¡Olé! ¡Qué arte hija! ¡Arsa!

Last Saturday evening, we went over to Yecla to see a pre-selection concert for the Cante de las Minas flamenco competition which takes place in La Unión, near Cartagena.

La Unión, the town, has a strong tradition of Flamenco, the music more usually associated with gypsies and Andalucia. The link came about because La Unión, which mined lead and silver in Roman times, had a resurgence of mining activity in the mid-nineteenth century. With the liberalisation of certain laws and particularly with new technologies, the mines became potentially profitable for the first time in centuries. The mining industry needed workers. Starving peasants from Andalucia, particularly from Almeria province, saw the opportunity to escape the misery they were living in. They should have known better. Poor people always get it in the neck. They simply replaced the misery inflicted on them by the rich and uncaring farmers of Andalucia for more misery and hardship inflicted on them by rich and uncaring mine owners of Murcia. The miners started to sing songs about their woes in the style they knew, flamenco, and so the song type called Minera was born.

Flamenco has lots of different styles. They all sound the same to me, but if you find someone who actually understands the music, they will be able to clap out the different rhythms, the palos, by clapping, dando palmas, to styles with names like fandangos, tangos, bulerias, alegrias, and lots more.

Back in 1961, Esteban Bernal thought that with the decline of the mining industry, the flamenco style invented there was about to be lost forever. He decided to try to maintain the music by organising a competition for young talent. The competition includes the three main elements of flamenco - singing, el cante, playing, el toque, and dancing, el baile. Competitors for the semi-finals are chosen through a series of heats, like the one we went to in Yecla, and the singers, guitarists and dancers go on to perform in La Unión in the old Victorian-style market hall now dubbed la Catedral del Cante, The Cathedral of Song.

The festival Cante de las Minas, the Song of the Mines, takes place at the beginning of August, this year from 3rd to 12th. For the first four or five nights, there are concerts from established stars of flamenco, and then, from Wednesday on, there are three semi-finals with the big final on Saturday night. The big prize is only 6,000€, but there are prizes for the best this and that, so the actual winner may collect a reasonable amount from a variety of prizes. The real prize, though, is the publicity. Win Cante de las Minas or do well, and the offers of recording contracts or performances will almost certainly come rolling in.

We've been to performances by established stars, and we've done the semi-finals three or maybe four times. It's fascinating and boring in equal measure. If you think flamenco is tight spotty frocks and twirling hands to poppety little tunes then you'd probably be quite surprised by the performances and by the people involved. Tickets are best bought online before the night. The semi finals start at 10pm and go on till very late. When we go we try to be there a few minutes beforehand in order to find and settle into our plastic chairs. Despite our promptness the performance will start the habitual fifteen to twenty five minutes late. When it does get underway the singer will sing and the guitarist will play. I'm impressed. Twenty minutes in and I'm a bit bored. I can't understand the words, and the songs sound very similar (to me). We see someone dance, we see some guitarists, maybe there's a flamenco pianist. The hall is very, very hot. There's a lot of movement of people coming and going to their seats. My bum starts to ache, we're 90 minutes in, two hours. I'm bored to tears and in severe pain. We decide we'll stay till 1:00am or some other agreed time. Finally, we muster the courage to rise from our seats - perdona, gracias, permiso. We push past, we're out and the flamenco stops and we can enjoy the cool of the evening. We say how good it all was, we say how bored we were too. In the square outside the hall, the bars are doing a good trade in food and drink. Maybe we have a last drink before setting out on the 90-minute journey home.

Only the last time we were there did we realize that Spaniards get fed up with sitting on hard chairs in sweltering conditions too. They get a pass and pop outside for a beer or a snack then they go back in so they do their viewing and listening in stints. They don't try to tough it out. Even knowing that I suspect it's a bit unlikely that I'll be able to persuade my partner we should give it another try.

