Last day in Puglia - Driving along the East Coast

We had a beautiful drive for this coastal drive.  We took the fastest route which was inland to get down to the south coast to the town of S. M. di Leuca.  Santa Maria de Leuca turned out to be a charming little seaside town.  We first stopped to look at the view and find a restaurant with a bathroom - oops I mean that had coffee and a nice view.  (Most public bathroom require payment of about 1 euro - in restaurants they are free - and cleaner.)

  From the water front where we parked we saw these buildings a short ways above us.  We thought they were churches or museums.  When we walked up there we discovered they were private homes.

 Maybe you could rent one like this one with the beautiful mural on the front of it.

We then headed north along the Adriatic coast.  We stopped a couple of towns and surprisingly they did not have a lot of viewpoint parking places.  A lot of the best water front property is owned privately so the views are not necessarily as good as we had hoped.  But the places we did find were really beautiful.  This area is very rocky - stones are everywhere.  They have used them over the centuries to built walls and buildings - but still more stones break the surface of the earth.

 

 We saw a lot of these types of stone buildings - now they are mostly used for storage of tools and equipment.

 And, yes, they do have a lot of these type of cactus.  Makes me feel at home!

 And olive trees are everywhere.  As it is harvest time, you see a lot of nets under the trees to catch the olives.  Puglia produces something like 50% of the olive oil.

 We stopped for lunch in a seaside town.  I think it was Castro Marina. 

We spent quite a bit of time here taking photos

here before heading home.  I got out the fisheye lens to see what I could come up with.  I dropped this lens on the hard pavement for the second time - it's still working.  Since it is a generic lens it does not have the white dot that indicates how to place the lens on the camera - I find this very frustrating and hard to get it set right on the camera.  When I get home I will get a bottle of white nail polish and make my own dot!!