Life in Culebrón

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 f...

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 l...

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 house...

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 fri...

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 ...

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 36...