Spanish for Siegfried, Triston and James

I read a book last week. In it a young woman has moved to the country, to a small village in the middle of nowhere Spain. She's thinking community and tranquillity. She rents a house and the first thing that she asks her landlord is if he knows someone who might have a dog for her. I was reminded of one of Maggie's stories. Maggie worked with a woman in Madrid who had a Spanish partner. The couple decided to move to the countryside and one of the requisites, one of the first things to do, according to Maggie's friend, was to get a "brute of a dog".

In the book the landlord palms the young woman off with one of his own dodgy dogs. Like all good country Spaniards the landlord thinks that it's cruel and unusual to sterilize a pet. The newcomer is from the city though and she takes the dog, for sterilization, to the nearest vet. The description of the vet's office is of a dusty and run down place where the vet is reading his phone and where there are no clients. It was much like that when we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo - except that it was before smartphones became our every time diversion. Eduardo the cat went with us. When it got to the time for his annual jabs I took him to the local veterinarian. The office was a scruffy and the vet was his own receptionist. I went more than once and I never had to wait.

It's not like that in Pinoso. We have a vet who trades under the name of Huellas; Pawprints. There's quite a team at Huellas including a receptionist, a bloke who seems to do a bit of everything, a couple of small animal vets - vets who deal with small animals not diminutive vets - and I think there's also a large animal vet (variation on the same explanation) but I haven't seen him for years so he may or may not still be there. There must be a dog groomer too because they offer doggie trims. Whatever, and whoever, the point is that it's a biggish team and it's a busy office. 

Turn up unannounced and you usually have to hang around for a while even when both vets are on duty. Plenty of Spaniards use the vet but, considering we Britons are outnumbered about 15 to 1 by Spaniards in Pinoso, we have a very strong presence in that office. It's amazing how often there is a Briton waiting with their (usually) dog or (sometimes) cat before I arrive. The vet's is fairly modern and the treatment rooms look properly medical with cupboards full of vials and tablets and sterile wrapped stuff. The vets are pleasant and well regarded.

Pinoso is very affected by we British. Brexit may be changing that a bit and there may be more Belgians and Dutch joining the Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and everyone else but there are still a lot of Britons and we are very noticeable. We're loud, we're old Empire confident and we don't blend in.

Whether we Brits are the reason that Cristina's is so busy or whether she was simply a vet with a well thought through business plan is something you'd have to ask her.

Horny handed sons and daughters of toil

There are all sizes of tractors. Probably the most common around here are really old, really beaten up and quite small tractors. Think of a tractor the size of a 1950s Massey Ferguson, the sort of tractor Peter Rabbit's Mr. McGregor would have, if he'd had a tractor. They use them in the vineyards where there is just about space for them to manoeuvre, they use them to haul trailers full of grapes to the local bodega, they use them for the almonds and to go to the bar. A couple of days ago four big tractors roared past the front of our house followed by a medium sized tractor hauling a trailer. They were going to pick almonds. I know because the tractors each had one of the umbrella like nets at the back which are fastened around the tree trunk whilst the tree is given a good shaking. Sherlock Holmes wise I could also deduce that they may well be picking almonds because, when I passed the industrial estate the other day, I could hear the machines working and see the mountains of almond shells in the yard. Oh, and when we were eating outside the village hall on Sunday a tractor and trailer rig went by and nearly everybody there shouted encouragement to the farmer. I could see almonds in the trailer.

Pinoso is rural, it's surrounded by lots of small villages and by vineyards, wheat fields, almond and olive groves and goodness knows what else. And that's the thing. Those people in the village, at the meal, who urged the farmer on, knew what he was harvesting and my guess is that they usually know what's been harvested because they have friends or family involved. I don't. Some things are obvious, the grapes for instance, and maybe peaches or cherries but there are plenty of fields with green things in them. They could be artichokes or peas or peppers or melons or potatoes or onions or aubergines. I may be able to tell close up but I can't guess from as I see the workers stooped over, picking by hand, or the tractors going to and fro.

