Life in Culebrón

I drove over to Novelda yesterday to see La bajada de la Virgen. I'd never seen this particular procession and I'm always up for a good romería. The idea of a romería is that a saint, well the carved statue that represents a saint, is moved from one place to another in a procession - usually from some sort of chapel to a parish church or vice versa. Normally the saints are carried on the shoulders of the faithful using a stretcher like base but not always, in la Palma for instance the saint rides in a cart. There are all sort of variations. The shrine where this particular saint, Mary Magdalene, came from is on la Mola Hill so she was brought down; bajada implies coming down, subida is when the saint goes up the hill. The style of a romería can vary, some are pretty large scale like San Pancrecio in Sax, San Isidro in Salinas or the Virgen de la Nieves between Aspe and Hondón de la Nieves. Several are much smaller scale including very local ones like moving the Virgen de la Asu...

Tapas trails are probably a bit old hat now but I still like to do one from time to time. In fact we went over to Novelda last weekend and, between dodging puddles and downpours, we did four stops on their current tapas route. It reminded me that I hadn't written anything about the trails for several years and whilst, for some of you, there may be a touch of "been there, done that" for relative newcomers it may still be one of the untried delights of Spanish life. The first tapas trail or ruta de tapas that we ever did was in Sax, probably in 2005. I don't suppose that was the first one ever organised in Spain so they must have been around for ages. There are lots of variations on a theme but the basic idea is pretty straightforward. Some body, often the local Chamber of Trade or the Town Hall, persuades any number of restaurants or bars to take part. Each participating establishment prepares a tapa, often two tapas, for the route. They agree to sell the tapa and a dr...

Last week we booked up for an Experiencia Gastro-Cultural in Novelda. The hook was the word gastro rather than on the word cultural.  The morning consisted of a couple of visits to the two "principal" Modernista or Art Nouveau houses in the town. Both are on the Calle Mayor in Novelda. One is run by the Fundación Mediterráneo and has an entrance charge whilst the other, the Centro Cultural Gómez Tortosa, is owned by the Town Hall, so it's free, and is home to the Tourist Office. Both are pretty stunning in their detail and, every time we go, they seem to have improved their offer of things to see. So, if the Modernista heritage was the cultural part of our visit, what were we going to get on the gastro side? Novelda has long been associated with saffron . The crocus flowers that provide the saffron originally all came from Castilla La Mancha (nowadays a lot of the saffron also comes from Iran) and it seems to be by sheer chance that Novelda became the place to process the...

I never particularly cared for Bohemian Rhapsody, or Queen come to that. For years and years though the British people, in polls no more dubious than the Catalan referendum, voted Bohemian Rhapsody the best song of all time or some such accolade. In Spain that same sort of listing goes to a song called Mediterráneo by Joan Manuel Serrat. Last Saturday some bloke I was having lunch with asked me if I'd ever heard the song. I controlled my snort and answered his patronising question almost civilly. He was an anaesthetist, I think the woman with him was a surgeon. There were five other people, including us, on the table and one of those people, a bloke we'd known for fewer than three hours, bought lunch for everyone on the table in an outstandingly generous gesture. We'd met the bill payer and his two pals in a car park in Novelda as we waited to do a tour of the vineyards that produce eating grapes, uvas de mesa, in this little bit of Alicante province. The wind was...

Maggie once helped some people, preparing to be official tourist guides, to get ready for the part of the exam they had to do in English. To be honest I've forgotten the details, then again I forgot why I'd gone back into the kitchen a while ago and I'll probably have to re-read this sentence to see where I'm heading, so that's nothing new. The point, though, was that these people had a scripts to learn for each of the places they were going to show. Word for word scripts. Now there's nothing wrong with "This cathedral is a milestone in the development of the Gothic, marking a symbiosis of technique and aesthetic that characterises so many other great churches built before the onset of the Renaissance".  I have no idea what it means but that's probably because I'd bunked off school or had a note from my mum that day. This morning though we had to get up early to get to Novelda for nine in the morning. Novelda is about 25 kilometres from C...

Just for a while I had a student who owned a marble company here in Pinoso. I have no idea whether there is money to be made in marble but I do know that he bought himself a Mercedes GLE - one of those big four wheel drive coupé things - because he said that some of his Arab customers looked askance at his Citroen. He also told me a story about how a new employee had left something off the manifest for a container full of marble which had lost him 2,000€. But, these things happen, he added, as he shrugged his shoulders. All around this area there are companies that sell stone. Lots of them are alongside the motorway as it passes through Novelda but there are tens of them scattered around. Some are quite posh and others are just fences around an area with a few big blocks of stone, some handling and cutting equipment. I've been on a trip to the quarry here in Pinoso. It is humongous. It's what makes the town so clean and tidy with such brilliant facilities or at least the mo...

I saw some article or advert about a micro brewery in Novelda a while ago. We don't work on Wednesday afternoon; either of us. "Do you fancy a beer?" I asked Maggie. She said yes. We found the place OK. It looked decidedly closed but there was a bar next door and it seemed logical that the bar would have the local beer. We went in. It wasn't a flash bar. It could probably do with a bit of a refit though the regulars probably like it as it is. There were lots of men, my age, playing dominoes or just sitting there nursing a beer. Fluorescent lights. There was a woman behind the bar and one female customer. We were a bit out of place. The beer, Exulans, was on display, a couple of third of a litre bottles on the bar. "Hello, can we have a couple of bottles of the beer from next door, please." "No. We don't have any." Moment of indecision. "Hang on though, I'll check in the back." The woman wanders off for a while. "No, ...

There are so many Moors and Christians parades in the province that we rather take them for granted. But, with having a houseguest last week we roused ourselves from in front of the telly and went to watch the entry of the Moors in the town of Novelda. Novelda has around 25,000 inhabitants and with that number they mounted a parade that lasted over three hours. The events celebrate the defeat of the Moors, the Muslim invader, by the home grown Christiams but it always seems to us that the Moorish groups have more members and better costumes. Each year the comparsas, that's the names for each group, prepare for the festival from one event to the next. Each comparsa has several sub groups that wear the same or a similar costume; these subgroups traditionally walk shoulder to shoulder through the streets. The costumes are incredibly detailed and must cost a fortune to produce - in fact there must be a whole industry built on pointed shoes, scimitars and bejewelled turbans. Moorish m...

The weather in Culebrón remains warm. It's been up and down a bit, temperature wise, but at the moment we're a tad over 37ºC. When I've done the gardening the temperature doesn't seem to be too much of a hindrance so long as there is a cooling drink to hand. The sweat that dribbles into my eye sockets and then splashes onto the inside of my sunglasses to dry into salty smears makes precision work more difficult but there is always the compensation of feeling a bit like Big John Wayne wiping his forehead way out West. We've just taken our house guest, John Leigh, to Novelda, a nearby town, where there is a very nice Art Nouveau house. When we arrived parking was dead easy because the town's fiesta is under way so all the shops and businesses were shut. Luckily the house was open. A bit of a bonus was that there was a bike race going on around the streets. I've been on a bike once or twice in my life; they seem like hard work. The route is always uphill ...