Life in Culebrón

I saw something about the fiestas in Cañadas de Don Ciro this last weekend. Now Don Ciro really is no more than a wide spot on a very rural road but they have fiestas. It reminded me that I hadn't written anything about our own local fiesta which was a couple of weekends ago now.  The Culebrón fiesta is one of a series for the outlying villages which are part the Pinoso municipality. The first village fiesta takes place in late Spring and they go on through the Summer with the villages taking it in turns to have a weekend of festivities. The fiestas are not usually particularly exciting or expansive but they are deeply ingrained in local culture and they offer the villagers a break from the routine with a chance to have a bit of a natter with friends, family and neighbours against the backdrop of some planned activities. There are usually two key themes. One is religious. Nearly all the fiestas are tied in to the patron saint for the village. The saintly effigies usually get an out...

I remember when we made the decision to move to Spain. It wasn't because there were people with guns in the street, not a sign of religious fanatics demanding that girls stayed covered and away from school. It wasn't even as though we were working in terrible conditions for a pittance. I, we, thought it would be good to move from one prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms to another prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms. I can hear the guffaws at that last sentence. I've read the Tweets and Facebook entries that suggest Spain is only one step short of being some Banana Republic, where nothing works as it should. I agree with some of the complaining. I'd like to be able to get my ID card without any effort too just like I'd hoped that my British passport wouldn't have a turn around time of four months. I might even prefer not to have to carry any ID. I understand the concerns about the wa...

Yesterday I went to see the 32nd Encuentro de Cuadrillas in Patiño, an area of Murcia City. Cuadrillas are musical groups made up of between 15 and 20 people. The programme told me that Cuadrillas, are typical of the Murcia Region and first made their appearance during the 17th Century to provide music at many of the annual round of rites and festivals. It goes on to talk about the variety of musical styles and the range of instruments used (many of which I presume are not in common use) and how the repertoire has been handed down orally from generation to generation. It's not the first time that I've seen Barandillas. On the last Sunday of January in Barranda, a satellite village of Caravaca de la Cruz, they have a Fiesta of Barandillas. I've been there three times and it has always been gloriously sunny. The groups take up positions throughout the village centre so that you can watch one group for a while and then move on to the next. There's also a big market and...

Spain is full of fiestas. Fiesta is an idea that we foreigners living here begin to get a glimmer of but which most of us never quite understand fully. It's not just a street party or a carnival. A proper fiesta is based on traditions, sometimes traditions based on beliefs. Fiestas are a collective expression of a community; it's not about somebody organising something and other people watching. Fiestas are commonplace, often nearly ignored by locals yet usually loaded with symbolism in the clothes, dances, music, songs or other manifestations such as language and bonfires. Recognising, and altering, those symbols is something often passed from generation to generation. Fiestas are periodic and repetitive - with the same basic things happening year after year. There are, within towns and cities, fiestas and fiestas. Some are only fiestas in name because they were designed by tourist boards or trade associations. They don't fit the spirit of the definition above. They can ...

You may have seen my snaps of blokes in bicorne hats shooting off arquebuses (old fashioned musket type rifles) in the streets of Yecla. If you haven't, and you want to, there is a tab at the top of this page for my photo albums. The one you want is December 2018. You may wonder why. Well, basically, in 1642 during The War of Cataluña 61 soldiers from Yecla, under the command of a Captain Soriano Zaplana, went off to fight in line with some treaty signed with a Catalan noble. The Yeclanos were in Cataluña for six months but they were never called on to fight. They all got back to Yecla safe and sound. They were well pleased so they went up to the Castle in Yecla, did a lot of praying and suchlike and then took a picture of Our Lady of the Incarnation, known as the Virgin of the Castle, down  to the town where she stayed in a church for a few days so that people could do even more praying and genuflecting. As the soldiers carried the picture down the hill to the town they shot o...

