How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

We were in the village hall; we'd finished eating; alcohol was involved. I was still managing to speak relatively coherent Spanish. Someone who works for Pinoso Medios de Comunicación (MCM), was talking to her pal. She was showing him something from a Facebook or Twitter page - sorry, I know, I'll try to say X from now on. I forget why I became involved in the conversation - maybe I was invited, maybe I muscled in drunkenly but, muscle in I did. The Facebook or X thing was mine. I vaguely remembered it. I had been complaining, in a gentle sort of way, that the local media were a mouthpiece for the current administration and responsible for promoting a Trumpton type image for the town - peace, harmony and tranquility.

MCM Pinoso has an FM and Internet radio station, an X feed, a Facebook page, a website and it publishes to the town hall website. There used to be a television station in analogue days. Now there is some sort of agreement with a local TV firm to broadcast special events from time to time. There may well be other outlets I've forgotten about but those are the main ones.

In the days when mobile phones were almost unknown, and the Internet was creaky, the town hall in Pinoso had the radio station, a local analogue TV channel and a monthly magazine called El Cabeço, named for the salt dome hill that overlooks the town. There was also an independent newspaper, one printed on paper with ink that stained your fingers, called Canfali. The newspaper was weekly. It covered the Vinalopó Medio; a geographical area that includes Pinoso and towns from Petrer and Monforte del Cid down to Hondón de los Frailes. I don't think Canfali had much of a circulation and one week it simply wasn't available and never re-appeared. A little later, a retired local school teacher tried running a local website with news, opinions, and quite a lot of reader participation but that folded too. There was a Facebook-based newspaper type publication called El Eco de Pinoso and I remember at least one locally based website trying to be a sort of Internet newspaper for the town - there were probably others, but none of them ever really became equivalent to a local rag. 

So, the only real survivors of the digital carnage, at least in Pinoso, were the media funded by the local town hall. They tried, for a while, to keep Cabeço, the print magazine going. It had always been free, but as it thrashed around in its death throes, they tried charging for the print version as well as giving it away free on the town hall website in pdf format. The truth is though that a monthly magazine just doesn't fit in a world where my mobile phone based news feed often picks up over 200 "proper" news articles per day. The regional newspaper, at least the one I know about, is called Información, I think it's Alicante based, and if there's a murder or something newsworthy in Pinoso that newspaper will pick it up.

Back at the village hall. The friend of the MCM person was saying that, in the old days, in El Cabeço, there was room for the opposition political parties to have their say, to disrupt the hegemony of the one remaining news outlet for Pinoso. I had joined the conversation late, the whisky was going down extraordinarily easily and I didn't remember my X message particularly well. I'd probably complained that MCM failed to report on the non-political local stuff, that it had nothing to say about the roadworks here or there, that the information about who was the new director of the local town band or the town basketball team was scant, that there was nothing on planning applications and even births, deaths and marriages was missing. I also probably suggested that the reporting of crimes and misdemeanours was a bit Truman Show to give the impression that Pinoso was free of drunken drivers, traffic accidents, break-ins and robberies. In fact, I probably moaned that there was almost nothing that wasn't town hall sanctioned. To put it simply - whitewash. It was only when I listened a bit better that the other person was arguing a suppression of any news that wasn't promulgated by the local ruling party - a political news blackout on anything that the local mayor wouldn't like.

The counter argument is that in these information-rich days, it's dead easy to subscribe to the social media of the other political parties, to find a different point of view but most people who look at the town hall media outlets don't approach the information published there thinking of political bias - they're just keeping up to date and they would no more look at the opposition political party media outlets any more than they look at the media outlets branded as being property of the ruling local party.

I don't think I'd necessarily go with the view that MCM is Pravda inspired but it could certainly try to be a bit more of a news outlet and report on some of the dissent especially given that I suppose we local taxpayers keep it afloat.

