About Me

As a little girl growing up in El Puerto, I was obsessed with pirate stories. Not for the treasure, but for everything that lay beyond the horizon: unknown ports, foreign languages, people living completely different lives. I'd look out over the bay and think: someday, I'm going to go see what's out there.

And I did. At seventeen, with a suitcase full of dreams, I left for Granada to study Translation and Interpreting. That's where I learned languages and, almost without noticing, learned how to tell a good story. Every night in the caves of the Sacromonte, hundreds of people from all over the world listened to me talk about flamenco and the Alhambra in four different languages.

Then came the Mediterranean. An Erasmus scholarship took me to Milan, and Italy stole a piece of my heart forever. I started guiding all across Europe, and in Rome, Naples, Athens and the Greek islands I discovered something funny: the farther I traveled, the more I kept finding home. The Phoenicians who founded Gadir three thousand years ago, the Greeks who placed the edge of the known world right here, the Romans who made Gades one of the richest cities in their empire... They had all sailed this same sea before reaching our bay.

Along the way, I organized and produced the Granada Flamenco Festival and worked for 20 years with some of the most respected names in cultural travel for American travelers, including Tauck and Odysseys Unlimited, as well as special interest groups from the Smithsonian, the American Institute of Architects, and universities like Berkeley and MIT. I watched the Northern Lights dance over the Arctic Circle and trained as a yoga teacher in India.

Then I crossed the Atlantic. I lived in Panama for several years, and the translator in me couldn't resist: I studied the local Spanish and kept pulling the thread until it led me straight back home. That softly dropped s, those words I thought were ours alone, that lilt that sounds like Cádiz in the middle of the Caribbean... It all traveled on the ships that left this very bay for the New World. Living there, I realized how much we share on both sides of the ocean: the same words, the same love of music, the same way of celebrating life.

That's when I finally understood where I come from. Cádiz is where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic. Ancient civilizations arrived from one side; ships set out for a new world from the other. Three thousand years as a gateway, a bridge and a crossroads.

And when I found out I was going to be a mom, I knew exactly where I wanted my daughter to be born: right here, facing this bay, so she could grow up knowing how wonderful her homeland is. I came home and closed the circle. And of course, I named her Mar, which means "sea" in Spanish.

That's where Seacret South comes from: the sea that carried me far away and now carries my daughter's name, and the secret, everything this land keeps hidden for those who know where to look. Old-school tabancos where sherry is poured straight from the barrel, Phoenician and Roman stones beneath the streets of Cádiz, sunsets glowing over the bay. A land forged by the Atlantic and lived with a Mediterranean soul.

I'm an officially licensed tour guide in Andalusia, and now it's my turn to show it to you. At your own pace, privately, in English, Spanish or Italian.

Shall we begin?