Life in Culebrón

There's a shoe museum in Elda. You have to ring a bell to get in. They have some very odd (sic) shoes. Elche has hundreds of shoe factories. Nowadays lots of them have signs with Chinese script characters over the door but the product still carries the label "Made in Spain." If Elda and Elche are the most important centres this area, in general, has a tradition of shoes and leather goods. The tiny village of Chinorlet about 3km from us has a factory that makes handbags. Our next door neighbour has a company that produces bows and buckles and the like to stick on leather goods. Pinoso too has a history of shoe making.  In the middle of town there is a small square dedicated to the shoemakers, (just like there are places dedicated to marble and to wine the other big industries of Pinoso). A local firm, Pinoso's, always has a stand at the celebration of the town's identity, the Villazgo celebrations, where you can don an apron and pose with a shoe last looking ...

Maggie had an appointment in Elda today and naturally enough I got to drive. Elda and Petrer are our local  big town. Some towns are easy to navigate. Somehow you instantly grasp the basic arrangement of the town or city and getting from one place to another is easy. Petrer and Elda are not like that. They are supposed to be two towns with different town halls and each one has street maps that don't show the other so, at times, it's not easy to say whether you are in Elda or Petrer. Elda is where the dole and tax office is whilst Petrer has the long distance bus station and the shopping centres. The hospital is called Elda Hospital but I would have thought it was actually in Petrer. Who knows? Petrer is also called Petrel at times, or it could be the other way around. One of them is predominantly Castilian speaking whilst the other speaks Valencià. Despite visiting them regularly over the past nine or ten years navigation is still a bit less certain than Rosetta putting ...

There's a shoe museum in Elda. It's not surprising; shoes were big business along the valley of the Vinalopó. They still are but, as you might imagine the industry has taken a battering from the Chinese. There are often pieces in the local papers about Chinese firms based here importing shoes from China and then bunging them in boxes marked "Made in Spain" before shipping them all over Europe with names that sound Spanish or International. Stories about counterfeiting of branded shoes abound. Spanish workers regularly march around with banners or go in coachloads to Madrid and dump shoes in front of Government buildings. Anyway, ther's a shoe museum in Elda. It's a big building, a modern and quite impressive building with interesting displays as I remembered and I hadn't been there for a while. So when I went to Elda to sign on yesterday I thought I'd have another look around. I've been here in Spain a while now and lots of things that used t...