We have farmers as a near neighbours. They have plenty of kit, sometimes though, for things like big combines or the mechanised grape picking, they hire it in. They work all hours. They work the fields under artificial light quite often. Yesterday evening a tractor started ploughing up the field, which has been fallow for three or four years, directly opposite our house. They finished, I think, though to be honest I'd stopped paying much attention to the noise by then, around 10pm. I'd suspect they stopped to go home for the evening meal. They started again well before first light, around 4.30am.

But why have they ploughed up the field and why was it so urgent? I don't like not knowing that sort of thing.

ปลาออกจากน้ำ

There was an advert when we went to the cinema this afternoon for Coca Cola. It is about the people responsible for the success of Coke in Spain over the past 65 years. The funny thing in watching it was just how "Spanish" it looked. There is, for instance, a shot of a door with a polished aluminium door knob. The wood veneer, the colours, everything looks, and is, Spanish. It's the same with the men walking up the road in their fluorescent and grey overalls. I've seen those very same blokes getting the set meal in scores of restaurants in Spain. I've opened that door.

So how did those Coca Cola people make the advert look so Spain? After all we live in Spain but I don't think that anyone could argue that our microcosm represents the totality of Spain.

The very first time I went to Madrid I wasn't that impressed. There didn't seem to be anything notable in the Coliseum or Eiffel Tower "must see" mould. There were plenty of interesting buildings, squares, places and palaces but it was like being in New York and finding that the best they had to offer was the New York Federal Reserve’s Gold Vault. Very nice but hardly the Empire State. It was August to be fair and Madrid used to more or less close down in August. It was hot too. Very hot. I spent a fortune on trying to keep from dying of thirst.

I don't think the same about Madrid nowadays. I find something to stare at on every corner. I know the city a little better, partly because Maggie used to live there at the start of the nineties and, as an inhabitant, she stopped being as interested in just the Prado or the Plaza Mayor and started to know those hidden corners that locals know - the place for the best fried egg sandwiches at 3am, the best free music venues and which metro route to use to avoid long walks as she moved from one line to another. We've also been there a lot of times now but, even then, my knowledge is very superficial. In some ways my knowledge of Madrid is a bit like my knowledge of London - I know Bush House as well as Marble Arch and I can vaguely navigate from Shaftesbury Avenue to the ICA but it's a generalised and incomplete knowledge that sometimes fails spectacularly. "What's that building there?" I asked Maggie. A minute later, when we realised that we were almost in Colón, I knew it was the National Library but to that point I hadn't even recognised Recoletos.

In my youth I had a period living in or close to London. The excitement was tempered by the inconveniences. Travelling the Tube at rush hour and marvelling at people who could read a broadsheet newspaper given the crowds is interesting to someone heading for a job interview but it's a pain in the kidneys when you have to do it day after day surrounded by people with scant regard for personal hygiene. When I go to Madrid I'm usually there for a few days. I'm a tourist who recognises the similarities and the differences to the place I live. The number of people, the hustle and bustle is great, at times, and at others it's suffocating. We were somewhere on Alcalá looking for a gallery that I'd heard about on a radio programme and the number of people, blinded by their mobile phones, who kept crashing into me tried my patience. But there aren't any galleries loaded with Goyas, Tapies and Reubens in Pinoso so I suppose it's a choice; quiet streets or something to see.

There are differences too of a more prosaic nature. We went to a Thai restaurant. One of those that gets an honourable mention in the Michelin guide without getting a star. I don't actually know much about Thai food but I'm pretty sure that Thai is commonplace in the UK. The sort of thing you can get in packets from Tesco's as well as in plenty of high street restaurants. My impression is that it's not the same in Spain. Not that it's scientific or anything but I just Googled Thai restaurants in Murcia city, the seventh largest city in Spain, and Trip Advisor came up with just three. The Madrid restaurant had a table for us even though they were busy. We decided on the tasting menu but lots of people just had a main, or a starter and a main, with a drink and then cleared off. There were other tourists but, if I were guessing, I would say that most of the people eating there were on a lunch break and in a hurry.

A couple of things strike me about my hypotheses. One is that there were sufficient Madrileños in this one district willing and happy to eat Thai food often enough to keep an ordinary sort of restaurant in business - nothing like reluctance to stray away from traditional food common around here. The second was that, if I were right about the lunch break, then the model of a day split in half by a two or three hour break, which is alive and well near us, is losing ground in the city to the intensive day, the "nine to five" with a lunch break, of Swedes, Germans and Britons.

