"The only mischiefs I have done in my life I have done on summer nights"

For Care Santos, summer is not a time of year, it is a place: the beach of Santa Susanna in Malgrat de Mar. “This beach is the territory of my memory,” assures the writer. She started going there when she was little with her parents and siblings, who were teenagers. “I was a flat dweller, I was like a cat, and summer was absolute freedom and revelry. We arrived for Sant Joan and left for La Mercè: for me it was a paradise”.

Santos remembers putting on her bikini in the morning and not taking it off until she went to sleep. She remembers the intense smell ofaftersun from foreign tourists and how they played with the empty bottles they left on the sand, and the contrast in taste in her mouth when they went from the apartment pool to the sea water. Also her mother's potato omelette, “which was never missing”. 

The beach of Santa Susanna saw her grow up and become a teenager. “A t the winter, while my friends went to the disco, I wrote shut away at home, I was the weird one. On the other hand, in summer I transformed into someone else. The only mischief I’ve done in my life I’ve done on summer nights. In winter I never hooked up, me.” 

This summer paradise “it was lost when my mother sold the apartment”, but now Santos returns every year without fail. “I don’t need any impressive place on the Costa Brava, I need ten days on this modest beach in Maresme, thirty kilometers from my home. I am delighted to see that my children also enjoy it and consider it important. At home we say it’s a place that cures everything for us. When we have had a difficult school year or have problems, the sea, our sea, which is magical and needs no decoration, frees us. A few days in this place give me energy for the whole year”.

The beach of Santa Susanna has also seen Care Santos become a writer, which first and foremost means being a reader. “I have read entire libraries on that beach. My friends used to laugh at me because I arrived at 11 in the morning and didn’t leave until 9 at night. The sun was leaving, the tourists were leaving, and I was still there, reading”, she recalls. 

One of the most special summer nights of her life was also in this corner of Maresme, as an adult. “ I was meeting the man who would become my husband. I took him to the beach at night, which is when I like to swim in the sea the most, and we submerged ourselves in the water naked, alone on the beach, in my sea. You know someone is special to you when you show them your special places, right?”, says Santos.