Life in Culebrón

As I get older and older, I often find myself remembering one thing from another. The link may be tenuous but that doesn't stop me. So, we'd just been to see María Terremoto in concert at the ADDA, and very good she was too. We'd done well; we'd driven through Alicante in both directions without putting a foot wrong, and parking had been dead easy. As we eased back onto the motorway heading for home, I commented on the white lines. They were nice and bright. They reminded me of a trip many years ago when the lines were far from bright. It was 2007, and Maggie had moved for a job in Ciudad Rodrigo. I was going to join her when a building job on the house in Culebron was completed but, for now and for the coming long weekend, I'd got a bus ticket to go over to see her. It's a long way to Ciudad Rodrigo, more or less on the Portuguese border, but I was hoping to get my head down on the bus. I knew the bus station in Elda; I went there for the 2 a.m. bus. It never c...

From trunk roads, main roads, and motorways, through to the tarmac ribbons in the countryside, the different sorts and standards of roads in Spain are owned and looked after by different levels of government. Most of the roads operated by the national government are the ones that cross provincial and regional boundaries. This includes both motorways and conventional roads. The motorways are divided into two types: autovías and autopistas. There are technical differences between the two types of road (such as the style of junctions, width of carriageways, design speed, and the like), for most Spaniards, autovía is the all-purpose word for motorways, and they reserve autopista for toll motorways. For Brits the distinction might be that autopistas are motorways and autovias are major dual carriageways. Both types have a median separating the carriageways and at least two carriageways in either direction and the generic speed limit of 120 km/h. The signs, direction signs, kilometre posts, ...

Nowadays instead of working for a crust I live off pensions. One of the few things I miss about that last part of my working career, the bit where I attempted to teach English to Spanish students, is that they told me about things Spanish. One time a student told me that she was an architect. When I asked what she was working on and the answer was a roundabout. It was a bit of an eye opener. It had never crossed my mind that roundabouts were architect designed. Roundabouts in Spain are a bit of a growth industry. New ones pop up all the time. Spanish roundabouts have, to British schooled drivers, strange rules. Basically the outside lane, the one that involves going the greatest distance, always has precedence. So, whereas in the UK you use a different entry lane for right as against left turns there is absolutely no reason to do so in Spain. This isn't particularly important where there is no traffic but it certainly makes big and busy roundabouts in cities quite interesting. As w...

I always called it Road Tax and I suppose that's what it really was, in the beginning. You had a car and you paid tax that was then used to build and repair roads. It's not a principle that's applied to schools or social services but I can see the sense.  Not everybody needs roads so the people with vehicles pay. But UK road tax was abolished in 1937, long before even I was born, and replaced by Vehicle Excise Duty. This is, and was, a tax on cars, not roads, and it goes straight into the general fund. Here in Spain I pay a vehicle tax too. It's charged by the local town hall and collected on their behalf by a tax management agency, called SUMA. SUMA is a local organisation created by most of the Alicante town halls, working collectively, to collect local taxes. The tax on the Arona for this year is a bit short of 18€. Obviously comparing a local tax with a central government tax is unreasonable but it looks as though the Vehicle Excise Duty in the UK for the same car w...