So, we saw the Pat Metheny concert in Madrid, we ate Thai, we went to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, we saw a Brassai exhibition and we rode around on the Metro, we went up the Faro de Moncloa. In Atocha, we caught the train in a station full of smoothie stalls, sushi bars and vegetarian cafes but when a few of us got off the train in Villena, in the gentle warmth of the Alicantino evening, with the aroma of the vineyards wafting around us I thought it was nice to be home.

Take me home, country roads

Every now and then I get an email from Abraza la tierra, Embrace the Land. It's usually a business opportunity or a job in some rural part of Spain. They are normally good offers - businesses subsidised by town halls, free accommodation, maybe with tantalising offers for families who have young, school saving, children. It's a while since I've looked at their website but I presume that they are a platform for rural development initiatives. You know the sort of thing - access to infrastructure in the countryside, innovative solutions to the everyday challenges of rural life.

I listened to some programme on the radio about rural development in Spain. One of the interviewees said that he wished Spain were as go ahead as the Scottish Highlands and Islands. I smiled at that because I remembered being in Inchnadamph, in the 1970s, and how impressed I was with the lateral thinking that had replaced the post office van with a minibus that transported both post and people. Well that and the horizontal rainfall. I'm sure there are similar initiatives here but I've never noticed them.

Much of Spain is empty. There are lots of stories of someone, or some organisation, buying up a deserted village in Huesca or Guadalajara to turn it into a religious retreat or an English teaching village. A novel about the last inhabitant of a village in the high Pyrenees became a Spanish best seller and there is, generally, a bit of an industry built around rural nostalgia and family roots in the land. Apparently, of the 8,000 municipalities that make up Spain, over 1200 have fewer than 100 inhabitants on the municipal roll. I bumped into a blog where a chap goes around "bagging" empty, abandoned, villages. His list included one in Alicante and four in Murcia. Of course most Spaniards, something like 80%, live in the big metropolitan areas and along the coast.

We live in the countryside but it's not an isolated countryside. For one thing Alicante apparently has a strange population distribution in relation to most of Spain. The normal model is towns and villages with countryside in between. In Alicante there are the usual towns and the villages but there are also houses dotted all around the countryside. Maggie commented on the number of lights twinkling out as we drove back from Petrer the other night. I was once told that this pattern is to do with the Moors having introduced irrigation into the countryside around here which allowed homesteads to be more scattered. I don't see how that would make any real difference but I thought I'd mention it in case my informant was correct.

In our own case, in Pinoso or Culebrón, the nearest decent sized town is about 25km away. It's actually two towns that are next to each other, next to each other in the sense that there must be streets that are one town on one side and the other on the other. Elda is the 137th largest town, population wise, in Spain and Petrel (Petrer in Valenciano) the 212th most populous. If they were as administratively combined as they are geographically they would have a total population of a bit over 87,000 people and be the 74th largest town in Spain. Similarly sized places in the UK are Burnley and Stevenage which, by comparison, come in as around the 275th largest towns.

The other day one of my Facebook friends posted a video. I suspect he may have just bought a new dash-cam for his motor because the video was of an empty motorway. The near deserted inter urban roads are definitely one of the joys of life in inland Alicante and Murcia. I once managed to come the 35km from Jumilla to Pinoso without passing a single car outside of the town limits.

Just this week we finally got around to buying an Amazon Fire Stick and a Netflix subscription. I'm still not quite sure why. I have more than enough TV available with the traditional broadcasters but, I suppose, some of it is proving that we are still able to adapt to change. It also shows that despite our rural location we're definitely on the digital superhighway!

The morning after we'd installed the Fire Stick I got an email from Abraza la tierra with information about taking over a bar-restaurant and teleclub in Guadalaviar in Teruel. Population 245. Weak as my Spanish is I could translate that. Tele in Spanish is telly in English and club in Spanish is club in English (though beware of the clubs with bright lights outside towns unless you're looking for expensive sparkling wine and female company).