If you haven't done it though consider it. The tickets for the stars aren't cheap and the final usually sells out pretty fast but the semi-finals cost a bit under 16€ this year. Who knows you may fall in love with flamenco. They say people do.

Paintings and carvings on Monte Arabí

Monte Arabí is a natural park, about 20 kms out of Yecla, almost into Castilla la Mancha. It has some nice looking, rounded and very young, geologically speaking, Miocene rocks (10-12 million years old) and a bunch of trees and Mediterranean scrub. It's one of those places to wear the trousers you bought from Decathlon and to load a bottle of water, and maybe a bocadillo wrapped in silver paper, in your backpack. Mobile phones are a bit lost in the park - not much of a signal.

I have to admit to not being a fan of most of the walks in this area. Ooh, look, a pine tree and some esparto grass, oh, and there's another pine tree. As Ivor Cutler said of the Scottish countryside - “We were soon well acquainted with the thistle, there are many thistles in Scotland”. I like Monte Arabí though because it's one of those places that has a long history of human settlement and I like the idea of continuity. The first time I was there, in 2011, I clambered up the hillside and peered through the iron grille that protected the pinturas rupestres, the prehistoric, abstract, wall paintings below a rocky overhang which shelters the cliff face. Later, in 2019, we went on an organised tour with the Yecla Tourist Office. The guide had the key for the padlock of the big steel fence behind which there were more prehistoric wall paintings - much more figurative paintings with people and animals. The same guide told us about the wall paintings that I'd seen on my earlier visit and about some petroglyphs in another part of the park. As we didn't see them that day, I went back a couple of weeks later to find them. 

Petroglyphs, are rock carvings. Possibly just a Bronze Age version of “Kilroy was here” possibly something with deeper significance. I didn't find them in 2019 but I did end up on the top of Aribelejo, which is where the only water to be found within the park is and where there was once a Bronze Age settlement. Just while we're on petroglyphs there are some nice ones up on La Centenera Hill in Pinoso.

This visit we started with La Cueva de la Horadada, a collapsed cavern that has left a big hole through solid rock. I kept mumbling on to my partner about how good the wall paintings were and how close you could get but, when we got there, things had changed. There is now a huge steel fence running around the cliff face and the unhindered growth of the vegetation behind the fence means you can no longer see the paintings. I'm all for protecting the site but surely the powers that be could have found a way to protect the paintings and still allow them to be seen? The paintings are only of any interest to people - passing rabbits, wild boar and hedgehogs will be happily oblivious to the paintings importance in human development.  At least we found the petroglyphs this time. In fact they were dead easy to find, just beside the track. and made easier by the full explanation we got from the ranger in the Punto de Información in the old Casa de Guarda. 

Whining on, again

I'm not such a big fan of wine. It's not that I don't drink it but I'd nearly always go for other sorts of booze first. Maggie, my partner, on the other hand, is a bit of an enthusiast. One of the things she often does is to take our visitors on one of the bodega tours. Indeed, years ago, she used to organise tours for tourists as a business venture so we got to know nearly all of the bodegas in Jumilla and Yecla and a good number of the bodegas close to Pinoso that allow visits.

Jumilla, Yecla and Alicante all produce wines that have Denominación de Origen Protegida (protected designation of origin) as well as wines more suited to drain unblocking or unarmed combat. Lots of the stuff that isn't D.O.P. is shipped to other countries, particularly France, where it is mixed with local wine and then sold as being from that country. The unloved wine is the sort of wine that you would use for things where any old wine will do - preserving fruits, cooking, turning into vinegar etc. Sometimes it tastes OK and sometimes it doesn't.

D.O.P., often shortened to DO, is a sort of quality mark which says that the product comes from a specific place, and that its characteristics are to do with that geography, with the methods by which it is produced and that there is a process for checking that those standards and rules are maintained and followed. Round here for instance the monastrell grapes grown on the wire trellis for machine picking aren't for DO wine. The good stuff comes from the vines arranged in the rows that make "diamond" shapes and are picked by hand. Wines are often D.O. - that's why we can talk about a rioja or a sherry - but cheese, ham, sausage and even tiger nuts and horchata (the drink made from them) can have D.O. 

