The resort is well set up for families. Alongside children’s football, tennis and golf academies, a modern dance academy has been added this year. My son Max and his best friend Oliver entered the teens tennis tournament and also played several rounds of pitch and putt, amongst other activities. Oliver, aged 15 and playing off a 28 handicap, also played a couple of rounds of the real thing. My 18-year-old daughter and her best friend, meanwhile, preferred nothing more physically taxing than walking from the beach sun lounger into the sea before retiring to the café for drinks.

Parents with teenage children know that holidays must be planned with military precision and with in-built flexibility for independence. La Manga Club works particularly well in this respect.Perhaps too well for some of the regular visitors who, I discovered, still hadn’t made it into nearby Cartagena, one of Europe’s oldest cities.

Named after Hannibal’s home in Carthage (he passed through on his march from Tunisia to Rome), Cartagena nestles beside the Mediterranean just a 15-minute drive away, a beguiling mix of turn-of-the-20th century modernist homes, Roman mosaics, hillside castles and modern cafés and restaurants flanking the harbour. My wife and I made the trip alone.That’s the beauty of providing a safe base and flexibility for family members to come and go as they wish.

On another occasion we drove to the capital of the province, Murcia, where we ate at a cracking restaurant called Ana, trawled the shops, and walked the gardens by the river.Amazingly, the children actually enjoyed trying authentic Murcian cuisine. But they liked even better sitting at an al fresco café drinking thick hot chocolate they could have stood a spoon in but in which they chose to dunk sugared twists of batter known as churros, instead.

In the evenings, on several occasions we headed to the go-kart track on the Autovia de la Manga. Having burned off a little adrenaline, we then followed the road a couple of hundred yards on to the La Manga Strip, an 18.5km-long skinny spit separating the placid Mar Menor from the Mediterranean.

The Strip is a favourite holidaying spot for Madrileños (inhabitants of Madrid). There were two hubs that were particularly lively: the fabulous but unassuming fish restaurants around the harbour at Cabo de Palos, and the nightly hawkers’ market at Plaza Bohemia (complete with ice cream parlours, a wide range of restaurants, bars and a decent bookshop). At both, having had our meal together, our children headed off in one direction and we in another before meeting up several hours later. The freedom to come and go meant fractious arguments were kept to a minimum and everyone got to do what they wanted.