Teleclubs flourished in rural Spain in the 1960s when people were still not rich enough to buy their own set - the teleclubs were often social centres as well and the Francoist State liked them because it was somewhere else where the propagandist NoDo newsreels could be shown. But surely there can't still be people without telly even in darkest, deepest Spain? It turns out of course that they are just a name, a nostalgic name for some, for a communal meeting space. I found mentions of them in Palencia, Lanzarote, Salamanca and, obviously enough, Teruel, without doing more than type the search clue into Google. I remember our pal Pepa told us about the tiendas multiservicios - the multiservice shops around her in Teruel province. The key element there was that a shop offered the basics along with a range of other community things, a bar, maybe a restaurant, post office services, internet access etc., etc.

I wasn't tempted to run the teleclub in Guadalaviar but if you are you have till February 1st to get your offer in.

I wave my hat to all I meet And they wave back to me

Somewhere I came across a newspaper piece about Los pueblos más bonitos de España, the prettiest villages in Spain. The organisation that promotes this list seems to be a not for profit organisation. Whatever its origins or purpose it gave us a simple holiday plan.

We have friends who run a casa rural, a country house for rent, which goes under the name of Vientos de Gudar in the village of Fuentes de Rubielos in Teruel. With a visit to our friends, and their house, as our ultimate destination we decided to do a mid distance tour from Culebrón up through the villages listed in the provinces of Castellón and Teruel with our end point being Fuentes.

The first stop on the list was Vilafamés then on to Peñíscola, Calaceite, Valdearobres, Morella, Cantavieja, Puertomingalvo and Rubielos de Mora. We also stopped off in La Fresneda and Beceite which didn't feature on the list but were recommended by locals.

The villages varied. Peñíscola for instance is a busy seaside resort with the old town built around the castle. Anyone who has seen, and remembers, the film El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren knows the outline of Peñíscola old town. Morella too was packed with visitors, so many that the local police funnelled traffic into a huge car park. Once inside the walled town there were countless shops selling local produce and knick knacks, alongside tens of restaurants touting regional menus, all of them aimed fairly and squarely at tourists. Calaceite on the other hand, well the old town at least, was full of huge stone buildings and steep streets but there was hardly anyone around; we couldn't even find a bar to buy a cold drink. Valderrobres was something half way in between; more huge stone buildings, more steep streets and stone staircases lots of them almost deserted whilst, in the main square, the bars and restaurants were doing a brisk trade with we day trippers. Maggie says she liked Valderrobres best. Puertomingalvo was, perhaps, my favourite. More stone, more steps, a gigantic church, a small art gallery, a splendidly different restaurant and several people posing for snaps but still quiet enough to hear the birds singing.

As I said, our destination was the casa rural owned by a couple of old friends. They had the house built from scratch and they have been running it as a business for a few years now. Our pals said that bookings for their house weren't bad but they thought that rural tourism seemed not to be recovering from the economic crisis as quickly as beach tourism. In summer their adopted village comes alive with summer residents. In the past, the bar at the local swimming pool has been run by a group of young women who wear harem pants, sport nose studs and cook things like hummus and cous cous - pretty alternative for Spain. We were looking forward to snacking there but it seems they were outbid by another outfit for this year's summer contract.

Now obviously, as we were away from home we needed somewhere to stay overnight. We've used a lot of hotels in Spain and it's usual to be able to find something decent in the 50€ to 60€ bracket and often less. The weekend before we set out on our road trip for instance we'd gone to Madrid. We stayed in a central hotel there and we were mysteriously upgraded so that our 57€ bought us a junior suite. Also this month I made a bit of a jaunt to Ciudad Real, a small provincial capital, where the centre of town four star hotel cost just 39€. When I was trying to find hotels or guest houses for our three nights in Castellón/Teruel I had to discount lodgings in several of the villages we were visiting because they were beyond my financial reach. The choice seemed to be either expensive or slummy. In the end we paid 60€, 63€ and 70€ for the places we stayed. All of them looked great from the outside but all had pretty dodgy Wi-Fi and one didn't have aircon. None of them were bad, or dirty, or unacceptable but only the 70€ room could be described as anything other than ordinary.

I suppose there are sound motives, from a business point of view, for the higher prices (and snail like Wi-Fi) in rural locations but I did wonder if one of the reasons for the slower recovery of rural tourism is simply that it isn't price competitive with either its beach or city rivals.