Life in Culebrón

This is the second in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to find a Spanish angle. This is a very small job. Wherever you live there will be a local variation on how you dispose of rubbish. In most Spanish towns and cities people take their rubbish down to containers that are placed strategically around the streets. The hope is that people will separate out the stuff that can be recycled so as not to fill up the generalist bins.  The yellow ones get containers like cans and cartons. the blue ones get paper and card and the green ones get glass. The generalist bins are also green. In some places there are brown bins that get organic waste and around here there are a couple of places that have community compost bins though they have not spread as was once promised. The stuff that isn't organic, or container or paper or glass, goes into the ordinary bin. Theses bins are, usually, emptied late at night in the cities and towns. Pinos...

I was chatting to my neighbours the other day. We were talking about the plans for the solar farm which will run along the Southern side of the CV83 (that's on the right as you drive from Pinoso to Monóvar). In the way that these things do the conversation drifted and we ended up talking about our water bills. My Spanish neighbours, whose main home is in Petrer, were blissfully unaware of the system for billing in Pinoso and they didn't know about this years price increases either. I reckoned that if they didn't know then neither would other people. An easy blog beckoned. I posted this same information in an entry on the Pinoso Community Facebook page back in September 2023. If you read that post you can save yourself effort and stop now. Here in Culebrón, and I presume throughout Pinoso, households are charged for drinking water on metered use. The bills are raised by Pinoso Town Hall, because they maintain the water system, but the money is collected by an organisation ca...

I just got a scary looking email. It was full of number codes and it came from the Government of Spain. My first thought was that it was a fine, the second that it was a scam. In fact it was from SUMA, the local tax collection agency, to tell me that a couple of new household bills were waiting for me on their website. Official Spanish is laced with over complicated and little used words. They really do need to start using plain, everyday language. Britons living in Spain often complain about Spanish tax. I can't actually find anything on the internet that directly compares the average tax burden between countries. I suppose, in the end, there are so many variables, from obvious taxes like income tax and VAT/IVA through to the sugar tax on soft drinks, that it's almost impossible to calculate. What there are are official figures, at country level, about how much tax revenues represent, as a percentage of the total budget. For instance in the UK taxes represent 35.5% of the tota...