The Virgin comes down

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 Asunción from Caballusa to Pinoso and back or taking la Fatima up and down Monte Cabeço. If you want to see sheer madness the romería associated with el Rocio in Andalucia is the one - religious fervour turned pitch battle. It's worth a bit of YouTubery to see it!

Anyway Novelda was due to start at 7pm from the santuario up on la Mola. I thought I'd leave Culebrón around 6pm, park in the car park by the castle on La Mola have time to take a few snaps as the Virgin set off with maybe a couple of hundred people in attendance. I expected to be home in an hour or so. 

When I got to Novelda the town was under a state of siege. Roads were closed everywhere. Local Police and Civil Protection moved around purposefully. Parking spaces had to be fought for. Obviously this thing was bigger than I'd expected. In fact I reckon that half of Novelda was there. The crowds were impressive and to be honest I had no idea what was going on. The road up to the castle and sanctuary, Paseo de los Molinos, had a few stalls along its length selling beer and water and candles. There were promotional tents for dance clubs and most of the big houses along the route were hosting pool parties. Lots and lots of young people had matching t-shirts which I presumed were simply unofficial peñas, often just friendship groups, but they may have been tied in with the Moros y Cristianos festivals that are going on this week in the town. I wondered about asking but I never quite got around to it. I don't like to expose my appalling Spanish and, anyway, my mum told me not to talk to strangers.

When the Virgin came into view I was a bit surprised. Those teddy bears you can win at the fair are often bigger. As she progressed there were lots of ¡Vivas! - Hurrah the Virgin of Novelda - Hurrah. Hurrah Mary Magdalene - Hurrah and so on. I was wandering along close to the Virgin's carriers and every now and again something would happen. Maybe there were a bunch of people forming human towers to delight the Virgin. Or maybe she would dive into the spectators when she saw someone alongside the road in a wheelchair. The Virgin got close, the wheelchair user stretched out to touch the Virgin. I saw no actual miracles. As she passed some of the houses along the route there would be a volley of fireworks. Every so often Mary Magdalene would be set down on a tabletop, brought out of one of the local houses by well wishers, so that people could rub their mass cards against the little figure or lift their babies up to touch the statue.

When the Virgin passed the junction which led to where my car was parked I decided to let her go on her way. I did notice though that the candle sellers were doing brisk business. Presumably a candlelit procession would be part of the event later. 

Tapas trails

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 drink, usually limited to beer and wine, for a fixed price to an agreed timetable. There is often a supplement if you want a soft drink which always seems a little contrary to me.

With the tapas decided the organising body then produces a leaflet and, nowadays, a website that features photos of the tapas along with a description. Being the 21st Century there are often nods to the fact that some people are vegetarian/vegan or gluten intolerant with little symbols to show which tapa has which characteristics. Often the times when the tapas are available is generalised for all the participating establishments and sometimes each place has different hours which makes it a bit more difficult to navigate the route. How long the route is available depends. In the past they tended to stretch across a couple of weeks and be available every day but now it's more usual for them to be weekend only events lasting for all the weekends in a particular month.

As you order, eat or pay for the tapa you traditionally get a sticker or a stamp or something to show that you bought a tapa in such and such a place. I'm sure there is an electronic variant but I've never encountered one. When you've collected so many stamps/stickers and/or when the event finishes you can take your completed leaflet to some collection point - maybe the Tourist Office or the Chamber of Trade offices. The winning establishment gets the publicity and some sort of award and there is nearly always a draw among the participants with prizes which range from a bottle of wine or a free meal through to a luxury cruise.

