Getting out and about

I always say that it's a part of my cultural education to get out and about in Spain a bit. Getting out and about has several levels. If you consider that our house is a little island of Britishness then going to a bar and getting a coffee is a journey to Spain. It doesn't really matter whether the out and aboutness is big or small. Memorable things happen on the doorstep just as much as hundreds of kilometres away though, obviously, the reverse is also true!

Out and about can be villages and towns and cities and parks and castles and museums and hills and churches and, even if they fail you, your luck may be better in a restaurant with something that you've never heard of on the menu.

Out and about can be fiestas. Most countries have theatres, cinemas, museums, concerts, coastline, woodland, prehistoric sites and so on and most places have fiestas too. The Tar barl festival in Allendale in Northumberland, the one with the burning tar barrels on the head, is as barmy as anything you'll get in Spain. The big difference seems to be that Spain has these street based fiestas, often with an enormous back story, everywhere and all year round. When Coronavirus becomes just another of those viruses that we live with I'll be trying to persuade Maggie that we should go to see the Cascamorros in Baza and Guadix or the Noche en Vela in Aledo. Who knows we might even get up to Noche de las Animas in Soria or over to Manganeses de la Polvorosa in Zamora now that they've given up on tossing the goat from the church tower. Or maybe that one where they carry people around in coffins, oh, and the one where blokes dressed in rag clothing are pelted with turnips and there are so many with bonfires and demons that I could be kept happy for years. Or maybe just the Moors and Christians in Oliva or Ibi or Petrer will do for now.

One of the problems with digging out places to visit and things to do is that it's not easy to find out about them. Every time we go to Murcia city there seems to be something happening outside the cathedral that I knew nothing about. I wonder why. Much as I dislike it I spend a lot of time grinding through webpage after webpage trying to piece together fragments of information like a second rate Hercule Poirot. 

A good example of making an event as difficult as possible are the heats which will decide Spain's entry in this year's Eurovision Song Contest. If I manage to finish this blog today the first semi-final is this evening. Eurovision is quite a big thing here in Spain. It gets a fair bit of publicity because Spain is one of the "Big 5" - the permanent members of Eurovision along with France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom which means that the Spanish song gets into the final whatever its quality. Having made the investment the state broadcaster does its best to promote the event. Over the past few years Spain's showing in the competition has been abysmal. This year the TV company decided to make more of the process for choosing the song and to try harder to get decent representation. Entering a song was opened up to almost anyone who wanted to give it a crack. From all those entries an expert panel chose fourteen songs to go on to the next stage. There would be two semi final rounds and then a final to choose the Spanish entry. The rounds and the final would be live with an audience. The town they chose for the concerts was Benidorm. 

Now, as Benidorm is only just up the road, I thought we should go and have a look. I don't really care for Eurovision but an event is an event and with this new format I even knew a few of the bands or singers. The spread of styles is pretty impressive. At the last minute one of the acts pulled out because the Eurovision rules don't allow the use of Autotune, and as her song hinged around the robotic voice (a la Cher in Believe), that put paid to her chances. So, from the first moment that Benidorm Fest was mooted I started to look out for tickets. It's a long and tedious story about Covid restrictions and how the tickets were and were not made available. In the end the organisers distributed 500 tickets through a couple of organisations of EuroFans with another bundle handed out on a sort of "old boy" scheme amongst official organisations. No tickets for plebs like us. Maybe we will and maybe we won't watch it on the telly. I'm rooting for Rigoberta Bandini (in the photo), we saw her in Cartagena over the summer but the hot favourite is a song called Terra, a folky type song sung in Galician, by Tanxugueiras.

I think there's another sort of out and aboutness, though Maggie tells me that these are only events in my own distorted imagination. Have you eaten toñas? They look like rounded loaves. Their taste is basically of a sweetened bread. They're pretty typical around here. You'll often get them, served with hot chocolate, at the end of a performance of the local Pinoso group Monte de la Sal. There's a variant to the toña, more usual at Easter time, called a mona. The only difference, as far as I know, is that a mona has a hard boiled egg baked into the crown of the bun. As I did my weekly hunt for events I saw a post from Monóvar town Council reminding people that the toña season was upon us. The post, half denied to me because it was in Valenciano, talked about some tradition of eating monas every Thursday between now and Easter - apparently you need to dance and or sing at the same time. I seem to remember that someone from here in the village told me that in the "olden days," around Pinoso, in the three days after Easter week, people would sally out into the countryside armed with the toñas to do some serious picnicking. 

If you're wondering what this has to do with events you have to do a bit of lateral thinking. Because I've not lived here all my life these things are not just a part of my DNA. If these were British we'd be talking Easter egg hunts, addressing the haggis, getting a pint in the beer tent at the village fete or just setting out some laverbread for the visitors. Keeping a tradition alive. It seems to me that turning up in some field in Yecla at some ungodly hour to watch blokes cook gachamigas (those doughy pancakes made with just water, oil, salt and garlic) or walking alongside the romería, taking the Virgin of the Assumption out to Caballusa from Pinoso, complete with free coca in Casas de Pastor (no, different stuff!!) along the way, is much the same. When we lived over in Salamanca we ate hornazo, a sort of chunky meaty pie. The pie got a big boost in sales on the second Monday after Easter. At some time in the past that was the Monday when the Church let the prostitutes back across the River Agueda into the city after their banishment during Lent. The pie was to celebrate. 

There's a shop in Benidorm that sells hornazo. That's the Benidorm where we won't be going for the Eurovision heats but where a Vicars and Tarts party might seem absolutely appropriate.

