I was talking to one of my Spanish friends, Mercedes, last week via Skype and the conversation naturally turned to how the season is shaping up in naturist Spain. I’m not sure how the conversation took the turn it did, but we ended up talking about people, mostly women, who end up at the beach, not just our local Spanish beach, but beaches in general, without ever planning to have gone there that day. And come ill prepared!

 

The thing is that many European women now routinely sunbathe/swim topless, so even on ‘textile’ beaches toplessness is a familiar sight. I speculated on why they don’t head out better prepared for a day at the beach. ‘It is Spain’, Mercedes said. ‘We don’t plan things. Things just happen sometimes and we go with the flow.’

I can recognise this trait, not just amongst the Spanish, but the ex-pats who now call it home. Indeed, the best laid plans can often go awry. Having marked out your day, you bump into someone, find this or that is happening, a band is playing, someone is having a BBQ and you’re invited…and what you had planned to do goes out of the window. I like this happy-go-lucky approach to the day, every day.

So yes, Mercedes is right. You set off to go to a garden centre or Ikea, run into someone, they’re going to the beach and ‘come along!’ in that open invitational way the Spaniards have about them.

By the time you get to the beach (which may be textile), you realise you’ve no swimming costume. No problem. You’re only wearing a flimsy sundress and panties anyway. So the panties, at a moment’s notice, become your swimming costume. Indeed, I have been caught out like this myself before now. A little way up the coast, in a textile part of town, we have friends who we ran into by chance at a heladeria, an ice cream shop, a couple of years ago. The female in the couple was topless, so I took off my sundress and joined her, sitting in panties on the sand. I have to say, as an aside, it feels strange to me. Fully nude, I’m fine. In my underwear, I feel exposed.

Not everyone is naturist, but I’d say the overwhelming majority of women in the part of Spain I visit are regular topless sunbathers, so women wearing only panties are a regular sight, as are men in briefs, on beaches. They’re just a practical solution to the problem.

Of course, if you go for a swim, and your undies are now wet, there’s another practical solution: take them off. I’ve also had the experience of throwing a sun dress back on and then tugging off the wet underwear, driving home ‘commando’, as it were.

 

As usual, of course, it was necessary to replicate this real life scene within SL, so model Niamh headed off to the Eden Naturopolis sim to pose for us, wearing panties from Reasonable Desires (pack of 3, L$0). A scene I expect to see replicated, in RL, at various points over the summer.

 

Ella