Odd behaviour

Pinoso, our local town, is keen to promote tourist activity. After all tourism was one of the engines of the Spain's recent economic growth and it is still an enormously important industry here.

So Pinoso has been getting involved in promoting a wine trail, is talking about turning part of the huge marble quarries into a tourist attraction and re-equipping the old flour mill as a museum. Good stuff.

As a part of this drive they have just opened a new tourist office. It's only open weekdays from 10 till 2 at the moment to see how business develops. Being blessed with clairvoyant powers, I predict that it will be an utter failiure. Maybe if they had put it somewhere in Pinoso town rather than over a kilometre from the town centre, in the last building before open countryside, there might have been a better chance. Who thought of that?

We went to the building where the tourist office is today because they also stage exhibitions there from time to time. We were the only people in the building and we had to ring a bell to get in but the custodian was welcoming enough. I liked the exhibition though Maggie didn't so whilst I was looking around Maggie talked to the chap about the upcoming Villazgo celebrations.

Villazgo is a festival to celebrate the town's identity. It's a good event and it attracts plenty of people. It could attract more though if the publicity were not available only in Valenciano, the local dialect of the Catalan language. The main language of Spain, the one most people call Spanish is more accurately called Castellano. Nearly every Spaniard speaks Castellano but Valenciano, obviously enough, is spoken mainly in Valencia though what percentage speak it varies from town to town. Valenciano is not spoken in Murcia. Pinoso borders onto Murcia so the populations of two of the largest nearby towns, as well as anyone else outside Valencia, will have to guess at the programme.

I really think whoever is driving forward the tourist drive in Pinoso needs to reconsider their strategy.