Life in Culebrón

Here is the text with the euro symbols returned to their original position behind the numbers (86€, 20€). To be honest, our electricity bill isn’t that eye-watering. It’s dead easy to change supplier in Spain, as I suspect it is in most of Europe. One company maintains the infrastructure that carries the power to the house, but you can buy that electricity from any number of resellers. How they pay each other is no concern of mine. Since we arrived, we’ve usually bought our electricity from a firm called Iberdrola. We’ve had lots of different plans with them – a fixed rate for every hour, three separate tariffs at different times of day, others with high and low-cost periods, and so on. Again, I suspect this sounds similar to anywhere else on the continent. Iberdrola is an electricity producer. It owns nuclear power plants, hydroelectric stations, and wind and solar farms, among other things. There aren’t actually that many power generators in Spain. Once electricity exists, it can be ...

There is, in Monóvar, just down the road from us, a restaurant that I rather like. As soon as you are at the table, the server brings a chunk of bread and a serving dish with black olives—on one side, the typical and renowned Empeltre variety from Aragon, and, on the other, a serving of olive oil from one of the well-respected almazaras, or oil mills, with a quality mark. It reminds me of the wide variety of Spanish phrases that suggest that with oil, bread, and wine, one will never go hungry. Born and bred Spaniards that we are, we soon order the wine. It’s a splendid start to the meal, one of those reminders that good food doesn’t have to be fancy food. Though I have to say that what comes after is usually pretty fancy! I suspect that some Spaniards may drink olive oil. In fact, I know that for a fact. At an event in Yecla, the man next to me was doing just that. “Dipping bread into the oil adds a variable,” he said. Olive oil is just a fact in Spain; it’s something that simply happe...

I bought a brush cutter the other week. One of those petrol-driven machines for hacking down long grass. I got it from the ironmongers next to Delia’s Chinese Bazaar in Pinoso, and, while I was there, I plucked up the courage to ask about a very homemade-looking pine wood object that I had noticed on a previous visit. “It’s for splitting olives,” I was told. I know very little about the family who own and run the shop. There was an older man, a woman and a younger man, all of uncertain age, although two of them may have been a couple, as well as a very young girl. I guessed at three generations, but who knows? It was the younger man who unpacked the brush cutter and put fuel in it, just to check that everything worked. He gave me a demonstration of how to start it. I suspect I wouldn’t have received quite the same level of attention at the Leroy Merlin DIY megastore. I’m also fairly sure they wouldn’t have had a machine for splitting olives. I suppose things have changed everywhere in ...

A Spanish chap I talk to on the internet, once asked me if I lived in the countryside. I hesitated. It’s obviously rural: we’re surrounded by what you would call fields in the UK, and there are vineyards and olive trees growing within metres of our front door. Still, we’re not that isolated, the town with barbers and bars is just 5km away. We have fibre internet, we’re nearly on a drainage system (just election lies keep us 100 metres from mains sewerage), we have mains water and electricity, and the nearest tarmac is no more than 200 metres away. I can see the municipal tip, or whatever they are called nowadays, from our garden, and there’s a bloody big solar farm not 20 metres from our front door. Nonetheless, if I were to step out of my front door naked around breakfast time, the chances are that I could do that 360 times out of 365 without seeing anyone. And both the back and the front door give directly onto our living space – no vestibules, no boot rooms, no hallways. When it rai...

Spain is, season-wise, a fairly conventional country: it has the usual four seasons, both astronomical and meteorological. There is no monsoon, no wet-and-dry divide, nothing especially hippy or politically suspect. And yet summer is special. Partly because it rather fails to behave itself. For a large part of the population—and institutionally too—summer and August are synonymous . My own experience of the Spanish summer is overwhelmingly Mediterranean, coloured by media coverage that is nearly always Madrid-centric, so my picture may be a little out of kilter for people in the North or in larger inland towns and cities, but, that said, I hope this is a fair reflection of Spain in general. There are all sorts of fixed ideas about August, most of which are no longer true. Maybe they never were, but there are seeds of truth in all the myths. You can tell that summer is on the way when all the adverts on the telly, and before your Amazon Prime film starts, show happy faces eating and dr...

