Two sheds Jackson and landscapes

I was thinking, as I drove between La Unión and Culebrón, about what I could see out of the car. I decided it was family and friends. You get what you're given. Blood's thicker than water and all that. History and culture from hand to hand and gene to gene over the generations. Alfred and the cakes, 1066, Glorious Goodwood, Cornish cream teas, feet and inches, Ant and Dec. Your friends on the other hand you get to choose. No blood ties, no original shared history. Something you manufacture between yourselves. I watched the dusty, brown grey, scrubby lunar landscape, the almond groves and the vineyards pass by. I looked at the bright blue sky and I thought how lovely it all looked. In the beginning, when I first got to Alicante and Murcia I thought it looked desolate. The sort of place that John Wayne ate beans.

Maggie and I had a great time in my old MGB car driving around the Cotswolds. I thought the Cotswolds were amazing. When we saw Calendar Girls, when it was new and first at the cinema here dubbed into Spanish, I looked at those North Yorkshire landscapes and thought how stunning it all looked

I was reading a piece that turned up on the English language feed to my mobile phone so it was either El País in English or more likely the Spanish pages of the Guardian. The author was a Brit writing from Spain. He said that some survey had shown that expats living in sunny climes were less happy than people living in the British climate. He suggested that British refugees to Spain were likely to be a bit curmudgeonly anyway because most were dissatisfied and were looking for something better. His main thesis though was that what was great as a break for a couple of weeks didn't really match up in the long term. He likened it to some chap who celebrates Christmas every day. I didn't agree with him.

On Sunday evening at about 9.30 I went to get some cash from the bank machine in the main part of town. La Unión is not a pretty town. The chewing gum plastered onto the flagstones looked particularly disgusting and I worried that one of the several footballs being kicked around by small groups of young lads would get me in the head. I turned left into the High Street, I was in shirt sleeves, the town was lively with people. A churros and chocolate van was doing good trade.The comparison with Huntingdon High Street crossed my mind. I often enjoyed a swift pint in the George before the weekend was over during the Huntingdon years. I was rather pleased with myself for being in La Unión.

It's not a comparison. It's a bonus. I got lucky with my family. Some of my friends I've known for over 40 years.

Billowing skyward

Nuclear Power Plants always take me a bit by surprise. I remember the first time I saw the one at Heysham when I was catching the ferry to the Isle of Man. It was just there. No more fuss about it than a bus station or an industrial estate.

Today as we passed the Cofrentes Power Station I thought it sobering that alongside the enormous, and picturesque, steam cloud coming from the twin cooling towers, was a nuclear reactor which might, at any time, do a Fukishima or Chernobyl and start killing and polluting for generations to come. On a sunny and crisp December day it just looked tranquil. The cooling towers plonked in the middle of the landscape weren't quite so romantic but the fluffy steam clouds rising to play with the vapour trails left by passing jet planes seemed very peaceful. Much more peaceful than the busy blades of the hundreds of wind turbines in the area. There are windmills dotted along the top of nearly every ridge in the borderlands of Valencia, Castilla la Mancha and Murcia.

Spain currently has eight nuclear reactors running on six sites. Two more reactors are in the process of being dismantled after suffering "incidents." Within the last few weeks the operators of the Santa María de Garoña plant in Burgos have said that they will close that plant down ahead of schedule to avoid paying a new tax which will cost its owners approximately €150 million per year.

The largest percentage - 33% - of electricity production in Spain comes from renewables of one sort of another. Next up is nuclear with around 21% and then come the combined cycle with about 19% of the power generation. I presume that the missing percentages are from the older non combined cycle power stations.

Iberdrola, the people who send us our electric bill, own Cofrentes. It produces 1,110 megawatts. I have no concept of a megawatt fortunately the operators make it clear that this is a lot. They say that Cofrentes could, singlehandedly, provide all of the domestic supply for the three provinces of Valencia. In 2010 the plant ran faultlessly for 365 days without any halt in production and provided nearly 5% of all the electricity used in Spain that year.

