LagOmar

Ever since I was a teenager I was aware of Omar Sharif thanks to Mum’s friend Chris . Today, we took a taxi to the legendary LagOmar villa. This is a house that Omar Sharif  owned but, supposedly, never stayed in. There is a legend that suggest that, while filming L’Île Mysterieuse, Omar fell in love with the house and bought it. The British property developer who commissioned the place set in the rocks, knowing the actor’s weakness for cards, challenged Omar to a game of bridge where upon he lost the property because he didn’t know that his opponent was also the European Bridge champion. I wonder if it’s true.

The property is beautiful. It’s unclear how big the house really is because there seems to be some kind of holiday house as part of the complex and it’s inaccessible to us tourists but we got to explore quite a lot of rooms.  Because it’s built into the landscape it’s a bit of a maze but it means that it’s possible to turn a corner and find an unexpected room or a cafe-bar cut out of the stone. This pool is quite near the entrance and looks more ornamental than for swimming. There is another swimming pool that’s part of the holiday building.  It wasn’t very busy but, inevitably at this kind of place, visitors are following each other around the preordained viewing route so it felt a little bit strange to keep bumping into the same people. PY, Eleanor, Mark and I ended our visit with coffee/beers overlooking this pool. 

After leaving we started walking to Teguise. PY started to lead us across the top of the nearby hills but quickly decided that that he didn’t want to take the route so we navigated ourselves back down the hill to some more conventional roads. I am not sure we were supposed to be walking down the small bit of main road that we needed to but we made it and found a nice little lunch restaurant, Casa Leon, for some tapas-like food. One of the waitresses -might have been one of the owners - was British and a lot of fun.  Getting to know the staff came in useful later when we were trying to get a cab from the local taxi rank and nothing was turning up.  PY and Mark went back to the restaurant to get their help in ordering a cab back to the resort and, although it took much longer than we wanted it to, we got back.