Not a mention of holidays and nothing for the weekend

I got my hair cut last week. As I'm sure you know I go to Alfredo. One of the tiny pluses of Covid 19 is that Alfredo has cut down the number of appointments he takes in an hour. If it used to be one every 15 minutes it's now one every 20 minutes and if it was one every 20 minutes it's now one every half an hour. This is to give him time to disinfect things and to make sure that there are not too many people waiting or sitting together. It also means, that for most of an appointment, there's just me and him in the room; so nobody extra to smirk at my Spanish.

I said good morning and Alfredo said, "Do you know there are 54 Nationalities living in Pinoso?". I had to say that I didn't. The last time I'd seen the figure it was "only" 42. "I wonder why?," he asked. Being an immigrant myself I had answers. I likened it to the Bengali population settling in Brick Lane or Spaniards congregating in West London - friends tell friends that a place is good, services spring up to serve migrant populations etc. I said that in our case it had been the affordability of the housing. I also suggested that there was an initial desire of the Britons moving to Pinoso to move somewhere ostensibly more Spanish than the coast. Lastly I suggested that Pinoso wasn't a bad little town. Plenty of facilities for its size and well maintained. Alfredo didn't seem convinced.

As I settled in the chair we agreed that we Britons were being joined by Belgians and Dutch and to a lesser extent by Germans and French. The actual figures nearly agree with us except for our Eurocentric twist.

The information that Alfredo was reading came from the Pinoso Town Hall media team. There are actually two competing figures. The equivalent of the National Statistical Office (The INE or Instituto Nacional de Estadística) said, from the census figures, that Pinoso has a population of 8,025 (4,055 male and 3.970 female) whereas the register kept by the local town hall, the padrón, a bit like the UK Council Tax Register, says that there are 8,424 inhabitants. Whichever figures you prefer that's an annual increase of either 59 or 71 more people living in Pinoso.

I'm going to be pretty cavalier with the figures. I'm going to round up and down and I'm going to use the padrón figures as the basis because the local town hall has done the break down for me and that's a lot easier than digging around the INE website.

• The total population of Pinoso is 8,424 people.
• Just over 6,800 Spaniards live in Pinoso.
• Nearly 1 in 5 of the population of Pinoso are not Spaniards.
• There are 54 nationalities living in Pinoso. (There are 195 countries in the World.)
• The biggest group of foreigners in Pinoso are Britons. Nearly 800 of us. Nearly 10% of the population.
• The second biggest group of foreigners are Moroccans. The 185 Moroccans are a bit below 2.5% of the population.
• The Dutch are next with 65 people then there are 64 Romanians, 55 Belgians, 54 Ukrainians and 39 Ecuadorians.
• The remaining 47 nationalities account for around 350 people.
• There are nationals of 24 European, 17 American, 6 African and 5 Asian countries in Pinoso.
• Of all the towns in Alicante province Pinoso has the third highest proportion of inhabitants born in other countries. Hondón de los Frailes and la Romana are first and second. All three are small inland towns.
• Nearly 180 Pinoseros live abroad.

The haircut was fine, as always. 8€ well spent.