We booked a villa (self catering for obvious reasons) in Nerja - a fairly ‘English’ town on the Costa del Sol and booked flights with Thomas Cook who were able to provide a vegan (and therefore egg and dairy free) in flight meal for Charlie.

Having checked in the UK with a few suppliers, I knew ice cream in Spain would be a no-no so I decided to improvise and took lots of ingredients in a cool bag. (Mushed up fruit, especially strawberries, combined in a sugar syrup and added to a carton of dairy free cream make fab dairy free ice cream).

So in my cool bag we had lots of big and small cartons of soya milk (although we could have got this in the Spanish supermarkets), Provamel puddings, fruit snack bars, biscuits etc etc. They looked a bit surprised at the airport when it showed up in the X-ray but I just said ‘special diet’ and nothing more was mentioned. So we went knowing that we had our soya essentials for a fortnight - very reassuring. A letter from the doctor regarding epi-pens was also necessary, but again no one took any real notice. We took lots of epi-pens, Piriton etc in case of need.

Once there, armed with Foods Matter’s invaluable Spanish ingredients translation, I was able to shop easily and confidently in the many Nerja supermarkets - Captain Frudesca fish fingers proved very popular! There were also lots of sausages/burgers from the butchery counter but with comprehensive ingredients lists so we could be sure they were OK. Squid proved Charlie’s favourite, amazingly enough, again bought from the supermarket. Bread was a bit tricky as all Spanish breads have milk products listed, but in a good old ‘Brit.’ resort there was even Kingsmill sliced bread for sale, so that was OK.

We had lots of BBQs at home (the boys could even cook their own!) and we managed a few plates of chips out in restaurants as olive oil is the most common fat around. On the beach there were lots of ice lollies to choose from and you could watch your fish being BBQ’d in front of you. in the evenings Will and I could eat at one of the beach front bars while the boys played around on the beach (complete with climbing frames etc) right in front of us - so WE had a bit of a holiday and a few nice meals too.

We recognise that lovely relaxing all-in catered holidays are not something we can do (it would just be too stressful not knowing how the food was prepared the whole time). But for us, Nerja was the perfect solution. Pool, beach, lots of English speaking doctors, aqua park nearby and plenty of choice in supermarkets. We all loved it and the boys are already pestering us about next year.

My advice would be play it safe, go prepared and choose a big enough resort to offer Tesco/ Sainsbury style shopping!

But you will have to make your own ice cream!

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