Life in Culebrón

I spent most of yesterday morning locked in combat with the IMSERSO booking portal. For those who have not read the multiple blogs I have written about it, IMSERSO is the Spanish state’s subsidised holiday scheme for pensioners—an enterprise designed to keep coastal hotels open and retirees occupied during the off-season. The system won't let you apply a minute before your allotted time. Mine was 09:00 on 17 September. Having done my homework beforehand, I had compiled a tidy list of preferred destinations and target hotels. My initial plan was to head out to the Canary Islands—the offer included Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, or Tenerife. Yet when I finally logged in at two minutes past nine, the digital calendar was already glowing red with ‘full’ dates. Fuerteventura and Lanzarote were completely wiped out, leaving a mere three green blobs on Tenerife, the island we'd chosen, but none of the dates or hotels had any relation to my pre-planned targets. The dearth of space is simple...

We went on holiday last week to Gran Canaria one of the Canary islands just off the coast of Morocco and the Western Sahara. The islands have been Spanish for a long, long time so, despite being geographically in Africa, they look and feel like Spain. Chris Columbus stayed over for a while in 1492 on his way across the Atlantic to what turned out, to his surprise, to be America. Gran Canaria is a smallish sort of island, round in shape and about 50kms in diameter. The island is volcanic and hilly. If you think of it as the summit of a volcano sticking up out of the blue grey ocean you'd be about right. It has a motorway system joining all the main towns on the coast and a mish mash of little roads twisting up hillsides to connect the hundreds of small settlements inland. We drove around the island in an underpowered and hired VW gawping at banana trees, sugar cane plantations and the carpet of spring flowers before stopping to eat wrinkled potatoes with a spicy sauce. It was ...