MAGAN'S WORLD: Manchán Magan'stales of a travel addict
If the gown is of a particularly intense blue, almost indigo, he's likely to be a Tuareg - considered until very recently one of the most ferocious, mysterious and vindictive tribes on earth.
They are nomadic Saharans, distantly related to the Berbers of north Africa. For centuries they moved with small flocks of goats and camels from pasture to seasonal pasture. Their animals were a way of supplementing their incomes. Their principal wealth came from banditry and extortion of caravans. In this they are an evolutionary rarity, one of the few tribes that depended almost entirely on robbing other humans.
Now they spend their time staring imploringly up at you from the pavement, trying to attract your attention as you apply more suncream or lick your ice cream. Although you see them wagging tarnished necklaces and polished lumps of agate in your face, they are masters of the desert, knowing the whereabouts of every well and bush - the only people who can survive there sustainably.
Until the 20th century no group ever managed to overcome them. They were known to attack and kill anyone who had not paid for their protection - and sometimes even those who had. They swallowed armies of ancient Greece, and Roman legions vanished into the sands whenever they dared enter Tuareg territory.
The Ottomans knew better than to confront them, merely paying what was asked to guarantee a supply of slaves from farther south. It was the French in the late 19th century who dared be the first in 1,000 years to stand up to the Tuareg, and they suffered terribly for their hubris.
At first the Tuaregs just played with them, accepting vast bribes to act as guides, but when it looked as if the French were planning to settle in the area they massacred them, either by luring them into the desert and abandoning them without water or by chopping their heads off - always leaving one or two alive, to report exactly how gruesome it was.
The French eventually gained the upper hand, since when Tuareg fortunes have been in decline. The past century has been as hard on them as it has on all nomads. Their migration routes were closed and their wells polluted. With the coming of roads, caravans died out and the Tuareg had no one left to plunder. Their nomadic nature has almost been wiped out, but a few still have that urge to wander, so it is no surprise to find them on the strands of Spain and the Canaries.
They have adapted to a life of hawking their jewellery, swords and scabbards. They still swathe their faces in cotton, lest a Saharan sandstorm somehow sweep across the sands of Torremolinos or Playa de las Americas, so it's hard to know what they make of their new lives, but if you crouch down you can just about get a glimpse of their heavily hooded eyes through the break in the bands of cloth.
You see such determination, such regal certainty, that it's clear they still know they are the masters of the world's most inhospitable desert. They alone know how to cure the bite of a horned viper using only what is around them. They may never have brandished a sword in anger, but their fathers did, and if the opportunity arose they could rise up again against the holiday reps, inflatable-dolphin dealers and lobster-skinned holidaymakers. Or, at least, in my fantasy they could.