The organisation varies from town to town. The one in Novelda (which is still on for another week or so as I type) was for both savoury and sweet tapas. Each offering cost 2€ and that didn't include a drink. What's more you voted not only for the quality of the tapa (which is habitual) but also for the service which was a new idea to me. Usually you only need to go to a percentage of the participating establishments or try a set number of the tapas but the rules for each route are different. The number of places you need to visit is determined to some extent by the size of the town. If Alicante or Murcia runs a tapas trail then asking people to visit ten or even twenty places is easy because there are, potentially, hundreds of bars that may be involved. On the other hand there may only be twenty bars all told in Monóvar so each route has to be adapted to the particular circumstances. The possibilities for routes are manifold. We've done routes which have centred on varieties of coffee, on cocktails, on cakes and pastries and I've seen routes based on seafood or on traditional recipes. 

Pinoso has had a couple of stabs at a tapas trail, though they used the Valencian word mossets to describe tapas. They changed the rules slightly each time but of all the tapas trails I've ever been on I think the Pinoso ones were, uncharacteristically, the least well organised. So often Pinoso does things really well. The most basic mistake was that, at least on one of them, you had to go to every establishment and eat every tapa. This took no account of people's tastes; you don't like seafood - tough. There were also a couple of places that were out of the town centre - excellent in itself but, if you were transportless - tough. But the worst thing about having to go everywhere and eat everything was that some of the bars were really cynical about the event. Whilst most made an effort to produce something special a couple made no effort at all and did an anchovy on a bit of bread which devalued the whole event. There were also a couple of places which didn't seem that happy to sell tapas to people when they could sell something more expensive. Oh, and when we tried to do some of the places advertised as open on Sunday evening we found they were all closed.

Still, worth a go, especially if you haven't done one before.

Rooted in the land

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 saffron and then sell it worldwide. I have heard that, like the marble industry located in Novelda, the saffron trade owes a lot to the 19th Century railway boom. Nowadays, businesses that began with saffron have branched out into associated areas. If you buy one of those kits of "botanics" to mix in your gin, if you have a salt cellar with pink Himalayan, or black truffle salt or even if you just look at the spice and condiment section in Mercadona, you'll often find that the company that did the packing and marketing is based in Novelda. So that's where our tour guide took us next. To the LayBé factory where a small team puts saffron into nicely designed tins, worries about the ideal qualities of salt cellars and frets about packaging up varieties of paprika. There wasn't a lot to see to be honest but the talk we got from one of the owners was pretty interesting and it just shows how important marketing and image are nowadays.

Next, the bloke who'd been showing us around changed his hat from tour guide to winemaker. Apparently his family has been in winemaking, as Bodegas Ortigo, since 1880 with vineyards near Las Salinas. At one point the vineyard, and its wines, had all but disappeared, then, a few years ago, the guide and his family decided to give it another go. We got to taste the result. The white, the rosé and the red all have a bit of a twist on the typical wines produced around here. We got to do "the cata", the tasting, outside a shop called El Escaparate. It's one of those places that sells, nuts and chocolate, olive oil, salt, honey and a whole host of similar edible things in cans and jars at inflated prices. The wine was served with coques or cocas - the local variant on a pizza but only in as much as it has a bready sort of base and a topping. I like cocas but Maggie always refers to them as fat pies!

As I drank my wine I thought about bodegas selling "odd" wines, about the young woman at LayBé selling salt that tasted of fried eggs and saffron packaged in fancy little tins. The man selling his wine was passionate. Although all the businesses, the saffron place, the trendy shop and the bodega, were simply businesses, and business is easy to understand; selling things to produce profit, there was something else to each of them. People dream up new businesses all the time. Not long ago food delivery on bikes, leasing cars or the idea of selling a unique digital image would have seemed ridiculous. Nowadays they are just another business. There was something though that the businesses we'd seen and the places we'd been, had in common. The man, Angel by name, was waxing lyrical about "nuestra tierra", our land, our home, our traditions. It's the sort of thing you hear folk musicians talking about, it's the stuff of local historians, it's the reclamation of their place in history by women or by communities and by groups with a common bond. It's something that's there in the foundation trying to preserve the variety in citrus groves or the farmer herding rare breeds. It's there in the towns that depend on tiger nuts for the horchata but have found hundreds of ways to market products made from the nuts, it's the people who still make the lip balm that was developed by their great grandad for local farmers in the huerta of Valencia. 