The salt of the Earth

There's a hill to the East of Pinoso. It's a rounded, dome like, formation which stands about 320 metres above the surrounding terrain though its summit is 890 metres above sea level. If you know Pinoso it's the hill with a couple of telecoms masts near it's summit and you can see it from almost everywhere in town. It's called Monte Cabeço and it's a sort of visual reference point for most Pinosoeros. Travelling home, with Spaniards, on a coach from Madrid years and years ago the man behind me tapped me on the shoulder when el Cabeço came into view, "Look," he said, "It's our mountain".

One of the wines produced by the local Pinoso Bodega is named for the hill, it's called Diapiro and diapiro is the Spanish equivalent of the technical word, diapir in English, to describe the geological phenomenon where the light, and plastic, salt has been squeezed up through the harder, surrounding rock.

The salt in Monte Cabeço has been mined for years, at least since Roman times. The hill is basically millions and millions of tons of Triassic salt. Salt in its mineral form is called halite. In the past the salt was mined by digging it out with picks and shovels but nowadays the salt is extracted by drilling a borehole, injecting pressurised water into the rock to dissolve the salt and then pumping out the resultant brine. The saltwater solution is sent down a 53 km gravity fed pipeline to Torrevieja. There the solution is added to the salt lagoons, already partially filled with salty water from the Mediterranean. The Pinoso brine increases the concentration of salt in the water so, as the hot sun evaporates the water from the shallow lagoons, it leaves behind tons and tons, 550,000 last year, of salt ready for the chemical industry, for road gritting, for any number of industrial uses and even to add a bit of taste to your food despite what the doctor told you.

By the Ermita de Fátima

I've just come back from watching the awards ceremony for the 21st Maxi Banegas National Poetry Competition. Maxi was a local teacher and poet.

It's a nice little event. This year it was half way up our "emblematic" salt dome hill near the Fatima chapel in a sort of wooded clearing. Lovely setting. There were some songs from Andreu Valor, and an unnamed musician, as a guitar duo before the awards for a couple of photo and writing competitions and then the big prize for the poetry competition. As I said all very gentle and very pleasant.

There was wine and there were snacks afterwards provided by the local bodega, Bodegas Volver, but I didn't stay. Maggie was watching Liverpool lose the Champions League final so I was alone. There is something pathetic about eating ham and drinking wine alone in a crowd but that was only half the reason for clearing off. There were plenty of people I'd nodded to in the audience. With a glass in hand they may well have tried to speak to me and that would never do. I took a few last snaps of the guitar duo, now augmented to a trio, and headed home.

Nice as it was I have to admit to being a bit cross with the event which is billed as being a National competition. The singers sang in Valenciano, the Mayor spoke in Valenciano. There was a lot of Valenciano. Fair enough I live in Valencia. Good on them that they use their local language. On the other hand it's also very exclusive. Say something in Castellano, the world version of Spanish, and any of the forty odd nationalities that live in Pinoso might have a chance. Speak in Valenciano and it's only for the locals. It even excludes the vast majority of Spaniards.

Quite a lot of the news on the local website and radio station is presented in Valenciano. There's plenty in Castillian too but I think the percentage of Valenciano may be increasing. Anyway I was listening to the radio as I drove into town the other day and I heard the shortlist for the Carnival Queens, in Castillian, for this year's fiestas. All of them were double barrelled, local, Spanish names. Not an Ecuadorian, a Moroccan or a Ukrainian among them.

I thought the word was plurilingual

There is a local language in the Valencian Community which is called Valencian in English, Valenciano in the worldwide version of Spanish sometimes called Castellano and Valencià in, well in Valencià. Most people seem to think that it's not the same language as Catalan but the academic body that looks after the the rules and vocabulary of the language says they are wrong and that Catalan and Valenciano are the same with local variations.

As you would expect, and as I've reported before, there is a fairly strong local movement to promote Valenciano as a cultural heritage. Maggie keeps saying she's going to have a go at learning some. Rather her than me; I have enough problem with standard Spanish. Lots of people speak Valenciano as their principal language but there are lots of areas in this region where Valenciano is hardly spoken. Apparently about 50% of the population in the Valencian Community can speak the language and 85% can understand it.