Graham, well now he’s Graham, strolled into our lives when he breached the defences of our garden three or four months ago. Maybe it was before then, maybe after; one never remembers when these things happen exactly, because they only become interesting in the light of what happens after. We’ve had a lot of cats since we came to Spain. One, Mary, came with me riding down in an MGB GT. She screamed all the way from Huntingdon to Dover but finally accepted there was no escape and watched France pass by with her paws on the dashboard. She died of heart failure. So far she’s our only cat that has lived out her natural span. Most of the rest have been slaughtered by cars or simply disappeared. We’ve also had a lot of cats just walk into our garden. We have food out for our household cats, and the interlopers recognise a free buffet when they see one. Several of them have been clever enough to work out the cat flap in double-quick time. One, Isabel, who we’d decided to take in, then went and...

The TV news, the radio or just keeping up with social media will tell you that Spain is on fire. It’s not a new story. By 23 July, more than 120,000 hectares had been turned into charred wasteland. Last year, by the same date, the figure was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares. In other words, this year’s fires have already burned four or five times as much land as they had by this stage in 2025, and that’s despite last year eventually becoming Spain’s worst fire season since 1994. Figures measured in hectares don’t really mean much to most of us. A hectare is what you need to put up a house in the campo in Alicante province, but visualising 7,000 of those plots is beyond my imagination. The deadliest fire so far this year, around Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, destroyed around 7,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of Leicester or Derby. Meanwhile, the huge fires in Zaragoza and Guadalajara have each burned more than 30,000 hectares, making each of them larger...

There can be a fantastic energy to a typical Spanish bar, especially during the mid-morning when people have their breakfast. The main protagonists are the coffee grinder and the coffee machine—one, obviously enough, produces a fierce grinding sound, and the other hisses like the Mallard letting off steam in Waverley Station. Then, of course, there are the people, who rise to the occasion. As a national characteristic, Spaniards are not quiet, and they do like to talk, sometimes quite loudly. So, with all this grinding and gushing going on, the clientele have to raise their voices a tad. And, in an upward spiral other groups at other tables follow suit, and so it goes on until the bar is as noisy as the engine room of the Titanic. So that is a normal bar: the sort of place you go for a coffee or a beer and some toast, maybe a roll or, if you are in Madrid, churros. It is nothing fancy and just as likely to be on a city street as in a rural village. There was a time, though, when these ...

It's often said said that most people stay faithful to the music they first fell in love with as teenagers. For most of us, those formative tracks are added to as we pass through our twenties and thirties, but that's where it stops. That doesn’t mean we never pick up new bands or singers, but we usually stick to our core favourites from those key decades and just bolt on a few extras later. At every stage, and I would suppose in every culture, life inevitably becomes a series of tasks. Whether it is swotting for exams, braving the daily commute, walking a couple of kilometres to the nearest well, or just tackling the laundry, these chores dominate our time. Even when we try to buy time by paying someone else to lighten the burden, other tasks creep in. Even pleasurable experiences, like going on holiday, can become irksome as you fight airline schedules or some hotel booking site. Our habits may shift over time—trading a Friday night pint at the pub in our youth for a takeaway ...

I heard this information on a couple of news broadcasts today, and I checked it against several AI sources to list the changes. I have asked one version to check the information provided by another several times but I cannot be certain that every detail is completely accurate. I believe they are, and in broad strokes it definitely is, but if a Guardia Civil officer tells you otherwise, or if the DGT website says otherwise, then they will be right and I will be wrong. The Spanish government has officially approved a major update to the General Traffic Regulations ( Reglamento General de Circulación ). Aimed at protecting what the DGT describes as “vulnerable road users”, the reform introduces significant changes to everyday traffic rules. Before going into the details, it is important to note that although the Council of Ministers approved this legislation today (23rd June 2026), it has not yet been published in the Official State Gazette ( Boletín Oficial del Estado , or BOE). As a res...

