Life in Culebrón

Novelda and Alcoi both have lots of Modernista or Art Nouveau, buildings. Other Spanish towns boast a different architectural style, mediaeval walls or a castle. Some are littered with stone built palaces. Pinoso has none of that, in fact it has quite a lot of horrid buildings and plenty of buildings which look alright except that they are in the wrong place. Nonetheless, while Pinoso isn't exactly breathtaking in its architectural beauty, it does have lots of detail to notice if your life is not so full of care that you have some time to stand and stare. For some reason traditional, as in traditional costume, seems to mean 18th or 19th Century. The first Levi's were made in 1853, but I suspect we're unlikely to see the local dance group, Monte de la Sal, in jeans. There's a certain unspoken aesthetic about what classic and traditional mean. Maybe it's the same with houses, traditional implies some sort of fixed time in the past. Apparently Alicantino houses, those ...

I'm reading a book called España fea, or ugly Spain. Actually the full, and translated title is Ugly Spain: Urban chaos, democracy's greatest failure. Now this book is 506 pages long and I'm on page 98 so I'm being a bit previous here but it did set me thinking. One of the central themes in the book, so far, is that Spain followed the US model of delegating planning to local administrations which have been open to corruption and cronyism. The end result is a mish mash of badly designed, poorly built and inappropriately placed buildings. Lots of Spain is chocker with palaces and churches and big, big stone buildings. Around here in Alicante and Murcia those sorts of "monumental" town centres are far less common than in other part of Spain. Orihuela leans a bit that way and there must be others but, in general, this area is, architecturally, less impressive than many others. Pinoso is a perfect example. It's a great place to live, it's safe and tidy and ...

Maggie once helped some people, preparing to be official tourist guides, to get ready for the part of the exam they had to do in English. To be honest I've forgotten the details, then again I forgot why I'd gone back into the kitchen a while ago and I'll probably have to re-read this sentence to see where I'm heading, so that's nothing new. The point, though, was that these people had a scripts to learn for each of the places they were going to show. Word for word scripts. Now there's nothing wrong with "This cathedral is a milestone in the development of the Gothic, marking a symbiosis of technique and aesthetic that characterises so many other great churches built before the onset of the Renaissance".  I have no idea what it means but that's probably because I'd bunked off school or had a note from my mum that day. This morning though we had to get up early to get to Novelda for nine in the morning. Novelda is about 25 kilometres from C...

There are fifty provinces in Spain and two autonomous cities on the North African coast. Then there are the islands. Each province and all of the islands have a capital and Ceuta and Melilla have a similar sort of "capital" status. Over the years we've bagged most of those towns so that it's just Palencia and Melilla to go. Until last week we were also missing Ibiza and Formentera. But not now. It takes only 35 minutes in the air, more or less, from Alicante to Ibiza. Nonetheless, it took us something like six or seven hours to get there. The plane being four hours late didn't help. Then there was a slight hiccough with the pickup minibus to take us to the hire car. Actually the car was quite odd. I'd taken out insurance to cover the 1200€ insurance excess, which cost about 50€, but the car hire itself was flagged as being something less than a euro a day and that proved to be true. There was a bit of a trick though, I'd been expecting something becaus...

We hadn't been to La Rioja, a small wine producing region in the North of Spain, for a while so we decided to put that right. We stayed in a Parador, visited the capital Logroño and toured an upmarket bodega. And, as we were nearby we extended the trip to Bilbao and finally to Canfranc. I'd mentioned a place in Bilbao that I had read was worth seeing. Maggie looked on the map and thought as we were in La Rioja why not wander over the border into Euskadi (nobody seems to call it the Basque Country anymore) and have a look? The place I'd read about is called the Alhóndiga and it turned out to be a sort of arts, culture and fitness centre rolled into one. It took us a couple of hours to drive to Bilbao from Logroño. I also noticed that a sensible route home passed through the Huesca province of Aragon. This time I'd heard a programme on the radio about the Canfranc International Railway Station. The place was built as part of a railway project to unite France and Spa...

This isn't about Culebrón or our life here.  I wrote it for the TIM magazine and it was published earlier this month. I just thought I'd save it here too. It's long. El Valle de los Caídos is a huge mausoleum and basilica church carved into solid granite and topped off with an enormous cross in the Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid. It was built, on the orders of Franco, between 1940 and 1959 with money from the National Lottery. The work was done by as many as 200,000 Republican prisoners of war according to some sources and as few as 2,470 according to others. The prisoners were able to gain remission on their sentences by working on the construction. Some sources suggest the workers were reasonably paid whilst others charge slave labour. The supposed number who died during the building of the the complex varies from 14 to 27,000, depending on whether the source is pro Franco or pro Republican. The monument was consecrated by Pope John XXIII...

It would be hard to describe Pinoso as good looking. In fact if I were searching for everyday adjectives to describe our home town I'd go for words like scruffy, messy, boring and dusty. The one horse has most definitely left. In truth Alicante province is a bit short of handsome towns - a few like Orihuela and Elche have a collection of monumental buildings but generally the townscape consists of anonymous and boring concrete boxes. What's more there is a mania for pulling down anything old but ordinary to use the space for something much more utilitarian. Nonetheless there is a traditional style of Alicantino house. Originally the facades were of plain stone - something like dry stone walling but with mortar holding the irregular sized stones in place - though with time the facades were rendered and then painted in bright colours. It's usually two or three storeys high and the windows are tall and rectangular with grills or rejas and surrounding casements. The door is...