Yesterday, over my work days lunchtime sandwich, I was reading the magazine produced by the communications team from the Pinoso Town Hall. The magazine's name, Cabeço, comes from a local hill. You will notice it is a Valenciano word with one of those French type cedillas. Our local council has a socialist majority and, as you would expect from a team directly employed by them, the reports in the magazine tend to highlight all the good things that are going on in the town. Most of it is pretty anodyne stuff anyway; new park benches here, a bit of tarmac there, what's on at the local theatre but, if you want to, you can argue about anything - wooden park benches - in this climate? Money on park benches when people are out of work?

There is some space in the magazine for the opposition political parties. Not much space but some. I always enjoy reading that because it means I find out where the local frictions are. I nearly always find something I didn't know because the Spaniards I talk to don't talk to me about that sort of thing and most of the Britons I talk to know even less about local controversy than me.

So, in the magazine, the conservative bunch were having a bit of a dig at the local budget - how much of it goes on staff, why rent office space instead of using council property etc. Then I got to a bit about education and about the use of Valenciano in the local schools. I read it twice, then a third time. I understood most of the words, I understood the sentiment but I didn't really understand what it was talking about although the gist was obviously that Valenciano was being pushed in all the schools in the Valencian Community, as a result of a Regional Government policy, which was bad for people who mainly spoke Castellano and would mean they'd have to pay for English classes. How did English come into this?

For years parents in the Valencian Community have been able to decide whether their children do the majority of the subjects in Castellano or in Valenciano. Currently seven of every ten youngsters are taught in Castellano. The Regional Government, which is ruled by a coalition of socialists and nationalists, has decided to change this twin path for a multilingual option. Now state and state assisted schools have to decide whether to slot into one of three levels - basic, intermediate or advanced - depending on how much of their basic teaching is done in Valenciano and how much English they offer. If the school teaches mainly in Castellano they end up in the basic level, and those which teach principally in Valenciano go into intermediate or advanced.

I should mention here that a very common model in Spain is for a bilingual school. Outside of the communities with a local language this usually means that the school teaches in Spanish and English though I'm sure that there are some which teach in Spanish and French or Spanish and German. Murcia, the community next to Alicante, the one in which I teach, has tens and tens of bilingual schools. Maggie used to work in one where she taught English in English, Art in English and a subject, Conocimiento del Medio, which is a sort of mix of natural and social sciences, in English. Personally I'm glad that I'm not a Spanish youngster having to struggle with a foreign language as well as the intricacies of the subjects themselves but it seems to be an accepted idea here.

Oddly it's English that is the incentive in this change from teaching in Castellano to Valenciano. Schools which teach half of the curriculum in Valenciano can up the percentage of the curriculum that they teach in English to 30%. This means that at the end of their school secondary career students will automatically get a B1, lower intermediate qualification in English, and a C1, lower advanced, qualification in Valenciano. It also cuts the amount of Castellano to the bare minimum allowed by Central Government legislation.

The Regional Government argument is that Valenciano and English are minority languages with Castellano being way out in front, so this change gives youngsters the opportunity for good levels in three languages whilst also helping to preserve a local cultural heritage. The detractors say that schools which cater to Castellano speakers are basically being punished by denying them increased access to English which, in the long run, is likely to be more useful. That's where the link was to English. The argument I had read in the magazine was saying that by denying Castellano speaking schools as much English for free, in the schools, the good parents would feel obliged to send their children for private classes.

What I found really odd about this was that I didn't know. After all I live here. I read the news most days, I listen to radio news and I even sometimes watch news on the telly but this policy had passed me by all together.

Eine Kleine Nachtwanderung

Cabeço towers above Pinoso. It's a salt dome. There are traces of human habitation there in pre-history and people still live on its slopes today. Plonked right on the top are a series of masts which people refer to as the repetidor, the repeater. It's a while since I've been up there but I think there is a mobile phone mast and I know that the local radio station uses one of the masts too.

