We Took the Kids Back-to-School Shopping in Cartagena's Old Town

Three weeks into the school term and my youngest still didn't have a bata. That's the smock the little ones wear over their clothes in infantil and the first couple of years of primaria, and no, nobody puts that on the official list they hand you in July. You find out when the tutora sends a WhatsApp message on a Tuesday night asking why every other kid in the class has one and yours doesn't. Cue a Saturday morning drive into Cartagena with two grumpy kids and a coffee we didn't have time to finish.

If you're new out here, the first thing to know is that Los Alcázares and San Javier are great for a lot of things, but a proper back-to-school shop isn't one of them. For that you want Cartagena's old town, and once you know where to park and which streets to walk, it's actually a nice morning out rather than the ordeal it sounds like.

Why we skip the big shopping centres

Everyone tells you to head to the retail parks on the edge of Murcia city for school stuff, and sure, they've got everything under one roof. But the queues in September are horrendous, and you end up paying full price for things a family-run papelería in Cartagena will sell you cheaper, often with someone who'll actually help you match the exact folder colour your child's teacher demanded.

We park in the underground car park near Parque Torres, which is a five minute walk from the old town and usually has space even on a Saturday. From there it's all on foot, which the kids actually prefer because there's a lot to look at along the way, Roman ruins popping up between shopfronts, that sort of thing.

For anyone who's just moved to the area and is still getting their bearings, our guide to the Mar Menor area covers the drive times between the golf resorts and the bigger towns, and Cartagena from Roda Golf is a comfortable 25 minutes down the RM-12, easy enough for a school-run treat.

The papelerías tourists never find

Calle Mayor gets all the attention because it's the pretty pedestrian street with the cafes, but the shops we actually want are tucked into the smaller streets that run off it, around Calle Puertas de Murcia and towards Plaza San Francisco. These are proper old-school papelerías, the kind with a wall of pencil cases and a till that's older than me, run by families who've been doing this for decades.

What surprised me the first year we did this was how specific the lists are. Spanish schools want exact things: squared paper of a certain size, a particular type of glue stick, folders in colours assigned per subject. The women behind these counters know the local school lists better than the schools do, and they'll pull out exactly what you need without you having to explain twice. Try that in a big chain store and you'll be stood there with a photo of a crumpled list, guessing.

The bata rescue mission

Back to my smock crisis. Turns out there's a shop just off Plaza San Francisco that stocks nothing but batas and school aprons in every size, and the woman there took one look at my seven year old and had the right one off the shelf before I'd finished the sentence. Fifteen euros, done. If you've got little ones starting school out here for the first time, budget for this. Nobody warns you, and every single year someone's child turns up without one.

Making a morning of it

By the time we'd ticked off the list, everyone needed feeding, so we wandered down towards the port. There's a stretch of bars near the Muralla del Mar that do a proper menu del día, and after the school shop chaos, sitting outside with a caña and letting the kids run around the square for twenty minutes felt like the reward we'd earned. It's also just a genuinely nice part of Cartagena, close enough to the Roman theatre that you can squeeze in a bit of history if the kids haven't lost patience yet.

Families who are here on holiday and thinking about what life would actually look like living here full time, school runs, shopping trips, all of it, should have a wander round Cartagena's old town even outside term time. It gives you a much better feel for daily life than another afternoon on the beach. If that's the sort of thing you're weighing up, we've got a range of holiday rentals near Roda Golf that make it easy to base yourselves nearby and try the area out properly before committing to anything.

A few things I wish someone had told us

Go early on a Saturday, before eleven if you can, because the good papelerías get busy and the staff have less patience for questions once there's a queue out the door. Take a photo of the school list rather than the paper copy, it never survives contact with small children. And buy one size up on the bata if your child is anywhere near a growth spurt, because you do not want to be doing this trip twice in one term.

If you're new to the area and still working out how the Spanish school system fits together, or you're weighing up a longer stay near Roda Golf, our team is happy to answer questions about what life's actually like here once term starts and the tourists thin out. And if you fancy more of this sort of thing, the family section of the blog has other bits and pieces on raising kids out here, from beach days to festival season.

Either way, next time the WhatsApp group mentions a bata, I'll know exactly where to go.