Pinoso

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, where we live, is one of those satellite villages. Most of them have very few facilities – a restaurant here and there but none of them have shops and, in general, if you live in a pedanía you'll have to go elsewhere for nearly everything. There is almost no public transport in Pinoso town or in the pedanías so people who live in the area usually need a car.

Pinoso was a very wealthy municipality because the marble quarry brought in lots and lots of money. Although the income has nose dived the quarry still props up the town's coffers quite nicely, with reported income up around the two and a half million mark, maybe a bit less. In basis though Pinoso is still an agricultural economy with wine grapes, almonds and olives being the main crops. There is a small industrial estate near the town and another closer to the quarry but employment opportunities are quite limited even for Spaniards. For anyone without fluent Spanish or Spanish qualifications the job opportunities are significantly fewer and setting up a business is not easy to do.

The mix of shops is on the decline, partly because retail is a bit old fashioned but also because as older shop owners retire, there is no 'generational relief'. Younger people look for better jobs in the surrounding towns or further afield. Mind you we still have a reasonable variety with several mid-sized supermarkets, a handful of clothes shops, and a mix of all sorts of retail outlets, from stationers and opticians to butchers and Chinese bazaars. For most everyday supplies you won't need to leave Pinoso. We also have a couple of petrol stations, several motor workshops, tyre places and the like. We have one vet's practice too. There are still plenty of bars and a number of restaurants, from the chop and chips variety up to one that gets an honourable mention in the Michelin guide. The food tends to be either traditional or very ordinary international fare. Considering its size though, the offer is pretty remarkable, no doubt buoyed up by the number of we rich foreigners living here.  

The landscape is a bit difficult to describe. It's definitely rural and even picturesque in parts; there are big hills and mountains all over the place with sweeping views but often, the fact that it's a working landscape with quite a high density of population, means that the views are degraded in some way or another. The province is also a bit odd in the distribution of dwellings. In most of Spain the rural areas are dotted with towns and villages with countryside in between. In Alicante the houses and tiny settlements pepper the countryside and human activity leaves behind abandoned houses, telegraph poles, pylons, worked out quarries and a whole lot more. It also seems that the current crop of farmers are possibly the last in a long line. When the men who currently work the land get to retirement age most of their sons and daughters show no interest in carrying on the family enterprise. Agricultural land is increasingly left fallow or sold on to people to build big houses or rented out for solar farms.

The administrative structure in Spain starts with the town hall or municipality and works up through provincial, regional and national levels. The town halls employ lots of people, from road sweepers and gardeners through admin people and police officers to planning officers and librarians It's the town halls too that issue lots of the everyday licences and permissions and collect local taxes, water and rubbish charges. The next step up is the province, Alicante in our case, then the regional government, Comunitat Valenciana, which looks after most of the big services like health and education. Sections of national government deal with immigration, identity cards and the like.

Pinoso has a wealth of services. Lots of small Spanish towns do. There are sporting facilities which look pretty good to me, but as I never go near them, I'm not really qualified to say. There is cultural provision too like a theatre, which gets a lot of use, a cultural centre which houses the town's library and archive, there's meeting space for local associations, there's a third age centre with stacks of activities for those 'golden years' and there is a nursery, two primaries and a secondary school. We have a good-sized health centre with three or four doctors and lots of ancillary services. The health centre offers 24-hour emergency cover. If you keel over in the street, an ambulance will get to you pretty quickly, but the nearest hospital is 30 minutes away. 

Our big fiesta is at the start of August and the Santa Catalina, neighbourhood hosts a locally intense fiesta in November. Easter is big here as it is in so much of Spain and a Christmas involves lots of events and activities too.

About 25% of Pinoso's population is non-Spanish. Moroccans, Ukrainians and Romanians are reasonably plentiful but they blend into the background in a way that the Britons, Irish, Dutch and Belgians (who between them are about half of the immigrant population) do not. The number of foreigners is also inflated slightly by populations in nearby villages. Although those villages are in other municipalities (and that's where the villagers figure in population counts) the people who live there see Pinoso as their natural "market town". Britons have been the largest immigrant group in Pinoso for years but there has been a relatively recent surge in the number of Dutch and Belgians.

I'd rather expect that Pinoso would be full of old people with a much sparser young population but, the last time I looked, the town has a surprisingly even spread of age groups -  a bit top heavy but not significantly so. The nursery school for instance is at capacity and the pensioners club is a thriving hub of activity. Pinoso is a safe place to live. Obviously there are robberies, burglaries, break ins and every other sort of crime but Spain is a pretty safe country and Pinoso is a safe corner of Spain.

One of those reasons for moving to this part of Spain is the weather. It's absolutely true that we have lots of sunny days, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's always warm. A bright blue sky in January and a temperature of around 14ºC can be very pleasant in the sun but bone chilling in the shade. During the time from, say, November to April, it's often much more pleasant outside than it is inside. If anyone tells you we only have a few weeks of cold weather they are either liars or they don't live here. People who build from scratch can decide on insulation and heating, but lots and lots of rural properties have inadequate insulation and primitive heating. It's not at all unusual to find people in offices working in their coats from late Autumn to early Spring. Summers can be scorching and plenty of people complain and complain about the heat. In fact the weather in general can be pretty extreme. When it rains, it often buckets down, when the wind blows it blows things over, and when it hails, and it does, things get smashed.

I'm not really in a position to compare utilities because my recent experience is all Spanish. I remember that people used to regularly complain that their electricity supply was inadequate with the circuit breakers popping all the time. Upgrading the power supply had a big impact on the monthly bill. Solar panels are obviously a modern option and there are plenty of rural houses that are completely off grid. Water quality is fine, but rural properties may end up using water intended for agricultural use which is often turned off to restrict overuse. That can lead to interrupted supply. The town water infrastructure in Pinoso hasn't been overhauled for years and it's creaking. Water cuts are relatively frequent as supply pipes burst. Gas comes in bottles if you use it; there is currently no piped supply. Internet speeds depend on your providers, but fibre connections are pretty widespread and speed isn't bad at all. The mobile networks all operate in the area but there are odd blind spots.

There are only four and a half roads out of Pinoso. One goes to Yecla, another to Jumilla, both in Murcia and one goes to Monóvar in Alicante – it's a bit further down that road to the hospital mentioned above. The other road goes out Abanilla way and to Fortuna, also in Murcia, but you can slide off down to the village of Algueña, if you wish and that's in Alicante

Because we are surrounded by places like Yecla, Jumilla, Abanilla, Fortuna, La Romana, Monóvar, Novelda, Elda/Petrer and Villena, there is always something happening within striking distance in the way of fiestas, theatre, events etc. It's about 50 minutes to the airport, a bit over an hour to get to the coast. Murcia, Alicante and Elche, all of which are good sized towns and cities are reachable within an hour too. You'll find that lots of the things you need to do to get settled, the official paperwork, can only be done in those bigger places.

I could unpack almost all of those paragraphs in much more detail but the post is already quite long enough. Do, please, remember that this is a personal view of the town and I'm pretty happy here - it's not everyone's cup of tea though but I hope it's even handed enough to give potential newcomers at least a notion of the place.