Bursting at the seams

Maggie and I got married down in Gibraltar a couple of weeks ago. The chances that I won't blog about that are very slim so we'll leave the details for now. Anyway, after a few days on the Rock, with friends and family, our wedding party dispersed and we newlyweds toddled off to wander around Andalucía. Our first stop was Seville. 

Now I'm not sure how many times I've been to Sevilla but, without trying too hard, I can easily bring eight or nine visits to mind. The very first time I was there I stayed over three weeks and, as historic centres don't change much, I've always felt to know the heart of the city quite well. The terrible thing is that, looking back at my photo albums, it turns out that the last time we stayed there was fifteen years ago. Seville is a great place to visit. It's just full of Spanish clichés, it brims over with history, culture and life. I've had some interesting experiences in Seville over the years, not all of them pleasant and this time the town surprised me yet again. It wasn't the heat, I didn't get lost or have a run in with anyone. The problem was the sheer number of tourists, us among them, oozing from every nook and cranny. There was as much Korean spoken on the streets as Spanish and heavily accented English, spoken by non native speakers, was absolutely everywhere. A couple of days later we were in the relatively humble provincial capital of Huelva on a busy Saturday night where we were just more customers and not the cash cows we had been in Seville. I liked that much more.

I've mentioned Dígame before. It was a BBC Spanish language course with TV programmes, cassette tapes, a textbook etc. in the 1970s. It was based on the town of Cuenca in Castilla la Mancha. Through the BBC programmes students were introduced to the sights in Cuenca, to some local characters. We watched as people had a picnic by the river or bought their Sunday bread and paper. Because of the programme I went to have a look at Cuenca, for the first time, in, I think, 1984. The man driving the bus and the bloke in the tourist office were the people featured in the programme. It might have been 21 years before Google Maps first saw light of day but, from the dialogues in the course book about asking and giving directions, I was able to walk from the bus station to the Hostal Pilar without missing a beat.

Cuenca's relatively close to Culebrón and it's a nice town. I've just checked and we've been there 10 times in the last 20 years. You couldn't say we were regular visitors but I've still been to Cuenca more times than I have to Stoke or Bath. Cuenca has changed a lot in those two decades. The Plaza Mayor in the old town is now just for tourists and it is full of them. None of the shops there sell anything useful unless you need a fan or castanets and none of the "old men's bars" have survived. None of the artists who helped make the place famous are still alive and even the Casas Colgadas (The Hanging Houses which overlook the river ravine) seem to have been renamed in a grammatically correct fashion to become the Casas Colgantes. If you don't want to buy a donkey wearing a straw hat or drink or eat then you'll need to go to the new part of Cuenca where ordinary people live and still buy things in shops.

We've seen it all over and probably you have too; be it in Barcelona or Canterbury. On our first "pensioners holiday" in Catalunya we went on a trip to the Monastery at Montserrat. As we trogged around the place it was heaving with people but only until the coaches took all the visitors off for lunch. Montserrat reminded me of the early morning tourist throng in Karnak - everyone is herded off the boats as dawn breaks, to avoid the heat, but by midday it's completely deserted. In Zaragoza, the magnificent esplanade in front of the cathedral seethes with masses of shorts wearing, backpack toting, water swigging visitors and yet, only a street or two back, the city is still able to absorb the tourists painlessly. It's like that in lots and lots of places nowadays, in fact if you knew about the place beforehand it's more likely that it will be bubbling over with tourists than not. I'm not sure whether it's the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time. If it's a well known spot, from Prague to the Uffizi, from the Alhambra to Atrani I guarantee it will be flooded with people taking selfies. When we went on some Adriatic Cruise a couple of years ago I felt very much like one of the Mongol Hordes - despoiling Eastern Europe - as three cruise ships, ours included, dumped 9,000 passengers onto the the central streets of Kotor - population 13,500.

The Spaniards call it masificación. In Barcelona there are tourist go home posters and graffiti everywhere. Over the last couple of weeks the locals on Mallorca and the Canaries have been protesting about the invasion of tourists. Barcelona, and other cities, have changed several of the rules about tourist apartments to try to limit the numbers. Tourists are swamping the locals out. 

I'm not going to get embroiled in the debate about housing prices but it's pretty obvious that the recent trend to see flats as an investment, particularly as a way to generate money from short term tourist lets, is taking flats out of the ordinary rental market. Many of those flats are being bought outright, cash on the nail as it were,  by institutions with deep pockets. That must help to push up housing prices. The secondary concerns - that younger tourists are often rowdy, party well into the night, drink lots of booze, are disorderly and attract and sustain the dealers of illicit drugs - is additional to these visitors having no interest whatsoever in buying drill bits, or even bread. Their spending habits and needs mean that they change the faces of the neighbourhoods and leave the bleary eyed locals breadless and without ironmongery shops. Even the nice respectable tourists who traipse through cathedrals and museums, the ones who buy buy food in restaurants and take home traditional honey, cause crowding and queues where there were none before. And many of the jobs that tourism provides for the locals are temporary, low paying, unsociable hours type jobs which renders them useless when applying for a mortgage. Some 12% of Spain's GNP comes from tourism but there are both a lot of pros and a lot of cons to that business.

