I'm not sure what colour jacket you need

As well as the post box, the bodega, and Jason and Patricia's B&B, Culebrón has a restaurant. The restaurant is called Casa Eduardo because it's run by Eduardo with his wife, Maria Luisa, and nowadays, their son Sergio. To be honest the business used to be pretty moribund but it appears to have bounced back from the number of motors I see parked outside. The usual explanation is that the son added a bit of sparkle. I've always liked Eduardo's but Maggie is less of a fan. That said there's absolutely nothing to stop me from popping over for elevenses or even getting an odd beer when Maggie's out working but I don't, at least not frequently enough.

Eduardo was talking to me quite a while ago now about Sunday mornings. He told me the restaurant had to be open at some ungodly hour for the hunters to get their breakfasts. Hunting is big in Spain. In season you can hear the shotguns going off from dawn to dusk and the abandonment of the hunting dogs when the season is over is a Spanish scandal.

This morning, on a local Facebook community page, someone was asking about hunting. I thought they wanted to do some but when I re-read the post they were asking if the hunters would be a problem if they bought a rural house. Pet dogs slaughtered in error, hunters walking across their land - that sort of thing. Anyway it piqued my interest because I guessed that going hunting in Spain might be a paper heavy undertaking. 

First of all you have to be over 14, over 16 in Galicia, and, if you're under 18 you'll normally need permission from your parents, guardians or carers. Then you have to pass the hunting exam which is set by each Autonomous Community. Once it's passed it's passed though. It's not a recurring test.

Next, each season you have to get a hunting licence for the region or regions where you intend to hunt. The licence is for a named person so it's non-transferable. There is a multi community licence available. If you intend to go armed you need a firearms certificate. There are different certificates and presumably different procedures for getting licenced for the guns suitable for small game hunting (rabbits, hares, partridge and the like) or for larger animals (deer, boar etc.) Crossbows also need a licence though apparently longbows don't. It looks as though the licencing for those is a state licence administered by the Guardia Civil. It's the firearms certificate that requires a health test which has to be done every so often dependant on your age. If you commit an offence or you break the rules your hunting licence or your firearms licence can be taken away. There are different procedures, and different licences, for hunting with birds of prey! Hunters need civil liability Insurance and without insurance all the other licences lose their validity. 

With the exam passed, the licences bought, your guns (or raptors) licenced and everything insured you then need somewhere to hunt. All over Spain you see the little square signs divided by a diagonal line into two triangles, one black and one white. They delimit the coto - I suppose the English word would be hunting reserve though that sounds like an oxymoron to me. Anyway, to hunt you need to get authorisation from the owner of the coto. I'm pretty sure that I've heard that farmers often sell the hunting rights on their land to clubs and associations.

The article I used as the basis for this post from the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation reminds hunters that they should always use legal methods for hunting which I presume rules out AK47s and hand grenades. Only animals listed as fair game in each region can be hunted. Hopefully then our cats are safe so long as the hunter's eyesight test is reasonably recent. There was also a general reminder that there are safety rules that have to be respected - for instance someone on the Facebook page that I mentioned above said that hunting within 500 metres of a house is not allowed and I presume there are other comparable rules and regulations. (This is apparently duff information; see the footnote). Then the hunting seasons have to be respected. I just had a look to see when that was but it's far more complicated than I expected. For instance, this year you can hunt rabbits with dogs from 19 July to 25 December but only on Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and on regional and national holidays. On the other hand if you want to blow song thrushes out of the sky from a fixed position you'll have to hold your murderous instincts in check a little longer as the season doesn't start till 12 October and goes on till 6 December. You can't do that on Thursdays either - just Saturday, Sunday and regional and national holidays. Its the same start and finish dates and the same days for the lone hunter banging away at anything they find or a line of guns flushing out everything in front of them though hare and partridge have to be left alone after 8 November. No wonder they need to pass an exam! I suspect there will be a large section on noting the difference between rabbits, hares and chihuahuas and an even larger section on calendar use.

Oh, and I forgot all about hunting with dogs but without guns. And fishing. Pah!

