Life in Culebrón

A while ago we got something from the Catastro, or Land Registry, saying that we needed to stump up 60€ to have our entry in the land registry updated. I did a fair bit of research at the time to find out what was happening and why. I came to the conclusion that the Catastro was doing two things at once - updating the rateable value of houses and checking that their details for each house were correct. If there was any discrepancy between their records and the actual state of the property they were systematically fining people a standard 60€ for regularising their records throughout Spain. I read somewhere that, in Pinoso, about 1,000 households had been charged the 60€. Considering that there are fewer than 8,000 people in Pinoso and presuming that more than one person lives in most houses it sounded as though a good percentage of the records were skew whiff in some way. The system here is a lot like the old British Rates system. Each property has an assigned value calculated on...

Apparently, on average, we Pinoseros - the population of Pinoso - produce 500 kilos of rubbish each year. Of that just 28 kilos is recycled. Rubbish collection isn't done on an individual basis as in the UK. Instead there are big rubbish bins placed at strategic positions in the villages, towns, cities and throughout the countryside. Individual householders have to carry their household rubbish to the bins. Collection in the towns is usually every night whilst in Culebrón collection is twice per week. There are recycling bins too. Generally it's green for glass, blue for paper and cardboard and yellow for containers. There isn't discrimination within those three categories so the empty shampoo bottles, the tetrapaks and pop cans all go in the yellow container. Green, blue, clear and brown glass all go in the green container. I'm told that people have jobs separating the different classes of waste but any time I've ever talked to Spaniards about this the majo...