Maybe they're just another business, maybe they are simply looking for that unique selling point but I got this feeling there was more heart and passion in this than that and that it highlighted a way of doing business. Angel had sounded proud of "his" town as he showed us the houses, as he took a pride in the development of the town, as he talked about Modernista houses about the quality of the local buildings, that Modernista past, the pride in the Novelda woman who had been given the pejorative nickname of the Pitxotxa but had gone on to build up a business empire in a hostile world ruled by men.

Or maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age.

Sour grapes?

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 blowing, it looked like rain. Of the 23 people signed up for the tour only five of us actually turned up. Our future benefactor and his two pals went in one car and we went in the vineyard owner's BMW along with the tour organiser.

Spaniards seem to prefer their green grapes with seeds. One particularly famous seeded variety is aledo; the grape traditionally eaten alongside the midnight chimes that ring in the New Year. All the eating grapes we saw were protected from birds, beasties and the elements by wrapping them in what look like paper bags as they grow on the vine. This time of year, the run up to Christmas and the New Year, is a big time for picking - possibly because of the popping them into your mouth as the chimes ring out thing - but that could be a bit of chicken and egg type reasoning. One of the various stories to explain the twelve grapes tradition of the Spanish New Year has the grape growers of the past, faced with a huge glut of grapes at Christmastime, coming up with the cunning plan of promoting their fruit for the New Year. Do Britons choose to eat sprouts as a Christmas accompaniment or is it simply that there was very little option in the dead of a British winter?

So we got the tour. I understood it perfectly. We saw the forms of "trellises", we heard why hand picking was the only way, we learned  about the seedless varieties, with pink skins and red leaves grown under nets for the British market and lots lots more. But that was a week ago. All the fine detail has now drained from my overtaxed and withered mind.

The bit that I do remember, and the thing that surprised me most, was the next bit. The vineyard owner drove us to a shed just off the La Romana-Novelda road, by the turn down to Aspe. It's hardly a centre of population. Inside the shed there were well over 100 people  working at a cracking pace to prepare the fruit for market. They cut off leaves, discarded damaged grapes, packed the fruit in variously named boxes for different supermarket chains and then carted the boxes to waiting lorry trailers or piled them into the cold store. It was a very slick operation carried out to a stridently upbeat and very Spanish musical soundtrack.

And to finish off we went to a bodega that grew the other sort of grapes, the ones that people ferment into alcohol. That's where we met the man who paid for our lunch and the medic who thought that after fifteen years in Spain it was surprising that I'd heard a Spanish song.

Casa Mira

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 Culebrón and it has some notable Modernista style buildings. Modernista is the stuff we Brits call Art Nouveau - all inlaid wood, and curved lines based on the shapes of plants and flowers. For the past couple of years the tourist office has organised a Modernista Weekend to celebrate the style and we'd signed up to visit a house, Casa Mira, that's not usually open to the public. It had only been possible to book a place by phone after a given time on a set date and it took me ages to get through; I reckon I must have dialled at least 100 times, but it proved to be worth it.

The chap who was showing us around adjusted his straw boater, checked his portable microphone and loudspeaker combo and away he went. He started by talking about how people from Novelda had taken advantage of the early development of railways in Alicante, he talked about how the businessmen had been wheeler dealers who risked their money and invested as distinct from the monied classes who just earn and spend. We got stories about how the entrance way was designed to impress prospective clients, about the current owner sitting at the window and chatting with neighbours, about the people who had worked in the house and so on. I'd be lying if I said that I thought the guide was one of those inspired types you remember forever but he was good enough. It reminded me that it's a long while since we got one of the robot voiced facts and figures monologue tours. So much the better.

No photos though, private property and all that.

Marbellous

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 money it produces is. In a bad year the quarry brought in 6,000,000€ for the less than 8,000 population of the town. The sums aren't hard.

