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We did a bit of a circular tour last week. Up to Albacete, across to Cuenca and back through Teruel before coming home. 

Along the way we  visited the winery in Fuentealbilla, run by the Iniesta family, (Andrés Iniesta scored the winning goal for Spain in the 2010 World Cup), we looked at the huge 3rd Century AD Roman Mosaic in the tiny village of Noheda and we stayed in Albarracín which has city status even though it's smaller than either Algueña or Salinas. We even visited some old pals in Fuentes de Rubielos in Teruel.

I often think Spanish written information is patchy or poor. I wonder why there is no list of the tapas on offer or why the office doesn't show opening times. I have theories; those theories go from the link between information and power to high levels of illiteracy in the Franco years to the much less fanciful idea that Spaniards simply prefer to talk to a person. There's no doubt that written information here is much better, and more common, than in once was but it can still be woefully lacking.

Raul, who showed us around Albarracín, was a pretty decent guide. He introduced himself, he asked people in the group where they were from, he modulated his voice when telling stories and he spoke louder when someone revved a motorbike or beat a drum within earshot. Nonetheless the information was a bit stodgy - there were a couple of stories but it was still, basically, dates and facts. Years ago, when Maggie worked in Ciudad Rodrigo she helped a couple of young women to prepare for their oposiciones, the official exams for local government and civil service type jobs. Both of them had to be able to present the "official" script, in English, for the cathedral or castle; any deviation from the script was considered an error and would cost them exam marks.

I have another story that ties in with this Spanish idea of memorising things as being good. The first time I came across the Trinity College Speaking exam in English was when I had to help a student prepare for the exam. Her talk was going to be about the first of the Modern Olympic Games. When she'd finished her presentation I asked her a question about it. She replied, in Spanish, that all she needed me to do was to correct the script which she intended to learn and regurgitate. That method was so common in Spain that Trinity changed the exam to ensure that it was a better test of speaking skills.

The tour of the bodega at Fuentealbilla, the introductory welcome to the museum house in Albarracín, the guide who explained the Roman mosaics to us and the volunteer guide who showed us around Albarracín Cathedral were all fine, maybe a bit monotone, a bit emotionless, but fine. There was good information. When the cathedral guide told us that the decoration had been done on the cheap, the marble on the wall was just decorated plaster, the marble columns in the side chapel were painted pine trees, I thought this may lead to a bit of interaction, a bit of story telling. But no. Under such circumstances I often think back to a tour I did around St Peter's in Rome. The story of Michelangelo lying on scaffolding, with Dulux dripping into his eye from painting the Sistine Chapel, swearing at the Pope and complaining that he was a sculptor, not a painter, as he was asked if he could turn his hand to building the biggest dome ever because the tarpaulin draped across the unfinished church was letting in the rain water and giving the Protestants a good laugh. There was a guide who knew how to engage his audience in a tour.

In the Ethnological museum in Cuenca. I was reading one of the "labels" by an exhibit. It was, at least, 500 words long, a side of typed A4 paper. It was full of Spanish words in the style of the English word ashlar. Who ever says ashlar? Isn't dressed stone a bit more accessible? Couldn't they write, ashlar,  finely cut stone, to help out we non architects? I reckon that there was as much reading as in a normal length paperback on the walls of that museum. It takes me a few days to read a novel. Again, all it needs is a bit of thought to do this right. 

At the MARQ, the archaeological museum in Alicante, they do the British newspaper thing of a headline followed by an explanatory paragraph followed by the full story. An example. Let's suppose there are some hats and helmets and other headgear on display. The label title says Visigoth headgear. You can stop there if that's enough for you. Under the title the label says something like: Hats, helmets, scarves and other head coverings were worn by both men and women during the Visigoth rule in Spain (5th to 8th century AD). Whilst most of the headgear had some practical purpose, protection for soldiers, hygienic hair covering for cooks, a sun shade for shepherds etc. the style and decoration also emphasised the importance of the wearer in the social pecking order. Again, stop there if you will but if you're a millinery student looking for inspiration or simply a devout museum goer each exhibit has a longer, explanatory description.

But I would have forgotten all about the guides, and information and museums, if it hadn't been for the TV news yesterday. They said there were a shortage of place in FP courses. Now I happen to know what FP courses are but I wondered why they chose to use initials rather than use the full version. FP=Formación Profesional. The literal translation is Professional Training - it's the sort of training that is more directly work related. I was reminded of my potential blog topic and here it is.

