A surprising view

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 winery, as in the photo.

There had been a bit of a mention of the shoes that are still made in Pinoso, though even I knew that the most obvious factory closed a while ago. Apart from seeing the Pinoso'S vans flitting around, apart from smelling the epoxy resin in a little workshop next to the library, and apart from seeing the Jover factory down by the town bodega that makes cambrillones (the reinforcing steel shank set into the soles of most shoes), I'm unaware of any other shoemaking facility. That doesn't mean there isn't any, just that I don't know about it.

And then, of course, we got onto the quarry, Monte Coto. For years it was the golden goose, the largest open-cast marble quarry in Europe - a one-time producer of lots of work and lots of money that provided Pinoso with a spectacular range of services but which has been in marked decline for years.

As we talked about the quarry, I said that I'd seen some relatively recent news that Levantina Stone, the largest producer, were axing between a third and a half of their workforce in Monte Coto, the Pinoso marble quarry, and in the offices over in Novelda. I also said that I know there's a long-running argument between the Regional Government and the Town Hall about both the mining rights in Monte Coto and the costs of putting right the environmental damage of the quarry as parts of it are worked out. The legislative stuff is something that I've never quite worked out because our local sources of media are much more interested in a photo of the mayor shaking hands with someone important from the Regional Government than they are in actually giving informative news.

As we were outside a bar for this conversation and as the bar owner hove into view at exactly the correct moment, I asked him if he knew what the beef was. He told me it was about the rights to the reserves underground. He said that it was crystal clear that the town hall owns, and can exploit, the mountain, but that normally the below-ground mining rights belong to the region.

Now I have to say that I have no idea whether he's right or not; it sounded plausible, but it may, or may not be, true. To him, as a Pinoso native, he was quite sure. I mentioned the layoffs at Levantina and he shrugged them off - at one point that would have been important, when there were hundreds at the quarry, but now the numbers are so low that sacking half of them affects almost nothing. Without any prompting, he went on to say that the town was moribund. He said that Pinoso was now a dormitory town for younger workers who went off to work in the larger towns and cities nearby and that the town's only full-time inhabitants were we geriatric foreigners. There is habitually a coven of us outside his bar on a Saturday morning, and he was quick to point out that he was singularly happy with foreigners spending money in bars and restaurants but that it was hardly a sound industrial base.

I countered by saying that how could a town that had at least seven butchers be a doomed town. "Great example," he said. "Tell me the butchers." So I tried. I mentioned a few. To the first he said, "Closed last month". He went on, "Carlos will retire in three years and he has nobody to take over the business; it'll close." He did that with a couple more before some Dutch person called him over, and that was how the conversation closed.

Now seriously, I have no idea if the town councillors tasked with local development, agriculture, industry and commerce would see it quite the same way, but it is quite strange sometimes how, despite living somewhere, you, one, sees things in a different light to other inhabitants. I can't remember seeing any positive industrial news in the local media for quite a while, but it is true that I can think of several small businesses which have closed in the recent past and going in a way that seems odd to my Northern European way of thinking.

I've seen plenty of local shops, that seemed prosperous enough, just close as their owners retired. A particularly notable example was a local restaurant that was, supposedly, famous all over Spain. Even I had seen it featured on the telly, and the parking spots around the very ordinary-looking restaurant were always awash with ostentatious cars. Last year, it just closed. The owner had got to retirement age, so he shut the business. Recently, a biggish tyre place did the same - one day in business, the next closed tight. I've heard lots of speculation as to why without anyone sounding as though they were 100% sure but, again, I suspect simple retirement.

To be honest, I see Pinoso as typical of lots of small towns. Traditional retail is obviously in difficulty at the moment, but there always seem to be people with new business ventures of one sort or another. Some prosper, some fail. It also seems to me that several of the new batch of incoming foreigners, especially the rich Northern Europeans, are relatively young and still economically active. It could be, though, that mine is an over-rosy view and the bar owner has a point.

Think Walden Pond

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's not quite so easy to translate effectively into English, the idea behind the words isn't quite the same. Land of Women, Women's Land, Soil of Women etc. don't capture the multiple meanings about the ownership, or the place and number of women wedded to the earth, to the soil, to the land. It happens the other way round too. T.S. Eliot's "At the still point of the turning world." can be translated into Spanish as the point that doesn't move or the point that is quiet and peaceful but there is no single word to give the same double meaning as in English.

