Life in Culebrón

Pinoso has a weather station that forms a part of the AEMET network. AEMET is the Spanish Met Office, Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. So far as I know the weather station for AEMET is in the centre of Pinoso, at the Instituto José Marhuenda Prats. I think it's at the school because the bloke who started it all up taught there though that may be wrong. The man is real enough though, Agapito - always called Cápito - Gonzálvez. He's been Mr Weather in Pinoso for over 30 years now.  If you haven't seen the AEMET site this link  should go directly to the observations over the past few days. Click around the site and you'll find forecasts and a whole lot more. There is another weather station out at Rodriguillo, which was damaged when the reed beds there went on fire in the summer. Capito got it up and running again within 8 days. There's another another on the Yecla road out of Pinoso. These two stations log their recordings on the Valencian Meteorological Association w...

My guess is that you know that it snowed here yesterday. A good thick layer of snow in Culebrón. I missed most of it. In fact I must be the only person in Culebrón who doesn't have a photo of somewhere looking very Christmas card. I took a few snaps today but by then the thaw was well under way. There was 33mm of precipitation in Pinoso which, Google tells me, normally bulks up to about 33cm of snow. I'd have said it was less than that, maybe 15cm, but I wasn't here to see the snow at its height so I am not a reliable source. I drove to work through reasonably heavy falling snow but, by the time I got to work, the snow was nasty wet rain instead. Cieza is nearly 400 metres lower than Culebrón. By the time I came home the ploughs had done their stuff and I followed the car width wet tarmac ribbon, hemmed in by snow, occasionally hitting big compacted lumps, all the way home. It wasn't easy getting up the slope to the house though and I had to dig the snow away to a...