Apparently it's become a bit of a local tradition to take a night-time stroll up the 893 metre high hill on one of the days during a week dedicated to promoting sport and a healthy lifestyle in Pinoso. Personally it's the first time I'm ever heard of it so the promotion must be spot on but there you go. This year all the walkers were being asked to contribute a euro with the cash going towards research into rare diseases.

I thought I'd go and see if there were any potential snaps. I had this idea of a really wide angle shot with someone looking suitably rugged putting a large sporty looking trainer in the bottom left of the image with the group behind picked out in the unforgiving light of the flash whilst the repeater twinkled away in the background. I never quite got around to putting the wide angle on the camera and the few snaps I did take are out of focus, boring and blasted with flash light. I have to say though that the whole thing was, and now a word I haven't used often since the 1980s, surreal.

We have quite a flash looking sports centre in Pinoso. Well it looks flash to me though I've no significant experience of sports installations to guarantee that my perception is accurate. I did my best to embrace the digital era but I simply didn't have the capacity to take on all those high tech sports clothes too. It's not even a part of the town I go to often.

When I arrived, just a bit before the 10pm start, there were little knots of people standing around the main entrance to the sports centre but, apart from the local police lounging by the two patrol cars, there was nothing official looking at all. So I followed a group of youngsters who were going up and behind the main building. It would have been a logical place to start a race - on the hillward side of the sports area. I wasn't going to ask anyone what was going on of course. That would have involved Spanish.

As I walked a little farther from the town I was surprised to find that there were quite a lot of houses. Where the small scale football stadium ended so did the town houses and the olive trees and almonds took over. The urban street became a single track rural road but there was still street lighting alongside the agricultural water hydrants. An odd mix. I realised it was quiet too. Quiet like it is near our house surrounded by open land. Not much traffic noise but the damned yap, yap yapping of myriad dogs and, just for tonight, occasional shouts and torch beams shining out from a little up the hill where a few spectators were gathering. There were also occasional voices from somewhere nearer the sports centre. The light was a mix of those yellow and orange and pink shades that various forms of street lighting give off. All this within a five minute walk of one of the main thoroughfares in Pinoso. I was wearing a light jacket and a T shirt and I was over-warm. Just in case you're worried I had shoes and trousers and other stuff on too.

A few people passed me, indeed some people I know vaguely said hello, then the Police car pointed its headlights up the track, turned on the blues and twos and crawled up the road. Behind came 400 people who looked perfectly normal but who had the intention of hiking up a biggish hill on a Thursday evening in the dark. It didn't seem to be a race. I don't know why I'd expected one. I took a few snaps. The people were gone and I walked back to the motor. About a hundred yards from the car park a bloke and a young lad were hurrying up the road. Obviously, despite the start being about fifteen minutes behind time, they'd arrived late. I'm already knackered said the man to the boy.

As I drove away from the town I could see the blue flashing lights crawling up the side of Cabeço. Distinctly odd.

Absent minded

Today we took part in the day of the absent Pinosero. 

Pinoseros are people who were born in Pinoso. The idea of the day is that it celebrates the locals who, for one reason or another, no longer live here. Each year some of them make the journey back to Pinoso to meet with friends and family or just to renew acquaintance with the town. Those who will never come back are remembered too.

The day included an official welcome, a presentation about the local salt workings and then a trip, by coach, to the top of Cabezo to have a look the actual installations on the ground before travelling back to town for a quick church service, a group photo and a meal.

Pinoso mines salt, a lot of salt but there's not a mineshaft, pick or shovel to be seen. One of the local topographic features is a rounded, dome like, hill which stands about 320 metres above the general terrain and whose summit is at something like 890 metres above sea level at Alicante. It's a salt dome. Millions and millions of tons of Triassic salt that have squeezed up through the surrounding rocks. Nowadays a mining company injects water into the ground, dissolves out some of the salt and sends it down a 53km gravity fed pipeline to Torrevieja. There the brine is added to the salt lagoons, filled with already salty water from the Mediterranean. The Pinoso brine ups the concentration of salt in the water so, when the water is evaporated away, they are left with tons of salt ready for road gritting, the chemical industry and other industrial uses.

