Summer exodus

There's an advert on the telly at the moment. The premise of the ad is that, during the summer, everyone abandons the cities and heads for their village. The village that their family hails from. Some poor souls have no village to go to. They are left alone, orphaned, in the deserted cities. So the advert directs you to a website where inhabitants of the idyllic rural villages can nominate their villages as reception centres for the poor lost souls and where city orphans can seek refuge in an adoptive village.

The idea that cities are deserted for the summer isn't quite as far fetched as you may imagine. There is even a phrase in Spanish for the plight of the men left behind to work whilst the family heads for the cooler mountain or beach air- estar de Rodriguez.

Down in Cartagena I needed to park in a part of the city where parking space is normally at a premium but not on Thursday it wasn't. Oh no, it's after San Juan, the children have broken up from school, the exodus to the beach has begun.  It's the beach in Cartagena but as an awful lot of Spain is a long way from the nearest beach people have to make do with anything rural.

Over the past few weeks nearly all of my students have been preparing their summer homes ready for the 10 or 11 weeks they will spend there until the children are back at school. Sometimes the house is theirs but often it's just someone's in the family. Brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandparents all muck in and somehow manage to find enough sleeping space for everyone.

We're back in Culebrón. Our next door neighbours who usually live in Elda are here too. I noticed a light in one of the houses down by the farm - the last time they were here was the summer of 2011. Culebrón is filling up.

Drains

We have to pay for drains that we don't have in Culebrón. Fair enough really. We don't have children either but we're happy to pay tax towards the schools. So we have a pit. I've never known whether it's a pure cess pit or a septic tank. I don't really know what the difference is, apart from having the vague notion that a septic tank produces clean water to drain away. It would be easy to find out. Google knows everything but I have different things to do with my time.

The bathroom off our bedroom smells a bit. As we used to say in the 60s it pongs. Then again the two flats in Santa Pola and the one in Ciudad Rodrigo whiffed a bit at times too. I've been told that it's something to do with Spanish toilets having a different, and less efficient, trap design than their UK equivalents. So sligtly more aromatic toilets are a fact of life in Spain.

Maggie had some sort of concern about our tank because the shower she uses isn't draining as well as it did and she wondered if there was a damp patch on the garage floor. So we opened up the pit and had a nosey the other day. It looked like the mud you get in a river estuary - oozy and shiny.

Anyway, so Maggie did a bit of Googling. The search engine told us what a couple of locals have said before. If things begin to smell a bit hurling a supermarket chicken or some roadkill into the pit can help. We've always stuck to the more genteel and commercially available yeast and sugar mixes which do the same thing by helping the beasts that do the digesting to multiply. They also told us what we already knew that the kinder you are to the beasts - less bleach, no oils, less paper etc. - the longer the tanks can go without needing pumping out. The big surprise though was that, apparently you are supposed to have the pits sucked dry every year. We haven't done anything to ours for seven years.

Whoops - fun to come then.

La Colonia de la Sierra de Salinas

In Cambridgeshire Henry Morris invented the Village College to try and help to stem the flow of country folk to the towns. In Spain the 1907 Law of Interior Colonization and Repopulation had a similar aim.

Today we drove up the Sierra de Salinas mountain chain on the recommendation of one of our pals who had been up there on his bike. It was a lovely spot on a splendid blue sky day. Along the route we passed through an area that was signed as La Colonia de la Sierra de Salinas where, according to the information boards, 49 "poor but suitable" families were given their share of 1400 hectares of public land to farm in 1914. Each tenant received a house, land, a cart, a horse and farming tackle with which to try and cultivate the typical Mediterranean crops of grapes, olives and cereals.

As well as the 49 houses the Colony also had some public buildings namely a storehouse, a police post, an administration block, a school and a church. I noticed there was no bar or other social area which sounds, to me, like a grave oversight for any Spanish community.

At its height the colony had 287 inhabitants but the bad harvests, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the general harshness of rural life half way up a mountain meant that the colony was abandoned. Nowadays the homes are used as weekend cottages.

We drove down to Villena after our visit to get a bite to eat, exhausted by our exertions. The Colonists used to need a whole day to make the same journey. Maybe they got a spot of something when they were in town too.