There's a certain tendency to euphoria sometimes. It would happen from time to time driving across the fens or maybe with the MGB in the Cotswolds. Just feeling glad to be there, to be passing through. It happens a lot here. As I drive across some Spanish landscape with, maybe, high hills, or never ending plains or, perhaps, just watching that ochre yellow dust trail as a car or van drives along some dirt track I start grinning for no particular reason. Maybe it's my age but nowadays I've got to the point where small pleasures cheer me up quite as easily as things on a grander scale. Maybe it's always been like that. Lots of the films that I've liked most across my lifetime of cinema going have been the ones that are classed as independent film. There are lots and lots of celebrations in Spain. They are everywhere if you look. I wonder if they have a more obvious impact in small towns and villages. The centre of Pinoso is more or less closed off for the eight ...

My brother went to see a bullfight in Alicante. He seemed quite surprised that it was bloody - I wondered what he'd expected. Personally I am totally opposed to bullfights. Arguments about art and heritage cut no ice with me. I'm a bit ambivalent about some things that some people consider to be animal rights issues though - animals in zoos being a good example. It's a bit the same with bull related events here in Spain. There are lots. Some are plain barbaric, they are simply the abuse of animals by humans reduced to their most savage but others aren't, in my opinion, quite so bad. There are some bull events that worry me no more than people keeping their dogs inside all the time or the donkey rides at the seaside. I'm sure you've seen Sanfermines on the telly where all those people run in front of half a dozen bulls in what's called an encierro, and which I think we call bull running. I don't care about it one way or the other. I'm not interest...

When I turned up for work this morning there was nobody there. The school was closed. Nobody bothered to tell me but it gave me the surprise bonus of being able to get to the Wine Horse Festival, Caballos del Vino, in Caravaca de la Cruz. There are all sorts of Fiestas but if we agree that a Fiesta is some sort of street based celebration open to the general public then I have been to a lot of fiesta type events recently. More specifically in the last week or so. A bit back there was Easter where we saw various processions in Pinoso, Tobarra and in Murcia. Then we went to the Moors and Christians in Banyeres de Mariola, the Romeria to San Pancracio in Sax and more Moors and Christians in Onil. Easter in Spain I described a few posts ago so I'll skip straight to Moors and Christians which is loosely based on the triumph of the Christians over the North African invaders/rulers. In most places, as the name suggests, there are two main bands; The Moors, the North Africans, and the...

Last Saturday we joined some people from the language exchange group to go on the tapas trail. One of the participants was a bloke from Surrey who has partnered up with a young Spanish woman. He was saying to me that his perception is that whilst we Britons go out for a drink Spaniards go out for an eat. Obviously I agreed with him as it's true. Lots of Spanish life revolves around food. It depends on your criteria but the Santa Catalina area of Pinoso has been described to me, by Spaniards, as the poorest bit of Pinoso, the most authentic bit of the town and the district with the strongest community identity. There's nothing to stop all three being true. I've always known the area as Santa Catalina, named for the patron saint of the district, but there is a definite drift to calling it the Barrio de las cuevas - the cave district - where caves are the houses dug into the hillside. Either way I've been up there a couple of times this week to have a look at bits of...

Spanish websites have improved no end in the time that we have been here. Nowadays it's nearly as easy to find something in Spanish as it is in English. There are dishonourable exceptions of course. RENFE the state rail provider has a useless website. It may be possible to book a ticket and it may not but trying to find what trains go from where to where is impossible, so far as I can tell. This being the case I had no worries about trying to find some information about the Fallas taking place in Elda this weekend. Google gave me the website and there was a skeletal but serviceable calendar. There wasn't much in the way of background information so if you didn't know what Fallas are then you would be a bit stymied but I did visit last year so I had a vague idea of how it all worked. The basic idea is that a number of groups, comisiones, based on neighbourhoods build a falla. A falla is a sort of flammable tableau made of individual figures (which I think are calle...