Anyway, back at the page face. The book is largely about demanding recognition for the significant role that women have always played on the land, in the countryside, as shepherds, herders, planters, collectors, labourers and the like alongside their role as homeworkers. One of her key arguments is that the men get the praise for the horny handed sons of toil role whilst the women are only recognised as the sweepers of floors, the laundresses of overalls and the bakers of bread. There is no mention of Jill Archer or Annie Sugden but, as the author is a vet, James Herriot's Christmas cake baking heroines get a mention.

I've talked about rural Spain in the past. Partly because we have a friend who is politically active about rural issues and lives in a very rustic bit of Teruel and also because of where we live. Pinoso, is hardly urban, Culebrón less so. Here agriculture is important and everyday but where there is other work too and we are close to major centres of population. Part of Maria's argument is that we are all very quick to accept a view, forged by city dwellers, that lots of Spain is empty, a nice place to go for the weekend to relax, a place where we (Spaniards in this case) all came from but where none of us (Spaniards again) would like to stay too long. A place full of country bumpkins, good with their hands maybe, people who know all the gossip about their neighbours as well as being able to name birds, plants and trees the people who live in a place where doors can be left unlocked and where neighbours pop in all the time leaving trays of fruit, veg. and fresh baked pastries but who have been left behind by the modern world. Plenty tractor drivers and very few JavaScript developers.

She suggests that view needs a reappraisal. That rural Spain needs services more than it needs poetic praise and bucolic representation. Spain, lots of Spain, doesn't have much population but that doesn't mean it's empty. Just because it's not built up, or full of people, doesn't mean that it's abandoned. Sometimes the farming is extensive rather than intensive. There are places where the combines and the logging trucks roam, where the monster tractors equipped with tree shakers and catcher nets roar but equally there are places where herds of goats belch and fart overseen by a solitary figure and his or her dog and where families stop for a bucolic lunch with their backs against the olive trees that they have spent all morning beating with sticks to collect the crop. One fills supermarket shelves with cheap and accessible product and the other produces the high value local cheese and specialist olives of more "select" outlets. Both are alive and well, both have their place.

There was lots more too, it was a short book, fewer than 200 pages, but it was interesting given our situation. I suppose less so to someone enjoying the 3am traffic jams in Madrid. Well, according to one of the possible candidates for Mayor of Madrid that's one of the things that Madrileños enjoy.

Do you think I need to take a brolly?

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 litres or some 16% down. There have been bad years in the past, in 2004 for instance it was just 430 litres, but the problem is that it's been drier than usual for four years in a row and that means that the amount of water stored in reservoirs has been steadily falling, we're in a hydrological drought.

In fact the reservoirs are well below 40% of their storage capacity. To be honest this figure seems a strange way to report water capacity. Spain has the highest per capita reservoir capacity in the world. To say that the reservoirs are at 37% of capacity means nothing - do we have a lot of capacity, so there's plenty left for me to drink and for the farmers to pour onto their crops, or are we down to the last few cupfuls? The mug I drink tea from is pretty big, about half a litre, plenty of tea to wash down my breakfast toast but if I needed to drink a bucket of tea every morning, and presuming that the blue 15 litre bucket in our garage is typical, that mug would represent just over 3% of my tea habit needs.

Hydrologically Spain is divided into river basin areas. The one that affects us, in sunny Culebrón is the Jucar and the one next door, the Segura. They're at around 25% and 14% of capacity - the lowest figures in the whole of Spain. Again though that percentage figure has to be analysed rather than taken at face value. Up in Galicia for instance, where it normally rains a lot, there is not, usually, the need to store so much water because the stuff falls out of the sky pretty regularly. The storage figure for the Miño-Sil basin in that region is just over 42% but that represents much more of a supply problem than the 32% capacity for the Guadalquivir basin in Andalucia.  That's because it's often pretty dry in Andalucia so they have lots of reservoirs to store the water when it does come. In fact some restrictions on water use have been put into place in some of the traditionally wetter parts of Spain like Galicia and Castilla y León. Apparently they haven't had any rain at all in Valladolid, not a drop, in over 100 days for instance.

