La Cala Sketchbook Diary: A Costa del Sol Watercolour Journal
This sketchbook covers a few weeks in February and March, painted around La Cala and Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol. I like keeping a book like this on the go when we're out in Spain — it ends up being part travel diary, part material for the studio, and part just an excuse to sit still somewhere and look properly at a place.
There's no set order to how I fill these pages. Some days it's a proper sit-down painting; other times it's three minutes with a pen while the taxi waits. Both kinds are in here.
17th February — Beach erosion, La Cala
I started the book with this view along the beach towards the Chiringuito La Familia, mountains stacking up blue-grey behind the rooftops. I'd already noticed how much narrower this stretch of sand had become compared to previous years, so "Beach Erosion" went straight onto the page as a note to myself — it turns into a small theme running through the rest of the book.
18th February — Sendero Fluvial, Río Fuengirola
A much quieter page — the river path at Fuengirola, all greens and cool blues, painted wet-into-wet so the reeds and the water bleed into each other. This one's really about the paper doing the work rather than the drawing.
19th February — Paseo Mediterráneo, La Cala
A rougher sea that day, so I let the wave take over most of the left-hand page — spattered white gouache for the spray — before settling down to draw the terrace of buildings along the front in ink.
22nd February — Santana Golf, 18th hole
David's game, my sketchbook — I sat by the water on the 18th while he finished the round, and the taxi-service doodles down the side are a running joke about how we actually got there that day.
26th February — Olive grove with wild sweet peas
Inland for this one, and my favourite spread in the whole book. Wild sweet peas were threading through the grass at the edge of the grove, so I picked a stem to draw properly on the left before painting the olive trees loosely on the right — that blue-green they go in shade is difficult to get right and I'm still not sure I have.
27th February — Cabopina Marina
Boats out of the water for winter, shrink-wrapped into strange pale shapes against the yard. I liked the awkwardness of them more than I expected to — there's a comedy to a boat on stilts that a boat in water doesn't have. Lunch afterwards at La Despensa.
La Bohemia
Undated, but it slots in here — a café stop with two resident pink flamingos and a stack of pancakes that had gone cold by the time I'd finished drawing them. The interior on the right, all raking afternoon light through the pergola, was the part I actually wanted to paint.
1st March — Río Fuengirola
Back to the river, further along this time, with the hills doing most of the work in a single dark wash behind the paler foreground.
3rd March — Calle Francisco Cano
A street rather than a coastline for once — bare trees, striped awnings, the shop signs doing all the colour work. I wrote "what do you see, what do you think you see" alongside it, which was less profound than it sounds; I was mostly reminding myself to draw the shapes in front of me rather than the shapes I assumed were there.
5th March — the beach, twice
An early start, painted fast before the light changed — most of the page left empty on purpose.
Later the same day, further down the coast — boats pulled up on the grass in front of a handsome old building, mountains behind. "From the mountains to the sea, beach erosion" went on the page again; by now it wasn't really a note to myself any more, more a title for the whole book.
What's on the beach today
I ended the book with this one instead of a painting — just a plain list, illustrated, of what had actually washed up or been left behind on a single ordinary morning. Water bottles, ring pulls, cotton buds, a dead fish, fishing twine, building debris. It's not a comfortable page to include, but it felt more honest than closing the sketchbook on a pretty view and leaving it at that.
It's worth saying that La Cala beach still holds Blue Flag status for the summer season, so this isn't a beach in crisis — the erosion and the odd morning's litter are more a sign of a busy, well-loved coastline than a neglected one. But a February walk shows you things a July sunbather never sees, and I thought that was worth putting in the book alongside the prettier pages.
Sketchbooks like this one are usually where my larger seascapes and coastal paintings start — a page like the Paseo Mediterráneo spread, or the olive grove, will often turn into a full studio piece months later. If you'd like to see where some of these studies end up, have a browse of the Seascapes collection or Landscapes collection.
All sketchbook pages shown are original watercolour and mixed media works by Sheila Gill, painted on location around La Cala and Fuengirola, Spain, February–March 2026.