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Showing posts with the label provinces

Demonyms and Gentilicios or Brummies and Gaditanos

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Lumi, Elena and José Antionio were most amused. We were in the Culebrón village hall and I'd just asked if the collective name for people from Culebrón were Culebronista. They put me right, I'd be a Culebronero. The Spaniards told me that the -ista ending was usually for supporters of something. I thought Culebronistas sounded good but I was probably thinking about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas from the time when Dani Ortega was still a bit of a hero and not the raving despot that he is nowadays. You're going to have to stick with me now for a bit of Spanish grammar. I'll try to keep it brief. Spanish has two genders for its words so Lumi, being female, would be a Culebonera and Jose Antonio, being male, would be a Culebronero. In the language sense sex and gender don't always match. Of the many Spanish slang words for penis at least four I know are, grammatically, feminine - picha, polla, chorra and verga - while a couple of the many slang words for a vagina are coño ...

Lines on a map

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Amazingly it is now 13 years since Maggie took up a job in Ciudad Rodrigo. Ciudad Rodrigo is a small town in Salamanca province in the autonomous community of Castilla y Leon. It's just 30 km from the Portuguese border. When I needed a service on my Mini, not surprisingly, the Spanish Mini Internet site directed me to the nearest Mini garage in Spain, in Salamanca city, nearly 100 km away. The nearest Mini dealer was actually in Guarda, in Portugal, just 70 km away. A little less romantically Pinoso is in Alicante province on the frontier with Murcia. Maybe here I should clarify how Spain is administratively and politically carved up. The smallest unit is the municipality. Each municipality has a town hall. In our case Culebrón is in the municipality of Pinoso. We pay Pinoso town hall for lots of services like water supply and rubbish collection and it's where we go for administrative tasks like planning permissions or licences to burn garden waste. In turn Pinoso is in ...