Yearning for the past

I forget why, I forget what we'd been doing, I really do forget a lot of things nowadays, but we were with friends and and now it was time for lunch. The nearest place on the route back that might have restaurants was Polop so we drove into the town. We followed the signs for the ayuntamiento, the town hall. The road changed from tarmac to paving which is a sure sign that we were in the heart of the oldest part of the town, the part to expect restaurants. We passed the typical town centre buildings, the tourist office or the town hall or the parish church - again I forget. It's not that we were able to choose our route. We were funneled and shepherded, inevitably, by no entry signs and compulsory turn signs along the one way circuit through the old town. And suddenly the road became a street about two metres wide.

It happens from time to time. You follow the SatNav without realising it's set to shortest route or you simply get funnelled into the old part of a town and suddenly you're on streets that were not designed for cars and vans but for donkeys and handcarts. Now my car is loaded with sensors. It pings if you're close at the back, it beeps if you're close at the front, it chirps if you're close on the left and it tweets if you're close on the right. Or something like that. It's an all singing car. On this occasion in Polop the car was tweeting and chirping. It's bad enough having to negotiate very narrow streets, with very solid walls scuffed and marked with the paintwork of tens of previous cars, but with the Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo (SEAT) choir at its most vocal it was a particularly nerve-wracking piece of driving.

The other place you see scuffed concrete walls, decorated with the paintwork from any number of Mercedes, Toyotas, Renaults and the rest, is in the underground car parks that abound in Spain. I often wonder why the builders of Spanish car parks put bollards that are low enough to be invisible from the car as you get close. I wonder why the distribution of the parking spaces and the route to them is so labyrinthine; snaking between the very solid supporting columns. Then, of course, there are those ramps that are so steep that you can only see the ceiling through your windscreen. Even when you think you're in the clear, near the exit, the angle of approach to the ticket machine calls for some close order manoeuvring with the very solid, read car bending, ironwork put there specifically to protect the ticket machine from errant vehicles.

In fact I have this theory about car park design. As I said in a blog a few weeks ago most Spaniards now live in biggish towns and cities. The majority though remain proud of their rural roots. They may never go to the countryside but they all claim some wide spot in the road in Teruel or Castilla la Mancha as their spiritual home. They say that village life is in their blood, in their very DNA. My theory is that they subconsciously yearn for are those twisting and turning streets. So what do they do? The builders, planners and architects among them, who live in the city but whose veins course with bucolic blood, design the car parks to mimic those narrow streets with their impossible turns, very solid walls and intricate routes so as to recreate a part of their rural heritage in the city.