Villages and villages

We went up to Castellón for the weekend, the most northerly of the three provinces that make up the Valencian Community. The place we went was called Forcall and we lodged in an old palace. We were there to see a very odd festival where a couple of saints, Anthony and Peter, are harried by demons who try to burn them to death. My guess is that the roots of the festival are maybe older than Christianity! Whilst we were there we wandered around some of the nearby villages, mostly just over the order into Teruel, one of the provinces that makes up Aragón. If you want to see the snaps they're in this album which is just a part of the January 2022 photo album that you can access from the tabs across the home page, or here

Teruel is quite famous in Spain for being the back of beyond. At the last General Election for instance the province elected an "MP" as a member of the party "Teruel Exists". Teruel is always used as an example of España vacciada - emptied Spain. It's one of those staples of newspaper and radio articles, about how most of Spain is nowadays empty with nearly all the population living in Madrid or somewhere near the coast. The usually cited hotspots for this depopulation are the provinces of Teruel, Soria and Cuenca but, in trying to find some simple factual information for this blog post I came across a learned paper that said that Teruel, Zaragoza, Ciudad Real, Albacete, Sevilla and Asturias all had clusters of incredibly low population density similar to those in Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. You may notice that those countries are quite a long way North with a tendency to inhospitable climates. Even in the North of Spain, where it rains a lot, or up in the high Pyrenees, Spain isn't quite in the same class, climate wise. 

The villages we were wandering around have a particular feel to them but there are similar villages and small towns all over Spain. We have a friend who runs a casa rural in Teruel and one of the villages near her house is of the same character. Huge houses with enormous wooden doors, high rooves, impressive masonry, coats of arms on the façade mixed in with much more humble houses and, of course, a big, often colonnaded, Town Hall with the massive church alongside. I wondered where the money came from. These villages look as though, at one time, they were awash with money, nowadays they are often nearly empty with the carefully modernised weekend home next to a derelict barn. A not too exhaustive bit of Googling suggests that the answer is the obvious one and that the majority of the past wealth came from agriculture. Sometimes the hillside goats producing enough wool and milk to make the local land owners rich and, sometimes, the olive trees or cherries doing the same in more arable areas. After all Pinoso had an economy based largely on wine, esparto and salt before the marble became important and that wasn't all that long ago. It always strikes me as odd though that there are so many places in the boon docks that make peacock like shows of wealth. I was born in West Yorkshire and, there too, the Pennine hillsides produced wool. That wool made the hillside villages rich long before the Industrial Revolution moved the wealth production to the valleys. But none of those Pennine villages can compete in shows of ostentation with the similar sized villages in Huesca or Cantabria. 

Over the years we have heard explanations of why this or that village is how it is. We were in one village where everything revolved around pig keeping, down to the street design and house architecture and I remember some guide, on a Duero river cruise, telling us that villages on the border with Portugal became rich through contraband coffee (Portuguese links with Brazil). In Trujillo, in Extremadura, it was the loot brought back from the New World by some of the more well known Conquistadores that built the huge palaces and churches. It may be too that the style of architecture, and the fact that the villages have largely stood still through time, marks the difference.  Novelda made plenty of money out of both marble and saffron and that money built the big "Modernista" houses in the late 19th and early 20th Century but Novelda is too contemporary to be a good backdrop for an Edwardian TV drama whereas Mirambel would be perfect for a Mediaeval one.

There aren't any of these, one time rich, now impoverished villages around here but, of course we live in a part of Spain that has an out of character rural landscape. The normal pattern for most of Spain, away from the big cities, is that houses are grouped together in villages and towns rather than peppered across the landscape. It's easiest to see at night where, in provinces like  Salamanca or Cantabria or Ciudad Real, the landscape between villages is pitch black. It's nothing like the scattering of individual houses and hamlets, the patchwork of lights that you will see shining out from the fields and hillsides around here. I've heard that the difference is because of the old Moorish system of irrigation channels of this area made that dispersion possible but that doesn't sound like much of an explanation to me. In exactly the same way as I'm still not convinced that all the rural palaces and massive churches were built on the back of agricultural profits. After all there are hundreds of agricultural villages all over Spain that look like they've never been rich and simply look scruffy. What I do know is that if you haven't had the opportunity to travel outside the immediate area it's definitely worth taking a look.

And the other six dwarves

Thirty one years ago, in the Bar Lennon in Valencia, the barman turned out to be the chatty type. Having to talk in a mixture of mime, tortured Spanish and broken English was no obstacle to his chattiness. He sang the European anthem. He invited us to the beach and, amazingly, we and he turned up the following morning at the appointed time. He and his pals frolicked, stark naked, in the sea whilst we two Brits toasted ourselves to the colour of boiled crabs and ate all the food.

Jaime has been an occasional friend ever since. Time passes. He turned 60 on Thursday. I would be even less impressed to see him in his birthday suit nowadays. Pepa, his long time minder arranged a surprise party in Fuentes de Rubielos​ in Teruel where the two of them have a business renting out a country cottage.

It's 300 kilometres from Culebrón to Fuentes so we had to get up earlier than we would have liked on Saturday morning. We made good time though and we were only 10 minutes late for the agreed 12.30 congregation. The birthday boy wasn't due till around 1.00. When he arrived he looked suitably surprised, he grinned, he pumped hands and he hugged people effusively in appropriate measure.

