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Pinoso

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Often, on the Pinoso Community Facebook page people, who are considering moving to this area, ask - 'What's Pinoso like?' So, as a nice easy blog, I thought I'd give my answer to that question for those people. First off, Pinoso is more a big village than a small town and expectations should reflect that. The town is in the province of Alicante, part of the Comunitat Valenciana, but it's right on the border with the Murcia region. Pinoso, like all of Spain, speaks Castilian Spanish which is the Spanish spoken worldwide. However, because it is a part of the Valencian region it also speaks a local variant of Catalan called Valenciano which is taught in all the local schools. You will hear Valenciano all over the place. Increasingly the town hall produces information primarily in Valenciano. The population of the municipality is a bit short of 9,000 people, and that includes all the people living in the satellite villages or pedanías that surround the town. Culebrón, w...
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Trying to get an ID card

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In Spain you have to carry ID at all times. For Spanish nationals they have an identity card, the DNI and for foreigners there is a TIE, the Foreigner's Identity Card. EU citizens, within an EU country like Spain, are neither Nationals nor foreigners. This means that EU citizens have to carry the form of ID in use in their country. Now we Brits are a little odd in that we don't have an ID card so Brits are supposed to carry their passport with them at all times in case the "Competent Authority" needs to see it. As well as the need to carry identification EU citizens, living in Spain, have to register. When the scheme was first introduced the registration certificate was a bit of green A4 paper but later it became smaller and more card like, something like the old UK paper driving licence. A couple of weeks ago the UK left the European Union. Consequently the registration document became a bit of an anachronism for UK citizens. Nonetheless with the transitio...
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And just how do you get to be extra virgin?

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I find it vaguely amusing how the Italians seem to get there first. Here the tiny strong black coffee is called a solo but buy one in Teignmouth in Devon or Alberona in Foggia and it'll be an espresso. Expensive British coffees have Italian names. Another example is Spanish ham, the Jamón Serrano. Commonplace here but, when I want to describe it to visiting Britons, I find that I need to describe it as Parma ham so they know what I'm talking about. Spaniards by the way call the British floppy boiled ham York Ham - jamón York. Spaniards are often particularly narked about oil. Oil in Spain means olive oil. The default is olive oil. If, for some strange reason, you want another type of oil then you have to be specific - corn oil, sesame oil etc. Even if the Mediterranean Diet is besieged on all sides by hamburgers, pizzas and kebabs the oil is still an essential part of the Spanish diet. Obviously enough it's easy to buy Spanish oil here but it's not difficult to ...
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