A set of photographs from Cap de Creus, from a rather stormy weekend.

The park is interesting in that the geography and geology mean that it has been largely spared from the industrial tourism that has decimated the character of the Costa Brava. Unfortunately, even here the only areas that are protected are those that would be unfeasibly difficult to construct on, and there are large areas currently under development. Destructive exploitation of the country seems to be a recently adopted cultural feature in Spain – something not helped by a corrupt Prime Minister who as a Jesuit educated property registrar understands and values nothing beyond cars, construction and catholicism.

The area is also interesting for its connections to Dalí, who took a house in the area and featured the region in several paintings. Cadaqués makes good tourist capital of this, ranging from themed hotels through to felt-tip portraits of the artist on random items of street furniture. There is also a noticeable Cuban influence on some of the buildings.

All images in this set were taken with a Canon 5DIII and 50mm f1.2 lens, in some cases using stitching for a wider field of view. This is a lens that is controversial for being soft, although in reality most “softness” is a consequence of shooting extremely shallow depth of field images with poor placement of the focus – wide open and at minimum focus distance the DOF is only a few mm…

The full set of images are over on on SmugMug…