We went out the other day with the Amigos del Vino de Pinoso—the Friends of the Wine. We made a full day of it, starting with a mid-morning snack on the picnic tables of a motorway service area and ending with a visit to Guadalest Castle, but the main focus was a trip to the Mar de Vins bodega in La Nucía. Now, Maggie has taken me along to plenty of bodegas over the years, so I’ve seen my fair share of grape destalking machines, stainless steel tanks, thick rubber hoses, and bottling lines. You normally have to endure all that before they let you drink. The tasting itself has its own ritual: sniffing, swirling, angling the glass to inspect the colour. I’m never sure whether knowing a wine smells of blackberries is good or bad, but it’s part of the performance. One place told us to use all five senses when judging wine—though I forget where touch came in, and the sound of pouring is surely a dead giveaway about quality. Or not. Bodegas nearly always offer bits and bobs to snack on, usua...

Terrible, what you don't know sometimes.  I was chatting with a Spanish pal during a video language exchange. She was telling me about some event for Corpus Christi held near Toledo. Obviously, living here I know that Corpus exists, but heaven knows what Corpus actually is. The sum total of my knowledge is that it's some sort of Christian religious celebration. I also know it's the one where little girls, dressed up like miniature brides, and boys in their sailor suits parade through the streets after their First Communion. I haven't seen any of the other sexes yet, so I've no idea what they wear. Anyway, Charo mentioned that the streets near Toledo were strewn with thyme. I'd seen something about that for some event around here. I couldn't remember what, where or why, but it sort of primed me. I already knew it was Corpus time because the folk in Elche de la Sierra had started bombarding me with emails and WhatsApp messages about their own event. I've s...

When we first came to the Pinoso area, the locals were having a field day selling the semi-abandoned houses that their grandparents had left them: basically stone-built sheds with almost no modern conveniences, uncared for at the end of some dusty track and surrounded by half-abandoned terraces and plots of land. Lots of the houses had neither electricity nor running water. We Britons were an easy mark. We seemed to be willing to hand over thick wads of cash for houses that the locals considered more of a burden than a welcome gift, and, when we'd bought the house, we employed their cousin or their uncle to do it up. Electricity and water were deal-breakers for many houses at the time. Britons just expected that water would come out of taps and that there would be somewhere to plug in the fridge and the telly. One saving grace for many of these houses was that they had "agricultural water" – water designed for watering crops rather than drinking, but which had been extend...

I held back a slight snigger when I saw some Britons in the café inside Santa Bárbara Castle ask after their coffee and tea. The Fanta and whatever they were eating had arrived promptly enough but not the hot drinks. The server spoke good English. "Oh, sorry," she said. "I was going to bring them after you'd eaten." No Spaniard would think to have a hot drink alongside food except at breakfast. And when is Spanish breakfast time? When we have house guests, breakfast is the first meal I worry about because there's very little probability that we'll be eating breakfast out. It's not the same for lunch. If we have eggs, bread and cereal, maybe, nowadays, porridge, along with a few extras: yogurt, milk, butter and the like, I reckon we can satisfy most British breakfast demands. For kedgeree and devilled kidneys, our guests will have to arrange something with Lord Emsworth at Blandings, and if our guests want overnight oats with soya milk, I can only pre...

I can’t remember when I went to Avebury. It was a long time ago – before my bones started aching all the time and even before my hair turned white. I went to Castlerigg, near Keswick, around the same time. Both are oneiric memories – fleeting and half-forgotten, yet leaving a lasting impression. In both places I felt a link with the past – nothing academic, nothing to do with dates or history. It was a sense of continuity, not of dogma or rhetoric, but of something that was ours – a shared patrimony. I can hardly claim any shared past with Spain. My dad used to say that he’d sailed with Drake aboard the Pelican when it set off around the world. His proof was the name John Thompson on the muster roll. Obviously he hadn’t, but the idea that one of his forebears – one of mine – might have done so would be easy enough to check. I never have, though. Better a good tale than a refuted fact. Either way, my upbringing and lineage place me firmly on the side of the raiding, piratical English ra...