Last year at this time there were just short of 28,000 cubic hectares of water stored in reservoirs. This year it's about 22,000 cubic hectares, some 22% down. The water stored has three principal uses. For agriculture, for the urban centres and for hydroelectric generation. Agriculture uses about 85% of the water and the urban centres about 15%. The hydroelectric generation just borrows it for a moment or two. It's been a bad year for agriculture. The sector has had trouble with frosts, with hailstone damage (I've told you about the horrible hailstorms before) and the drought. Farmers reckon they've lost about 2,500,000,000€ of retail sales because of those three things. Mind you it's not all one way traffic. Farmers are allegedly responsible for an estimated half a million illegal water wells which use about the same amount of water as 58 million people in a year. Hydroelectric generation is down about 50% this year because the dams don't have the flows to drive the turbines. This means that other, non renewable and more costly, forms of energy, like gas and coal, have to be used to fill the gap and that, in turn, means more greenhouse gases - up 37% for this year over 2016.

I wondered how much rainfall would be needed to turn this situation around. None of the articles I read had a figure. It took me a long time to work out why. The answer is that nobody can really say without lots of ifs and buts. For instance Spain has systems for moving water from one river basin to another. Water is often moved from the Tajo to the Segura for instance so, I suppose, if the drought persisted in Murcia but it poured down in the Tajo basin then Murcia would be fine. Also you would need to establish what's normal in the way of full and empty reservoirs and whether the reservoirs or aquifers are the main source of supply. The highest figure I can see for reservoir capacity seems to be 70% in 2013, just before the dry spell started. If you were one of those half empty people, rather than half full people, then I suppose you could, quite rightly, point out that even in the fattest years the reservoirs were 30% below full. I'm pretty sure though that, a few years ago, one of the complaints in the North was that they had run out of storage capacity because all the reservoirs were full. That ties in with the point above about the Miño-Sil river basin. Full to overflowing in the lusher parts, still only at 50% in the drier parts but, in fact, all well and good. Actually I did find an article that said in Galicia it needed to start raining now and not stop until they had about 600 litres per square metre or about half a years average rainfall to bring things back to normal. That doesn't sound good.

But not to worry the Government has said that no cuts in supply are envisaged until 2018 - hang on isn't that just a bit short of 40 days away?

Gardening

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 year at least. This monotonous colour scheme doesn't help me to decide which of the various green and brown growths are good, nice, desirable plants that I should leave in peace and which are the weeds that apparently deserve to die.

We've spent years living somewhere else as well as Culebrón. After coming back from Salamanca one summer to find the weeds in our garden so thick and high that the chap with the rotavator said he didn't think the machine would cope, we decided it was time to employ a gardener. We asked our friend Geoff to do it. Just a couple of hours each week - to keep the weeds down and the garden tidy.

Now Geoff is British, English in fact. He has a British sensibility about gardens. He likes to see things growing. Maybe some nice veg, something flowering, certainly some variety and things like ground cover to keep the weeds down. He planted things. We had were able to eat homegrown tomatoes and cabbage during the Geoffrey years.

Spanish people very seldom come into our garden. Our friend Pepa came soon after we'd bought the house. She commented on the garden being limpio which means clean. This was because, between the various and obvious plants, there was bare earth where the weeds were being held at bay. Pepa explained to us that this was the Mediterranean way. Bare earth to avoid fires taking hold or spreading.

So, now that we are back in residence, we had the choice. We could build on all the work that Geoff had put in to produce a varied garden or we could slash and burn our way back to cleanliness. I think it was more my decision than Maggie's that we would cut everything back. And basically that's what we started to do in September. At first the jobs were obvious. The Torrevieja weed, which is a groundcovering succulent, was the first to go, then lots of the ivy that was growing beneath the fig trees. Next all the yuccas had to be dug out. We thinned out some of the other plants like cactus and iris and the palm tree and ivy hedge got their regulation trims.

None of it was really gardening. More like navvy work; digging, chopping, ripping and tearing. With the brute force stuff generally out of the way the garden began to look Spanish again. Maggie actually added some new plants and did some gentle pruning - with the help of tutorials from YouTube videos. All I had to contribute was a bit of weeding. That pruning though inspired me. I thought Maggie was being a bit timid about it. I tore up the last patch of decorative ivy over the weekend and, this week, I've been chopping down lots of pine branches.

Vicente, our next door neighbour passed as I hacked the other day. The garden's looking nice he said - very clean. I sniggered. It may be time to put the shears and clippers away, let the compost heap settle a bit and maybe just keep the weeds down. After all, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes "there's a time to plant and a there's a time to prune."