The venue was a concrete floored, chilly, ill lit storage space underneath the municipal swimming pool. It looked like the sort of place where the tractors and the ride on lawnmowers are parked for the winter. A big square table had been set up in the corner to take advantage of the natural light from the frosted glass windows. There were about 15 or so party goers. We had plastic chairs, a paper table cloth and plastic cutlery.

The guests, included a man we met for the first time probably at Jaime's 50th and who never took off his mountaineering style anorak. The tall German woman I met on that beach at el Saler did a lot of the cooking, Jaime's 86 year old aunt seemed to take a shine to Maggie. A man, who we think deals in frozen seafood, had a great line in card and other magic tricks. Presumably he's available for bhamitzvas and weddings too.

I must say that I felt we were playing at being very Spanish as we sat on plastic chairs in the middle of the sunny street chatting and nibbling on crisps and olives whilst the mountain of meat and various styles of sausages were cooked on the municipal street barbecue.

We ate the meaty feast in the garage. We drank beer and wine and sparkling wine with Happy Birthday sung in three languages and gifts handed over to a suitably appreciative Jaime.

And when the eating was done the crowd started to drift away. A few of us went on to the village bar for a coffee​, maybe with a splash of something. By late evening we were the only guests left.

I wave my hat to all I meet And they wave back to me

Somewhere I came across a newspaper piece about Los pueblos más bonitos de España, the prettiest villages in Spain. The organisation that promotes this list seems to be a not for profit organisation. Whatever its origins or purpose it gave us a simple holiday plan.

We have friends who run a casa rural, a country house for rent, which goes under the name of Vientos de Gudar in the village of Fuentes de Rubielos in Teruel. With a visit to our friends, and their house, as our ultimate destination we decided to do a mid distance tour from Culebrón up through the villages listed in the provinces of Castellón and Teruel with our end point being Fuentes.

The first stop on the list was Vilafamés then on to Peñíscola, Calaceite, Valdearobres, Morella, Cantavieja, Puertomingalvo and Rubielos de Mora. We also stopped off in La Fresneda and Beceite which didn't feature on the list but were recommended by locals.

The villages varied. Peñíscola for instance is a busy seaside resort with the old town built around the castle. Anyone who has seen, and remembers, the film El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren knows the outline of Peñíscola old town. Morella too was packed with visitors, so many that the local police funnelled traffic into a huge car park. Once inside the walled town there were countless shops selling local produce and knick knacks, alongside tens of restaurants touting regional menus, all of them aimed fairly and squarely at tourists. Calaceite on the other hand, well the old town at least, was full of huge stone buildings and steep streets but there was hardly anyone around; we couldn't even find a bar to buy a cold drink. Valderrobres was something half way in between; more huge stone buildings, more steep streets and stone staircases lots of them almost deserted whilst, in the main square, the bars and restaurants were doing a brisk trade with we day trippers. Maggie says she liked Valderrobres best. Puertomingalvo was, perhaps, my favourite. More stone, more steps, a gigantic church, a small art gallery, a splendidly different restaurant and several people posing for snaps but still quiet enough to hear the birds singing.

As I said, our destination was the casa rural owned by a couple of old friends. They had the house built from scratch and they have been running it as a business for a few years now. Our pals said that bookings for their house weren't bad but they thought that rural tourism seemed not to be recovering from the economic crisis as quickly as beach tourism. In summer their adopted village comes alive with summer residents. In the past, the bar at the local swimming pool has been run by a group of young women who wear harem pants, sport nose studs and cook things like hummus and cous cous - pretty alternative for Spain. We were looking forward to snacking there but it seems they were outbid by another outfit for this year's summer contract.

Now obviously, as we were away from home we needed somewhere to stay overnight. We've used a lot of hotels in Spain and it's usual to be able to find something decent in the 50€ to 60€ bracket and often less. The weekend before we set out on our road trip for instance we'd gone to Madrid. We stayed in a central hotel there and we were mysteriously upgraded so that our 57€ bought us a junior suite. Also this month I made a bit of a jaunt to Ciudad Real, a small provincial capital, where the centre of town four star hotel cost just 39€. When I was trying to find hotels or guest houses for our three nights in Castellón/Teruel I had to discount lodgings in several of the villages we were visiting because they were beyond my financial reach. The choice seemed to be either expensive or slummy. In the end we paid 60€, 63€ and 70€ for the places we stayed. All of them looked great from the outside but all had pretty dodgy Wi-Fi and one didn't have aircon. None of them were bad, or dirty, or unacceptable but only the 70€ room could be described as anything other than ordinary.

I suppose there are sound motives, from a business point of view, for the higher prices (and snail like Wi-Fi) in rural locations but I did wonder if one of the reasons for the slower recovery of rural tourism is simply that it isn't price competitive with either its beach or city rivals.