And, if anyone is keen to visit Culebrón Sergio and Blandine stand ready at Restaurante Eduardo and the bodega will be more than happy to sell on locally produced wine and oil.

Burnin' Down the House

It was in the early 80s. I had discovered Spain and was determined to learn Spanish. I didn't know that Andalucía had a reputation for an impenetrable accent, but as I had obviously heard of Seville/Sevilla, a two or three-week language course there seemed like a good idea. I went just after Christmas.

Sevilla has never been kind to me. It's a city where I lose my wallet, get stranded, choose the wrong hotel, or end up in a shoving competition with nuns. That first time I went there, for the course, it was horrible. They put me in a pretty advanced class based on a written exam. Although it was easy enough to fill in a box on a test page with the third person plural of the imperfect as against the preterite, it's quite another matter remembering that as you try to recall vocabulary, word order, gender, as you wrestle with the pronunciation etc. I struggled and struggled with the spoken language. I seem to remember the caretaker found me hiding somewhere, sobbing at my inability to cope with the language, and got me transferred to something more at my level— that may have been the day I thought maybe a little breakfast alcohol would loosen my tongue.

As well as the terror of facing the language, it was cold, and I'm sure that it rained and rained and rained. The "family" I'd been lodged with turned out to be a bloke sloughed in a dark pit of despair because his wife had just left him and whose cooking seemed to include only things made from the intestines of inedible animals or fish that Jacques Cousteau had never met. He did introduce me to lots of things Spanish though because he was stereotypically Spanish—he bought bread three times a day and talked endlessly about the films of Luis Buñuel. His house was dark, damp, and freezing—the sheets, which he didn't offer to change all the time I was there, were damp.

He introduced me to two forms of Spanish heating. The first was the brasero. To use a brasero, you need a round-topped table and a heavy long tablecloth. In his house, the cloth was of green velvet. Underneath the circular table is a shelf, about 15 cm off the floor, which supports a circular heater. The heater in his house had one of those elements that you would get in a one, two, or three-bar electric fire, common until the 1970s and still available, but it was shaped to fit into the space in the near-floor shelf. So the heater was underneath the table; the heavy tablecloth kept the heat in and, so long as you didn't mistakenly rest your feet too close to the heater and set yourself on fire, you could keep your legs warm - though not your upper body. In the olden days, the heat source was actually a metal bowl filled with hot embers. As you can imagine, the potential for post-meal family conversations becoming family conflagrations was significant.

The second form of heating was the Spanish equivalent of a calor gas heater. The heaters have a case that's large enough to house a butane (or propane) cylinder which has a valve connecting to the innards of the heater via a rubber tube. I think even then the heater had a piezoelectric igniter and followed an ignition procedure that can be remarkably recalcitrant at times. The one in Sevilla was in the bathroom—a small room which the heater could warm up in minutes because I think even my host didn't care for naked shivering. The bathroom was the only place I was ever warm inside that house.

Our house can be like a fridge. We stop that by pouring heat into it in an exercise that will hand the planet back to plants and other animals before long. It also causes the people at Iberdrola and petrol companies rub their hands in glee. We have an excuse for the lack of insulation, for the big gaps at the doors, for the high ceilings—it's an old house and our insulation options are strictly limited. Even in modern-built houses in Alicante, insulation is pathetic with the excuse that the Alicantino winter is short and soon gone. It's a total lie. Inside—not outside—our house, and lots of other Spanish properties, are cold from November through to April because hardly anyone pays any attention to insulation. The number of shops and offices where you are dealt with by people wearing outdoor winter clothing is legion. The insulation issue is not true in what are considered to be the colder parts of Spain but here in the South, builders are as optimistic as they are thrifty.

We've never thought to try a brasero and our main heating, when it gets cold, is a pellet burner which produces a very noisy 11 kW of heat so that we have to wear headphones to hear the telly. Nonetheless, in the kitchen, for mornings, and in the space I use as an office and in the living room, we have butane heaters—exactly the same sort of thing I was introduced to all those years ago. These "estufas de butano" produce radiant heat. Sit close and the heat they emit—about 4 kW—makes you think the room is toasty warm when in fact you're simply sitting in a very temporary warm bubble—something you realise every time your bladder forces you to make a temporary move.

At least the butane heaters keep your upper body as warm as your legs.