Life in Culebrón

A little while back, I went up to Valencia to visit the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero. Before going, I asked a pal, who lives in the city, which were the city’s up-and-coming districts where we’d be able to get a trendy lunch. You know the sort of places: where traditional bakers selling white breadsticks are being pushed aside by sourdough-and-croissant specialists, and an abandoned engineering works is now full of small businesses trying to get rich selling kites, old clothes or offering bike repairs. She suggested Ruzafa. When, a couple of weeks ago, the INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) published its Atlas de Distribución de Renta de los Hogares, giving average net income per person, it reminded me of that visit. I started thinking about how some neighbourhoods become fashionable, property prices rise and new businesses move in, while others are left behind to stagnate and decay. I wondered whether the fashionable neighbourhoods were necessarily the wealthy ones, and wheth...

Now to explain a little. The usual way for anyone to refer to the Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, AEAT, the Spanish tax collection agency, is to say Hacienda. Each year Hacienda publishes figures, based on tax returns, to say which is the richest municipality in Spain. They give the median (declared) income as their yardstick. The figures are always a couple of years behind because the tax return we will do in Spring of this year will be for 2023 and with the time it takes to finish everything off this latest set of figures are for the tax year 2021. I have no idea why a news article turned up on my phone about these figures this morning, they were published in October 2023, but they did and I thought they were just about interesting enough for a blog especially if I added a few local numbers.  The richest place in Spain is Pozuelo de Alarcon close to Madrid with a median gross income of 80,244€. In the Valencian Region the richest town is Rocafort, a small town to th...