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It's a couple of weeks after the original post. It's Sunday morning and there are hunters near our house. There is a comment on this piece which says that the commentator didn't know about the 500 metre rule. As I said I read that on the answers to the Facebook question that prompted me to write this post. Apparently it's wrong. It may have been 500 metres at some time but there is an entry about Hunting in the Official State Bulletin signed Francisco Franco in 1970 which sets the limits at 100 metres from villages and the like and 50 metres from individual houses. There is a more recent entry in that same Official Bulletin relating to Valencia which sets those limits at 200 metres from the edges of villages and 50 metres from isolated houses with prohibitions too on shooting close to roads and tracks. Sorry about that misinformation.

The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable

Coming in to Huntingdon, past Samuel Pepys place, alongside Hinchingbrooke I was amazed by the number of bunnies hopping around. Millions of the little blighters. Where we live now is much more rural than Huntingdon but I see far less wildlife. Rabbits and more particularly hares are our most frequent sighting but I'm talking one at a time not hordes of them. Lots of people tell us stories of wild boar and one pal was even attacked by one. I've only ever seen them on a game reserve in Andalucia. Although I know foxes, badgers, snakes, hedgehogs, squirrels, mice, stoats and the like are all there I hardly ever see them except as road kill. We have plenty of birds too but I don't see the soaring birds of prey that were so common in Salamanca or the game birds that were always attempting to commit hari kari under the wheels of my car in the wilds of Cambridgeshire.

Hunting though is enormous in Spain. Some weekends, presumably as hunting season opens on some poor species, the sounds of rifles and shotguns in the hills behind our house is more or less non stop. I know lots of dog owners who complain that their dogs cannot be taken off the lead because they are soon challenged by some angry farmer keen to protect nesting game birds or whatever and so protect their sales of hunting licences. Searching in Google for some information I needed for this post I found hundreds of websites offering hunting holidays particularly for big animals. There were, to me, some really sickening pictures of what seemed to be a succession of overweight red faced blokes with the regulation beige waistcoat grinning from ear to ear as they tugged on the horns of some glassy eyed beast.

Just at the bottom of our track there is a rectangular metal sign divided into black and white triangles by a diagonal line. For years I've known that these signs mark the boundary of a hunting area but that was the limit of my knowledge. The other day, when we were walking by one of the larger signs I noticed, for the first time, that it had a little metal tag attached a bit like the old chassis numbers on cars. I wondered what it was so I asked Google and hence this post. The tag plate apparently refers to the local government licence held by the owners of the hunting rights.

It seems there are all sorts of hunting licences available. For instance there is one called coto social de caza, social hunting grounds, which are not singles clubs but places which are designed  for poorer hunters who can't afford the cost of joining a hunting club with high fees. The licences to hunt are allocated to small groups by ballot and hunting is only allowed in these areas on Sundays and holidays. Cotos locales seem to be hunting grounds operated by farmers associations or other community groups and there are cotos privados too which are private hunting land reserved for members. Fortunately for the beasts, there are a range of areas where some species at least are protected or they are protected under certain circumstances. To be honest I got really bored reading the various rules and regulations and decided to stick with less accurate generalisation.

Those black and white signs are there to warn people. Legislation seems to vary from community to community but basically you have to put up a bigger sign which says what sort of hunting area it is and then smaller repeating signs. The big signs have to be at any obvious access point to hunting land and never more than 600 metres apart whilst the smaller signs have to be repeated at least every 100 metres. The idea is that, standing in front of one of them, you should be able to see the next sign in either direction. The repeating signs can also be painted onto handy things like rock crop outs or fence posts as long as the letters are greater than a specified size.

One thing that struck me, as I waded through the legalese of the placement of these signs, was that, as well as the signs for hunting areas, there were several to control hunting in one form or another. Whilst I realise that anywhere that doesn't have a hunting sign is, by default, a safe place for the wildlife it struck me how few of the reserve type signs I've seen. On the other hand I've seen thousands of the black and white triangle signs that give people the right to exercise their blood lust.