Casa Mira

Maggie once helped some people, preparing to be official tourist guides, to get ready for the part of the exam they had to do in English. To be honest I've forgotten the details, then again I forgot why I'd gone back into the kitchen a while ago and I'll probably have to re-read this sentence to see where I'm heading, so that's nothing new. The point, though, was that these people had a scripts to learn for each of the places they were going to show. Word for word scripts.

Now there's nothing wrong with "This cathedral is a milestone in the development of the Gothic, marking a symbiosis of technique and aesthetic that characterises so many other great churches built before the onset of the Renaissance".  I have no idea what it means but that's probably because I'd bunked off school or had a note from my mum that day.

This morning though we had to get up early to get to Novelda for nine in the morning. Novelda is about 25 kilometres from Culebrón and it has some notable Modernista style buildings. Modernista is the stuff we Brits call Art Nouveau - all inlaid wood, and curved lines based on the shapes of plants and flowers. For the past couple of years the tourist office has organised a Modernista Weekend to celebrate the style and we'd signed up to visit a house, Casa Mira, that's not usually open to the public. It had only been possible to book a place by phone after a given time on a set date and it took me ages to get through; I reckon I must have dialled at least 100 times, but it proved to be worth it.

The chap who was showing us around adjusted his straw boater, checked his portable microphone and loudspeaker combo and away he went. He started by talking about how people from Novelda had taken advantage of the early development of railways in Alicante, he talked about how the businessmen had been wheeler dealers who risked their money and invested as distinct from the monied classes who just earn and spend. We got stories about how the entrance way was designed to impress prospective clients, about the current owner sitting at the window and chatting with neighbours, about the people who had worked in the house and so on. I'd be lying if I said that I thought the guide was one of those inspired types you remember forever but he was good enough. It reminded me that it's a long while since we got one of the robot voiced facts and figures monologue tours. So much the better.

No photos though, private property and all that.

Having fun

All the time we've been here and we've never been in Sax Castle before. It's only just down the road too, maybe 30 kilometres. We remedied that today with a theatralized visit. I saw the poster somewhere, sent an email and I was told to email back on a specific day as the visits were always oversubscribed. I did as I was told and got a couple of places. The story the players acted out was about the second Marquis of Villena taking possession of the lands around Sax Castle. When they were telling the story I realised that this particular Marqués de Villena was the one who lost the family the lands around Villena, another local town. He backed the wrong side at the time of the famous (in Spain) Catholic Monarchs, the ones who sent Columbus off to find some spices. There is still a Marqués de Villena, the twenty first. The eighth one set up an institution to protect the purity of the Spanish language which now produces the Spanish dictionary of reference. The Villenas are a bit like those Shakespeare characters - the Northumberlands, Gloucesters and Norfolks who are still very much there. It was a nice visit. The sun shone, the Spanish seemed easy enough and the price was right. It cost nothing. We were talking about that as we walked away. Lots of things, visits, theatre pieces, concerts and the like are free in Spain. Not all of them by any means but a significant number. Education for the masses and all that I suppose.

It's coming up to Easter. With my British hat on Easter was a few chocolate eggs and a long weekend with the Friday and Monday off work. Easter in Spain mobilises towns. Semana Santa, Holy Week, is a big thing. There are brotherhoods all over Spain who work all year to get themselves sorted out for Easter. Some of the parades are simply enormous. Last year I was in  a bar when the Foreign Legion, a famous Spanish regiment, were parading the Cristo de la Buena Muerte, the Christ of the Good Death, in Malaga. The volume on the telly was turned up and people stopped talking to watch.

Last night we went to something titled Incienso y Mantilla, Incense and Mantilla (those lacy shawls worn as headgear) at the theatre in Jumilla. I bought the tickets in the last week of January and even then there were no tickets left in the stalls. It was a complete sell out unlike the Karl Jenkins or the Chopin and Liszt concerts that we also bought tickets for at the same time. Now my knowledge of the Easter goings on is both limited and quite extensive. I've seen it a lot but, then again, I'm not Spanish, I'm not a Catholic and I'm not a believer. I know something of the brotherhoods, I know something about the various religious floats, some of the iconography and how things are organised. There are things though, like saetas, that I know but I don't know. The saeta is a religious song that gets sung during Semana Santa. If I hear one I know it's a saeta but I don't really know what they are. Then again I couldn't give you much of a low-down on Christmas Carols either.

Anyway, so we go to hear Joana Jiménez and her incense and mantilla thing at the theatre. The crowd were in raptures. Right from the start the cheering, the clapping the shouts of olé were in full flow. I've never seen roses actually thrown on to a stage before. Who takes roses to a theatre? Presumably that's why Tom Jones gets knickers. At one point the photo on the backdrop was a famous Easter carving, used in the processions in Seville, called the Jesús del Gran Poder literally Jesus of the Great Power. I was a bit surprised but I recognised the image. So did everyone else in the theatre because they cheered and applauded the photo! The singing and dancing wasn't really flamenco but, as most of we Britons think that long tight dresses, with flounces at the bottom, for the women and tight trousers and slicked back hair for the men, along with lots of tap dance type stamping, equals flamenco then it was flamenco. I have no idea how a knowledgeable Spaniard would name it.

Maggie said she took some people to see a house in Jumilla. She was along with a Spanish agent who had limited English. Maggie was telling the people that Jumilla has impressive Easter processions and the agent understood. He agreed. There are a lot of believers in Jumilla he said. We met some of them last night.