Pinoso does an ivory coloured marble. I think it really is a marble, in that the limestone has been recrystallised, and, as such, it takes a lovely shine. It's almost certain that you've walked on our marble in some office block or shopping centre. One day, when there was a marble and wine themed day in Pinoso I visited the only stone yard we have actually in the town and I was surprised to find that they were cutting and selling a limestone quarried in Albacete. The main company involved in the Pinoso quarry has its HQ in Novelda.

Today I went to visit another quarry as part of the Mármol-on event run by Novelda tourist information. We went to the Bateig quarries which were big, if not on the same scale, as the Pinoso quarry. They seemed to have a limestone that has a blue hue and takes a nice shine too.

The chap who did the commentary before we got there was really great. He emphasised that the three original stone companies in Novelda, had grown up around the railway. He stressed over and over again the effect that the railway had had on Alicante businesses from wine and marble to saffron, cigarette papers and toys. Just as an aside finding out that Banyeres de Mariola and Alcoi have history with fag papers was nearly as interesting as finding out yesterday that, in the last days of the Spanish Republic, the official Spanish currency was printed in Aspe. And probably more interesting than seeing some stone.

We went on to the workshops of Iván Larra the man who built the first ever church organ out of stone - marbles and granites. He gave us a tour of his workshop. He was more a musician interested in stone than a mason interested in music though he didn't give us a biography, or, if he did, it slipped me by. His workshop was a series of tumble down buildings which had once been part of a spa complex alongside what is now the A31 Alicante to Albacete motorway. Interesting (again) to think that people might have "holidayed" there until the 1950s.

I seem to have used the adjective interesting a lot in this entry but what with quarries and exhibitions and stonemason-musicians plus the street music event in Villena I can't think of a more appropriate adjective.

A swift half

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, we don't have any."
"Just a couple of whatever you have then, please."

We settled in, well we sort of perched on the stools at the bar, a bit uncomfortably. After a while the woman behind the bar engaged us in conversation. The problem it turned out was that the brewery was usually closed. The workers only turn up from time to time so the bar had not been able to replace their stock. Whilst she was speaking to us a man came to the bar to order another drink. As the woman continued to talk to us the man tapped a coin noisily and impatiently on the bar. The woman wasn't having that sort of behaviour and she told him so but it was obviously time for us to go. So we did.

Moors and Christians

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 men used to black up but that is no longer politically correct and the cigars that they used to smoke seem to have gone too. Nonetheless the beards, fake or grown for the occasion, and the pot bellies remain. Women used to be an embellishment, usually dancing girls, but nowadays they often walk shoulder to shoulder with the men dressed in similar costumes or they form separate lines carrying weaponary of one sort or another.

Each comparsa hires a band for the parades. The bands come from all over the province. The noteworthy feature is the percussion section with huge "kettle drums" mounted on trollies and the music has a similar quality whatever the tune.

As well as the bands and the lines there are any number of variations. Horses canter and gallop in the spaces between lines often rearing up or doing that strange stepping walk, fire eaters do their thing and there are lots of dance troupes. In Novelda we had a group of maybe thirty people going by with hawks on their hands with the hawks flying to lures from time to time. There are several floats too, Often just with tiered seating for the "Carnival Queens" and their courtiers but with an infinite variety from gigantic mechanical beasts through to fantastic constructions and mobile platforms for living statues and other performances.

It was hard work just watching them go by for so long, tough on the feet and legs and with the temperature at midnight still at 36ºC. We thought our vantage point in the doorway of a bar had important strategic advantages! If it was hard work watching imagine what it must have been like for the men and women walking in heavy costumes, dancing the whole route orfilling their mouths with kerosene to blow fire time after time after time.

Big John

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 and every time there's a gale force headwind. Those cyclists must have been feeling the heat but, worse than that, for them no John Wayne compensation - I mean can you imagine the Duke in Lycra?