Life in Culebrón

I think someone has it in for our palm tree. If you are a long time reader you may remember a post about an invasion of palm eating beetles, the picudo rojo. It isn't so much the adult beetles that cause the problem but their larvae which feast on the soft tissue and buds of the palms. The trees, I know they're not trees but that's what we call them, die as a result. Working out how to protect the tree against the beetle and overcoming a slight difficulty with power cables made me think we were going to have to cut the tree down a few years ago but, one by one, we solved the problems. In time I settled into a gentle, and relatively inexpensive regime of spraying insecticide every six weeks. As I understand it the insecticide I am using works like fly spray and interferes with the way the muscles of the beetles work so they die of asphyxiation. The big problem is that it does the same to other beasts, including bees and that's bad. In a more general way, living in Eu...

Elche is a biggish town just a little under 50kms from Culebrón. It's home to two World Heritage sites - well one of them isn't a place at all - it's an event; the Mystery Play. The play was awarded the badge of Intangible World Heritage back in 2001. The year before the palm grove in Elche, the Palmeral, the biggest palm grove in Europe, had also been given World Heritage status. In the middle of the week we popped into the Archaeological Museum in Elche to see an exhibition called Inmaterial: Patrimonio y memoria colectiva. The exhibition was basically groups of photos based on everyday culture, on the intangible daily events which, though long gone, are still recognisable to us today - sections on trades, transport, on fiestas, gossip, division of male and female labour and the like. The title of the exhibition is a play on words of a sort. Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial de la Humanidad translates into English as Intangible World Cultural Heritage. But inmaterial, as w...