To be honest I've been to much more exciting salt workings where huge trucks work underground or where salty white miners work with picks and wooden wheelbarrows (well in front of tourists they do) but this was interesting because it was on home turf. Something that we'd not done either before.

The meal wasn't bad. Mass catering and a very normal sort of menu but the rabbit stew, the gazpacho, I had was good and Maggie said her rice, rabbit and snail paella, was good enough too. The company was excellent. We had gone with a couple of recently arrived Britons but otherwise we were, obviously enough, surrounded by Spaniards and they seemed more than happy to chat with us. There were a couple of quite impish chaps sitting opposite who must have been studying irony at the University of the Third Age and were  determined to try out some of the things they had learned.

So, about seven hours after we started we came home. Fatter and more knowledgeable about local geography, geology and industry and, rather surprisingly, grasping one of the group photos.

Keeping up to date

When we first settled in Pinoso the Internet wasn't as all pervasive as it is today. There was still a weekly rag, el Canfali, which reported the news from Pinoso and many of the surrounding towns. The quality of its journalism was questionable but it was a part of my weekly routine to buy and read it. I was sad when it died. Good for my Spanish and good to know what was happening.

Our local Town Hall runs a radio station and a TV station. The TV station fell foul of the digitalisation of the Spanish television networks and finally gave up analogue broadcasting in March 2012. Even before it closed we lost the signal in Culebrón with a change of transmitter. I don't quite understand how or why but it still exists on the internet although it seems to produce still rather than moving images. There are just fourteen videos on its Facebook page for instance. The Pinoso Town Hall website is enigmatic about Telepinos's future "waiting to find a method of being an open window for all the people of Pinoso."

The radio station is fine. The signal's a bit weak our side of town but it broadcasts on the internet too. A mix of local programming and idiosyncratic music.

The other source of written information, alongside the commercial Canfali and the generalist commercial provincial press, was and is a free magazine produced by the Town Hall. It's called El Cabeço. It used to be monthly but times are hard and it now seems to be truly periodical - sometimes it covers three months, sometimes two. I don't have to worry about publication date. My pal Geoff collects one when he sees one in the newsagent where he picks up his Daily Mail every day. When it comes out I get one. I presume the same writing team put together the news on the Town Hall website every day.

I suspect that the editorial in El Cabeço is a little biased. When the PP/UCL were in power el Cabeço told us about their wonderful achievements. The present administration is PSOE/PSD and it's their turn to be outstanding. Nonetheless a lot of the information is purely factual and the parts I can read (much of it is in Valenciano) are usually pretty interesting. Each of the political parties gets space in the magazine anyway and they anticipate the guff of their opponents and answer back in anticipation. It can be amusing to read. There is obviously something close to "Parliamentary Privilege" in what opposing politicians can say within its pages.

You may remember that when we voted in the European elections I mentioned that we had a sort of referendum about some local questions too. Well El Cabeço tells me there's going to be another one in September this time about the future of our local salt dome, our emblematic mountainlet, el Cabeço in Valenciano or el Cabezo in Castellano.

Before I explain tell me what the answer is to this question: "Are you in agreement with the wells of the salt dome being used for potentially contaminating substances quite unrelated to their actual use?" It loses something in translation but I hope you have no doubt about the correct answer.

This is about the plan to use the empty spaces within the hill to store some of Spain's strategic oil reserve. I notice in his editorial in the magazine that the mayor doesn't shilly shally around when he describes the idea as damaging (nocivo) and says that he hopes the referendum will give support to the plans his party is developing to stop the project.

I don't quite understand why there is going to be a referendum. Thousands of opposing signatures have already been collected which surely serve the same purpose but I look forward to reading about the landslide support for keeping the hill clean in the next edition.