Spain is in full fiesta season. Our local town, Pinoso, has just finished its fiestas or, more accurately, is about to finish in a couple of hours. The fairground has already left town, the barriers will be taken down tomorrow and all those temporary road signs removed. I would say we'll be back to normal but after so many days of non stop action lots of the town's bars and restaurants will be locked fast for a couple of weeks as will a lot of other businesses and we won't be back into the usual routine till September. When we first got here I was keen to go to most of the various types of fiesta from the tiny village celebrations, where the fun might be a foam party or a bouncy castle, through to Moors and Christians, Semana Santa, Carnaval, Three Kings and all the other big events with thousands of people, late nights, lots of revelry and long, long processions. It would take ages to go through the various types of events we've been to. Maggie got tired of fiestas...

I'm sorry but I've been reading again. La familia de Pascual Duarte this time. In it, at one point, the "hero" of the book is wondering about taking a steamer to America. He has to queue. When he finally gets to the front the clerk gives him a list of prices and sailing times. He complains that that isn't what he wanted. He wanted a conversation about the possibilities. To my mind this is a real difference between we Brits and the Spanish. We like to read our information and Spaniards like to talk to someone to get theirs. With a bit of a push from me, and despite a little opposition, the village now has a couple of WhatsApp groups. I wanted one group but some little territorial dispute apparently made that impossible. So we now have a quick, effective, cheap, reasonably inclusive and only slightly confusing channel for sharing information. It's not helped much though. We had an outdoor film in the village last Friday. Nobody seemed to know what film we we...

Culebrón is one of the satellite villages of the nearby town of Pinoso. Culebrón is an unusual name for a village. Usually the word Culebrón is related to snakes. Big snakes. Or soap operas. Most Spaniards simply presume I'm mispronouncing the name when I tell them where I live. The last headcount said 112 people live here amongst them three British families with a fourth currently rebuilding an old house. Culebrón is dusty and a browny, beigy, yellow colour. It is not a place where dogs, cats or humans worry too much about traffic - there isn't a lot. It would be wrong to describe Culebrón as pretty but it's not ugly either. There is a complete mix of houses but most tend to be old and look typical for the area - stone built, maybe with concrete facings, blinds and grilles over the windows, various colours of paint jobs. Plenty of oddly shaped concrete and corrugated iron sheds too. There is quite a lot of greenery and trees, mainly pines but with wild figs and pomeg...

Every year, in Pinoso, we have fiestas the first days of August - a mixture of events, a funfair, stalls, parades, taunting young bullocks and temporary discos. It goes on for eight or nine days. Last night was the official opening of the 2015 edition. There is a new councillor in charge of the organisation after the elections back in May. It's still the same party in power but the councillor with the responsibility for the fiestas has changed from Eli to César. The programme, the remarkably glossy, 90 plus page long programme was very late out, just two days before kick off and that caused a bit of grumbling. When we first got to Pinoso the pregonero or pregonera, the person who makes a speech and then officially opens the fiestas, used to deliver their opening address from the balcony of the Town Hall. It's the usual routine for the majority of the small towns and villages acrosss Spain. It's the obvious thing to do. Flanked by the mayor, appropriate councillors t...

I read something, in an electronic newspaper, yesterday that said that our President, Mariano Rajoy, isn't a big reader. It went on to say that the only complete newspaper he has left on his desk, alongside the daily news roundup written by his staff, is a sports newspaper called Marca. I'm not sure whether it's true or not but he doesn't strike me as any sort of intellectual or even a deep thinker so it may well be true. It would certainly be in line with the last survey of the Sociological Investigation Centre - Centro de investigaciones sociológicas - which reports that 34% of Spaniards have not read a book in the last twelve months, that 10% read only one book in the last year and that just 7% read more than a book a month. Maybe this explains why many children are unsure of the name of the capital city of Spain. Talking of books my pal Carlos, writing under the pen name of Carlos Dosel , has just self published a book on Amazon - police story with a Nazi wa...

