Out on the blowout

Last Saturday we joined some people from the language exchange group to go on the tapas trail. One of the participants was a bloke from Surrey who has partnered up with a young Spanish woman. He was saying to me that his perception is that whilst we Britons go out for a drink Spaniards go out for an eat. Obviously I agreed with him as it's true. Lots of Spanish life revolves around food.

It depends on your criteria but the Santa Catalina area of Pinoso has been described to me, by Spaniards, as the poorest bit of Pinoso, the most authentic bit of the town and the district with the strongest community identity. There's nothing to stop all three being true.

I've always known the area as Santa Catalina, named for the patron saint of the district, but there is a definite drift to calling it the Barrio de las cuevas - the cave district - where caves are the houses dug into the hillside. Either way I've been up there a couple of times this week to have a look at bits of their fiesta. On Sunday I went to see the first transfer of the image of Santa Catalina to her first overnight stop with a local family and, this evening, as a lead in to the actual Saint's day on the 25th, we popped up to have a look at the hogueras, the little bonfires that families, friends and other social groupings gather around.

We parked the car and walked towards the first little bonfire we saw. Maggie drew in breath through her nose and that was enough for someone to offer her a hunk of bread and one of the local longaniza sausages, cooked in the embers of the fire, with a drop of mulled wine to wash it down. I heard someone there describe me as the Culebrón photographer. I'm not sure whether I liked that or not.

We strolled on, we were offered wine served as a stream of red liquid from the wooden version of a wine skin. We bumped into, and chatted with, some Britons we know who were having a drink outside one of the district bar's. We walked on towards another little fire where I was invited into the patio of the house to take a snap of a small shrine to Santa Catalina. That, of course, led to the irresistible offer of food: first buñuelos which are a bit like doughnuts made with pumpkin, then variations on gachamigas, more longanizas, some unnamed bits of cold and very unpalatable fat and then some broad beans cooked in a ham stock. The wine I had to surreptitiously pass to Maggie as I was driving.

We had only popped in for a quick look see. Very pleasant way to pass a cool November evening; very hospitable and, as Maggie said, November is a great time for a fiesta to add a bit of cheer to the colder and darker nights.

Absent minded

Today we took part in the day of the absent Pinosero. 

Pinoseros are people who were born in Pinoso. The idea of the day is that it celebrates the locals who, for one reason or another, no longer live here. Each year some of them make the journey back to Pinoso to meet with friends and family or just to renew acquaintance with the town. Those who will never come back are remembered too.

The day included an official welcome, a presentation about the local salt workings and then a trip, by coach, to the top of Cabezo to have a look the actual installations on the ground before travelling back to town for a quick church service, a group photo and a meal.

Pinoso mines salt, a lot of salt but there's not a mineshaft, pick or shovel to be seen. One of the local topographic features is a rounded, dome like, hill which stands about 320 metres above the general terrain and whose summit is at something like 890 metres above sea level at Alicante. It's a salt dome. Millions and millions of tons of Triassic salt that have squeezed up through the surrounding rocks. Nowadays a mining company injects water into the ground, dissolves out some of the salt and sends it down a 53km gravity fed pipeline to Torrevieja. There the brine is added to the salt lagoons, filled with already salty water from the Mediterranean. The Pinoso brine ups the concentration of salt in the water so, when the water is evaporated away, they are left with tons of salt ready for road gritting, the chemical industry and other industrial uses.

To be honest I've been to much more exciting salt workings where huge trucks work underground or where salty white miners work with picks and wooden wheelbarrows (well in front of tourists they do) but this was interesting because it was on home turf. Something that we'd not done either before.

The meal wasn't bad. Mass catering and a very normal sort of menu but the rabbit stew, the gazpacho, I had was good and Maggie said her rice, rabbit and snail paella, was good enough too. The company was excellent. We had gone with a couple of recently arrived Britons but otherwise we were, obviously enough, surrounded by Spaniards and they seemed more than happy to chat with us. There were a couple of quite impish chaps sitting opposite who must have been studying irony at the University of the Third Age and were  determined to try out some of the things they had learned.

So, about seven hours after we started we came home. Fatter and more knowledgeable about local geography, geology and industry and, rather surprisingly, grasping one of the group photos.