they actually have the shape of giant praying palms.
