Life in Culebrón

Corruption isn't really news in Spain any more. I don't mean that literally. Corruption is always in the news. Its just so commonplace that it has lost its impact. I just had a look to see how many politicians are facing charges at the minute and the information is a bit confusing. One of the problems in getting a figure is that there is no specific charge called corruption. So the figure depends a bit on what you count. The other thing is that lots of the corruption involves people at the edge of politics. The husband of a princess isn't a politician but the charges around him are clearly political. And someone who used to be a vice president and went on to manage the International Monetary Fund and then one of the big banks isn't a politician any more. So let's just say that the number is on the top side of 2,000. Most of the political corruption belongs to the PP, the conservative side. The last three party treasurers are all in trouble. There are eleven o...

It's raining. It's rained quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. We've forgotten all about the drought which lasted from last winter through to a few weeks ago. Usually, though not today, it rains overnight which is very civilised. I can't pretend that it's warm but it isn't cold either - at least not outside. Generally we're into the mid to high teens during the day but with sun and blue skies so it feels pleasantly warm. Overnight we're down at 7ºC or 8ºC maybe. I expect it will turn cold in December, it usually does. The pile of leaves that have just started to clog our drive suggest that Autumn has finally arrived. And its getting dark just after six in the afternoon. Considering it will start to get lighter again just before Christmas that's not too bad. So outside, in the fresh air everything is as it should be. Inside the house of course it's miserable. On the front page of today's Alicante paper there's a headline which say...

One advantage of the English language is that the word banker has an obvious rhyme. The Spaniards share the sentiment but not the rhyme. To the best of my knowledge this is a vastly oversimplified but basically accurate description of the Spanish banking system. Essentially, in recent history, there have been three types of "bank". The first is the standard commercial bank; the bank raises capital and then lends money to people and organisations in order to make a business profit. The second is the Caja de Ahorros, a Savings Bank where the money for loans came from the deposits of the savers. Many of the Savings Banks in Spain originally loaned money against pawned items. The profit from the operation is used to support loans to savers and a certain percentage is diverted to a charitable foundation to support "good causes." The third institution, the Rural Savings Bank, has syndicalist or co-operative roots and was originally developed to promote agriculture i...

The best route home from Cartagena to Culebrón passes close by the town of Fortuna. Alongside the ring road the gaunt skeletons of hundreds of unfinished houses bear witness to the folly of the Spanish building boom. The planned development, built in the bone dry scrubland that surrounds Fortuna, was to be called Fortuna Hill Nature and Residential Golf Resort.  A key part of the new resort was the Las Lamparillas development. It was aimed at golf playing Britons who weren't quite rich enough to buy a similar place on the coast and was planned to have 3,737 houses when complete. There were other agreements for other developments in Fortuna. If everything had gone as planned Fortuna's population would have increased from 10,000 to 100,000. A research project carried out by a local university in 2004 gives some idea as to the scale of the building work planned. Across Murcia, a region with just one and a half million inhabitants, there were agreements to build 800,000 house...