The Invitation I Never Expected to Accept

When we decided to visit Vera Playa, I honestly wasn’t expecting much. The beach was beautiful, the weather was perfect, but after a day or two it became obvious that most of the crowd was quite a bit older than we were. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that, it simply wasn’t really our scene, and I remember thinking we’d probably spend another day there before moving on to somewhere else.

Instead, Vera Playa ended up giving me one of my favourite memories from Spain.

One afternoon we met a couple from Dubai and clicked almost immediately. What started as a casual conversation over a drink somehow turned into hours of talking about travel, relationships and life in general. At some point they mentioned a private event taking place that weekend. They’d been before, loved it and said they had a feeling we’d enjoy it too. To be honest, we’d never even heard of Elephant Party until that conversation, so a few days later we found ourselves walking through the entrance with them, curious to see what everyone kept talking about.

What struck me almost immediately was that it didn’t feel like arriving at a big event. It felt more like being invited into somebody else’s circle of friends. Most people seemed to know each other, or at least knew someone who did, and that changed the atmosphere completely. Nobody seemed interested in showing off or trying to impress anyone. People of completely different ages mixed naturally, everyone looked relaxed, well travelled and comfortable in their own skin, and the whole evening had a kind of effortless elegance that I hadn’t expected.

As the night unfolded, people drifted naturally between cocktails, conversations, music, shibari performances and different spaces without any sense of rush. You could spend twenty minutes talking to someone you’d only just met, wander off for another drink, discover something happening in another room and somehow find yourself back in the same conversation later as though no time had passed. Everything flowed so naturally that the evening never felt organised, even though it clearly was.

The biggest surprise for me was the dark room. Normally they’re not really my thing because most of the ones I’d seen before felt too small, too enclosed and simply not very inviting. This one was completely different. It had been created inside a large conference room, which meant there was space to move, space to breathe and space to simply observe if that was all you wanted to do. People wandered in and out with cocktails, stopped to watch for a while, chatted with friends or joined in if they felt like it. Some couples were playing together, others were simply enjoying the atmosphere, and the whole room felt remarkably calm, respectful and relaxed.

Of course, I wandered straight into the middle of it all. My partner and I spent most of the evening laughing, flirting and enjoying ourselves without ever feeling self-conscious. Later we came back with another couple we’d met that night, and what I remember most isn’t anything dramatic. It’s how quickly the whole environment stopped feeling unusual. After a while you almost forgot where you were because it simply felt like a group of open-minded people enjoying a beautiful evening together.

When I think about that weekend now, I don’t really think about Vera Playa as the place where we realised we were among an older crowd. I think about the couple from Dubai who invited us somewhere we’d never even heard of, about saying yes without knowing what to expect, and about one conversation that quietly changed the entire trip. Moments like that are probably the reason I still love travelling so much. You can spend weeks planning itineraries, hotels and destinations, but the memories that stay with you for years almost always begin with something you never planned at all.