Life in Culebrón

Sitting around nattering, putting the world to rights, as one does, on a Saturday morning with friends. We were talking about how people make a living in Pinoso. The most obvious source of employment is in agriculture, particularly in producing wine grapes and almonds, though there are lots of other crops. Unfortunately, it's also true that there are hectares of good agricultural land lying fallow because of the problem of the "generational replacement". The farmers and winemakers are getting on in years, and their sons and daughters want to be teachers and scientists and influencers and local government officers and not farmers and winemakers. We'd talked about the salt that is pumped out of the salt dome, El Cabeço, and sent as a brine solution down a pipeline to Torrevieja where it is added to the salt lagoons there to increase the yield. Actually, the technical term for a salt dome, diapiro, also gives its name to a couple of wines produced by the local bodega or ...

Maggie often comes home and tells me about a house that she's shown or a new house on the books of the estate agency she works for. At the best I'm vaguely interested. The other way around I often start a conversation with "I'm reading this book about ....," and Maggie is just as responsive. So, if I can't tell her I'll tell you. Don't think of it as a book review though, think more of it as a bastardisation of the book alongside my own ramblings. The book in question was written by a woman called María Sánchez. This is the sort of Spanish name I approve of. It's like one of the names in a Learn Spanish text book. There are plenty of Spanish names that are easy to say like Fernández or García but there seem to be many more which don't exactly trip off the Anglo tongue: Úrsula Corberó, Sandra Sabatés, Lidia Torrent or Isabel Díaz Ayuso for instance. Maria's book title is dead obvious too, at least in Spanish - Tierra de mujeres. It...

I mentioned a few posts ago that it hasn't rained a lot recently around here. Whenever if does rain someone always says -"Well, we need it," and that is about as true a truism as anyone could want. Spain is in the middle of a prolonged drought. Drought occurs when, over an extended period, rainfall is lower than normal. Eventually, despite reservoirs, desalination plants, water recovery and the like, this results in a hydrological drought or lack of water resources. When this water scarcity affects agricultural, industrial and other economic activity we get to a socio-economic drought which is when your average Joe starts to notice. That's about where we are. For some reason, presumably to do with the normal pattern of rainfall in Spain, the hydrographic year here runs from the start of October to the end of September. Between 1980 and 2010 the average rainfall in Spain was about 650 litres on every square metre. In the last hydrographic year the figure was 550...

I don't really have much to tell you about gardening. The problem is that it's over a week since I blogged anything and, as I've spent a lot of those day in the garden doing the sort of damage that is usually reserved for logging companies in the Amazon, it was all I couuld think of to write about. We have a garden that I think measures about 1,000 square metres. Small by Spanish country standards but big in British terms. We have a lot of fruit trees such as figs, peach, nispero, almonds, plums, apple, pomegranate, cherry and quince; lots of ivy, lots of pine trees, and plenty more. The trouble is that I'm not much of a gardener. I can tell a tulip from a daffodil from a rose but that's my sort of level. Nature, colourwise, always strikes me as a bit monotonous. When a rose blooms, or the almond trees are in blossom (like now) there's a touch of colour in the garden but I consider  the countryside to be lot of shades of green and brown - for most of the yea...