There is a district of Pinoso called Santa Catalina and today is Santa Catalina's day, Well it's today if you use the Byzantine calendar or tomorrow if you're on the Latin calendar. So Saint Catherine. The day is celebrated here by lighting bonfires in the street and having an associated "picnic". An efigy of the Saint also starts doing the rounds of people's homes. When we first moved to Pinoso I went to have a look at the bonfires. Unlike this evening, when it was a very pleasant 13ºC, it was cold back in 2005 and I wore a big black overcoat with gloves and a scarf. Unlike tonight Maggie wasn't with me. I was alone. A couple of years later I was working at a furniture shop and a new co-worker turned up. She recognised me as the man with the long coat and she told me a story. The people who lived in Santa Catalina didn't trust me. I looked shifty. Maybe their children weren't safe with me around. As I strolled amongst the bonfires a person f...

We live in the province of Alicante. Along with Castellon and Valencia these three provinces make up the Valencian Community. Back in 1238, on October 9th, King Jaume I to give him his Valencian name or Jaime I in Spanish successfully took Valencia City as part of the Christian reconquest of Spain. The Moorish invaders weren't actually cleared from all of Valencia till 1305 and the last bits of what is now geographically Valencia weren't added until 1851. Nonetheless, when the powers that be were looking for a day to celebrate being Valencian they settled on October 9th. In the days when public holidays used to take us by surprise our pal Pepa, who is a born and bred Valencian, told us that on this day the tradition is to give little marzipan sweets wrapped in a silk handkerchief. Wikipedia tells me that this is because October 9th is also San Dionisio's day who is the patron saint of lovers (odd, I thought Valentine had that job sewn up). I remember going in to Pin...

The sound and picture quality were surprisingly good. Apparently it was a kosher copy of the film so that may explain it. Amazingly, despite its age I'd never seen Mama Mia! As Inma said it had to be a family film but the warm up videos, all Pitbull and Justin Timberlake with Ke$ha involved a plethora of bikini clad groin and breast shots. In my Parade buying days of the sixties they would have been very risqué. Pharell Williams seemed so much more family friendly. I was greeted warmly and repeatedly. Only one question though - "Are you still alone? When is your señora back?" Nobody mentioned money and I had to ask where the donations box was. I walked from home as the light faded reckoning that a 10pm start time was a little optimistic. Spain is a lot farther South than the UK though so even on the longest day of the year it was dark just after ten. The film started more or less on time, punctually by Spanish standards, at around 10.20 which saved me from any probi...

I had some WhatsApp messages from the village mayoress. 9th June: If you fancy enjoying the change of season come to the summer cinema in El Culebrón. With the aim of raising funds for the village fiesta on Saturday 21st at 10pm we'll be showing a film on the Chapel Esplanade. Bring your own rolls, drinks and sunflower seeds -and 2€ for the seat. We'll be waiting! 12th June: We won't be charging for the seats but we will accept donations. My guess is that someone pointed out that there were lots of copyright issues with charging for a film but they decided to press on regardless. Quite right. What better way to celebrate the longest day? I liked the grandness of the Chapel Esplanade - la explanada de la ermita, I've never heard it called that before but she must mean the bit of tarmac opposite the village hall by our tiny church. I'd already been to one film today - the very enjoyable Blockbuster- but I've got my beer chilled ready for this evening an...

I'm cool with a romería and with Elena gone on to her birthday party it was up to me to save the vermouth session. Last night we had the annual village meeting to plan the summer fiesta. I forget the reason. Actually I've got a bit of a bad head this morning because I popped into Amador's bar on my walk home and that sort of set me on the path of wrongdoing and amnaesia. I've just remebered a conversation with Eduardo outside his restaurant which was faltering, as always, but this time because of alcohol rather than more general stupidity. Anyway, whatever the reason everything got changed around a bit this year. So on Friday instead of the vermouth session to kick off the village fiesta we're going to have a catered meal followed by the music and dancing. Cost cutting was the order of the day because the grant from the Town Hall will be 900€ again this year and lottery ticket sales haven't been very healthy either. There was talk of not having live music....