The website of the Nuclear Safety Council mentions that all of the reportable events since 2005 at Cofrentes have been Level 0 on the International Scale of Nuclear Events - that is ones which have "no safety significance." However, between 2001 and 2011 Cofrentes made 25 unplanned shutdowns and reported 102 security events three of them at Level 1 which is classified as an anomaly but where there is still significant defence in depth.

The Nuclear Event Scale has three levels of incident and four levels of accident. Chernobyl and Fukishima are way out at the front at the moment on Level 7. The 1957 Winscale Fire was a Level 5 event, on a par with Three Mile Island in 1979. Sellafield has also had five Level 4 accidents between 1955 and 1979. In Spain the biggest incident to date, Level 3, was at  Vandellos in 1989 when a fire destroyed many of the control systems and meant that there were almost no safety systems remaining. Vandellos is one of the two plants that are being decommissioned at the moment.

I don't suppose there are quite the same sort of specific accident and incident scales for bus stations and industrial estates.

Las Lamparillas

The best route home from Cartagena to Culebrón passes close by the town of Fortuna. Alongside the ring road the gaunt skeletons of hundreds of unfinished houses bear witness to the folly of the Spanish building boom. The planned development, built in the bone dry scrubland that surrounds Fortuna, was to be called Fortuna Hill Nature and Residential Golf Resort.

 A key part of the new resort was the Las Lamparillas development. It was aimed at golf playing Britons who weren't quite rich enough to buy a similar place on the coast and was planned to have 3,737 houses when complete. There were other agreements for other developments in Fortuna. If everything had gone as planned Fortuna's population would have increased from 10,000 to 100,000.

A research project carried out by a local university in 2004 gives some idea as to the scale of the building work planned. Across Murcia, a region with just one and a half million inhabitants, there were agreements to build 800,000 houses. The figures never made sense but nobody seemed to notice before everything went pear shaped.

Work on Las Lamaprillas, which was just part of the whole resort, started in 2007. By 2010 the principal developer of the site went bust with debts of some 120,000,000€. The banks that had loaned the money took the valueless site and the part completed houses as payment. Nobody, not the banks, not the courts and certainly not the developers considered doing the decent thing by the people who had paid deposits for the houses or to the merchants who supplied the building materials. Local businesses and house buyers are still owed around 30 million by the developers.

The town mayor says that it's easy to criticise now but that, at the time, everyone was doing well out of the building boom and nobody was complaining then.

Local councils can re-classify former rural land as urban land. On reclassification citrus groves and farm fields become much more valuable as buildiing plots. In the boom years Fortuna town council found itself with nearly 10 million euros extra from the sale of reclassified land and the councillors set about spending the money with gusto. They expected more money to follow and they borrowed against future income. The result now, in the lean years, is that the council has had to jack up taxes and either cut services or charge more for them. Many projects were never completed but the bank loans on them still have to be paid off.

In small towns in Spain everyone knows everyone else. Little networks of friends and relations do favours for other little networks. The money coming in from the developers apparently flowed into lots of those networks. At the time of the local elections in 2003 with so much money swilling around the locals became much more interested in who was in charge whilst the politicians saw the potential in controlling all that lovely money. The ruling PP party set about buying votes. It wasn't until 2011 that the courts found party workers guilty of vote rigging. The mayor, the same man is still the mayor now as then, chose not to resign.

The people of Fortuna will be paying for las Lamparillas for years to come. Spain is paying for lots of similar projects the length and breadth of the country.

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Since writing this article a higher court has confirmed the charges of vote rigging in Fortuna and the Mayor, Matias Carrillo, has resigned. 

Gone to ground

I may have told this story before. I used to live in Cambridgeshire where agriculture is big business. A farmer friend had a visitor from Kenya. The farm visit over it was tea and scones time. As they went into the farmhouse the visitor asked if there was a problem with the land in the garden, was it not as fertile as the general farmland? My friend puzzled, said that it was good earth. "Then why are flowers growing on it, what a waste of good land, you can't eat flowers."

