Life in Culebrón

We all have our favourite words and expressions. One of my oft repeated phrases, when I'm saying where I live, in Spanish, to a Spaniard, is to say that I'm paleto and cateto. I thought these were two synonyms to describe country bumpkins. It turns out to be much more complex than that. And all I really wanted to say, with just a touch of humour, is that I live in the countryside. As I write I'm sitting outside the front of our house. The birds are chirping and I can hear a tractor working somewhere up on the hillside. There are dogs barking, of course there are dogs barking!, thankfully in the distance. I can see three of our four cats in various shady spots. I can see roses and trees and lots of other greenery, including far too many weeds, and piles of fallen blossom from our neighbour's tree. Country life. We country dwellers represent a small percentage of the total Spanish population. Exactly how small a percentage depends a bit on how you do your sums. Yecla isn...

We went up to Castellón for the weekend, the most northerly of the three provinces that make up the Valencian Community. The place we went was called Forcall and we lodged in an old palace. We were there to see a very odd festival where a couple of saints, Anthony and Peter, are harried by demons who try to burn them to death. My guess is that the roots of the festival are maybe older than Christianity! Whilst we were there we wandered around some of the nearby villages, mostly just over the order into Teruel, one of the provinces that makes up Aragón. If you want to see the snaps they're in this album  which is just a part of the January 2022 photo album that you can access from the tabs across the home page, or here Teruel is quite famous in Spain for being the back of beyond. At the last General Election for instance the province elected an "MP" as a member of the party "Teruel Exists". Teruel is always used as an example of España vacciada - emptied Spain. I...

I've read a few books by a Spanish author called Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867 -1928). A couple of the books were about life in Valencia, about the new bourgeoisie, the sort of people who didn't make their money by the sweat of their brow but by playing with money. The sort who despite being in debt need a new carriage to keep up appearances, the sort who would go on to be politicians if only they would stop impregnating the scullery maids. I found the picture the books conjured up of Spanish life at the tail end of the 19th Century fascinating. We went to Valencia to catch up with one of Maggie's nieces who was in the city for a European Arts Project. Maggie had booked a hotel that was about 3km from the Cathedral, near to the City of Arts and Sciences. It was in a district full of the sort of buildings that conjured up the characters from the Blasco Ibáñez books.  Big impressive buildings with lots of decoration, ample windows, high ceilings and fancy facades. Th...