Raising your eyes unto heaven

Novelda and Alcoi both have lots of Modernista or Art Nouveau, buildings. Other Spanish towns boast a different architectural style, mediaeval walls or a castle. Some are littered with stone built palaces. Pinoso has none of that, in fact it has quite a lot of horrid buildings and plenty of buildings which look alright except that they are in the wrong place. Nonetheless, while Pinoso isn't exactly breathtaking in its architectural beauty, it does have lots of detail to notice if your life is not so full of care that you have some time to stand and stare.

For some reason traditional, as in traditional costume, seems to mean 18th or 19th Century. The first Levi's were made in 1853, but I suspect we're unlikely to see the local dance group, Monte de la Sal, in jeans. There's a certain unspoken aesthetic about what classic and traditional mean. Maybe it's the same with houses, traditional implies some sort of fixed time in the past. Apparently Alicantino houses, those from Alicante province, didn't change much in their basic construction or style from the 17th Century through to the beginning of the 20th Century and they're the ones that are tagged traditional.

In these standard Alicantino houses coloured facades are a big thing. If you've been to Villajoyosa you'll know about vivid facades but if you look around the central Pinoso streets, like Perfecto Mira, Maestro Domenech, Sagasta and Maisonnave, you will see that it's the same here but without all the fuss. Those traditional houses are built of mamposteria which is like dry stone walling but with lime mortar. First, you try to fit the stones together, like a jigsaw, and then you fill the spaces between big stones with smaller stones. To finish it off you bind the whole lot together with the mortar. The mamposteria walls are often very thick. When some families became richer they showed off their wealth by rendering the walls and then adding colour wash. In the end nearly all the houses ended up rendered and coloured. You still see houses in the countryside without render because that's where the poor folk lived.

Another feature of these classical houses is that the windows and doors follow the form of the house. Sometimes, often, there is a central axis marked by a big, impressive, solid wooden door. The windows are arranged, symmetrically, around that axis with the same shape and number on each side. The window casements and door surrounds might be picked out in mouldings of a different colour. It's usual for the windows to be tall rather than square or horizontally wide. Exterior decoration frequently picks out the floor lines of the various storeys of the house. The ground floor windows are usually protected with fancy ironwork; the fancier the ironwork the richer the household. It's very common for the upper windows to have small Juliet balconies commonly sporting fancy floor tiles. Sometimes there are decorative tiles under the eaves too.

There are as many exceptions to these "rules" as there are houses. Over time people renovate their homes and these classical features are diluted. Coloured facades dull and peel, someone might to build with dressed stone instead of mamposteria. Sometimes a different need called for a different design, big doors at the end of the building often point to an entrance for animals with carts or carriages for instance. But, if you can. just look up from street level and I'm sure you'll notice that some of these features are there.