I think the Kenyan may be wrong, I'm sure I've eaten flowers in salads in expensive restaurants but the general principle is right enough.

I think Spaniards may have a similar appreciation of land - it's either good for crops or it is left to its own devices. True the Arabs built some splendid and fragrant gardens when they ruled Spain but I hear that is an attempt to recreate paradise as envisaged in the Koran. Those gardens were built around shaded patios and fountains.

A Spanish friend looking around our garden was being shown our various fruit trees. She commented, approvingly, that the earth between the trees was "clean" - bare soil in other words. Kept clear of weeds to help prevent fires.

We Brits of course like our flowers. Nearly everyone around here has land and all of our British chums set about landscaping the ground - belvederes, gravel here, plants there. Without constant watering nearly everything dies unless it is native to the area so palms and olives and figs and almonds and rosemary do well but lots of things you would expect to thrive in the sun simply curl up and die or are slaughtered by the first nippy evening.

I was reminded of this when Maggie asked me to escort her to the nearest garden centre. Garden centres are a reasonably new thing in Spain and none of them resemble the UK theme park type garden centres where ice cream vans vie for the business of the hordes of people who dress up and go there for a day out. Spanish garden centres have plants, compost, maybe a few tools and garden furniture but they are pretty basic affairs.

El Pinet

Maggie has known her friend Jane since they were 9 and at school together. It would be ungentelmanly of me to say how long ago that was but it is a long, long time.

Jane and Rolf are renting a cave just 30 minutes down the road. We've been to theirs to drink their beer and they came here for the melon and to look askance at the traditional rice with rabbit and snails at the restaurant in Raspay. Yesterday we drove to the coast. For us the coast nearly always means Santa Pola because it's the town we first stayed in when we came to Spain.

The Med was sill there looking very nice. The sun was still shining. Santa Pola performed its role as Spanish seaside town admirably. We strolled we gawped, we ate, we strolled again.

After lunch, around 6pm, we went on to El Pinet. It's a funny little beach we said. The houses are built along the edge of the beach, there's a dusty road that runs behind the houses, a couple of old fashioned restaurants painted green and a whole heap of Dutch camper vans parked under the pines by the road. It's so different to Santa Pola or Guardamar or Benidorm.

The houses, the restaurants, the dusty road and the pines (but not the Dutch) were all there. But so were thousands of Spanish holidaymakers. Every house had been rented out to a family. Grans and Aunties and Dads and Mums sat on their terraces snoozing, watching the world go by, playing cards or listening to the football on the radio as they recovered from Sunday lunch. Some family members were doing those exact same things but on the beach. The small child sitting in a bucket to swill off the sand amused me and reminded me of sitting on the drainer to have a wash 50 years ago in Yorkshire.

Written 6 July 2009

Shades of colour

On July 1st we drove away from Ciudad Rodrigo. We had two cars. Maggie and Eduardo left before me as I had one last thing to do. It was around 20ºC as the day began in Castilla y Leon, it was green and brown and the river sparkled as I crossed the bridge to leave town for the last time. When I stopped for a fag break just outside Segovia it was around 32ºC, there were small ash like trees, little red flowers and the smell of cool vegetation in the lay by. Thundering around Madrid, surrounded by lorries and vans and cars on the M50 the temperature was up to 34ºc and the construction lorries and diggers kicked up clouds of yellow dust as they worked alongside the road. Across Castilla la Mancha the combines were out - their progress across the parched brown fields marked by plumes of orange dust that hung in the still, crackling air. When I stopped in Almansa I parked beneath some pines for shade, the chap in the van next to me had left the engine on to keep the aircon running. It was 36ºC dusty and dry. Into Murcia, passing the vines, the olives, the almonds growing in the almost red soil. And finally into Valencia; to Alicante, home turf with Mount Cabezo standing guard over Pinoso and our house. 729kms, 7hours and 35 minutes later the green and brown had become shades of orange, yellow and brown.

Originally written on 1 July 2009