I don't know about you but I still think of wines as being quite posh. Expensive restaurants have people who select and serve their wines with the same panache as the servers present those fiddly plates of food. It seems wrong, to me, that this classy product starts with grapes hauled by old tractors in even older trailers and, when those grapes have been mashed up to yield juice, the liquid is moved from one steel tank to another using industrial pumps and thick rubber hoses laid across concrete floors.

I also find the whole wine tasting process at the bodegas a bit false. The normal routine is that you are shown around the unloading bays, the fermenting vats, the cellars where the barrels are stored and the bottling plant before the guide takes you to try the wines - anything from three to five different types - with a bit of ham and cheese to accompany the drink. The company line varies from bodega to bodega. If one adds yeast that produces the best wine if another doesn't, but relies on the natural yeast on the grapes, that's the best. One lauds the steel tanks another their concrete ones. When it comes around to tasting they instruct you on the correct way to hold the glass, how to swirl, the sniffing, the looking at the colour against a white background and so on. In one of the bodegas they suggested that you should use all five senses when tasting wines. Listen how it gloops into the glass. Ahem! They always talk about the colour. I understand that the colour may say something about the time and place that a wine has been stored, or the grape it came from, but so would the label, and more accurately. You are asked to smell the wine. What "notes" do you detect? - peach, strawberry, thyme, chocolate? I often wonder which is best. I usually think it smells of alcohol but if it smelt floral would that be good or bad? 

I once had the temerity to ask why one wine was more expensive than another. I can see, for instance, that wines put in barrels to mature will cost more than wines that are bottled more or less straight away because there is no barrel to buy, there is no energy needed to keep the wine at the right temperature and nobody has to be paid to keep an eye on the maturation but when the harvesting is done by hand, when the storage time and method is the same, when all the variables are the same I don't quite understand why one wine is several times more expensive than another. I didn't get a proper answer.

But, as I said, I don''t much care for wine so maybe I'm just biased and if you've never done a bodega tour I'd definitely recommend one.

Deflated

Last year we couldn't go to Yecla, to the Jazz Festival. We went to St Petersburg instead. Tough call - eighth largest town in Murcia or the jewel of Tsarist Russia.

We went to Yecla in 2015, 2016 and 2017 though. Absolutely cracking event, usually five nights. The bands are often really good - good enough to cost money with Amazon later. And the acts are introduced by one of the wise, avuncular Radio 3 DJs which adds to the fun. Even better it was free and, because it was free, you could sit where you wanted. Given that the Concha Segura is all red velvet and gilt choosing between stalls, boxes and the dress circle is a difficult but pleasurable call. We even tried the Gods one year. All we had to do was to turn up early enough to get the full choice.

The Festival started yesterday but Lord Grantham, Maggie Smith and the rest won out. Dubbed versions are fine but the once a week English language version film is better. Downton Abbey in Spanish? Hardly!

Just before we set off for Yecla tonight Maggie asked if I'd noticed that the Festival was no longer free. I hadn't. Tickets were 3€. We've never had any problem finding a seat when it was free even when we arrived close to kick off so we thought that, by arriving early, half an hour before curtain up, we'd be fine with the, new to us, ticketing system.

There weren't any tickets left. I'm away tomorrow, we have another concert on Friday, "Anything for Saturday?," we asked. Nothing. So no Yecla Jazz festival for us this year.

Sad. And a note in my calendar to buy early next year.

Fiestas de la Virgen in Yecla

You may have seen my snaps of blokes in bicorne hats shooting off arquebuses (old fashioned musket type rifles) in the streets of Yecla. If you haven't, and you want to, there is a tab at the top of this page for my photo albums. The one you want is December 2018. You may wonder why.

Well, basically, in 1642 during The War of Cataluña 61 soldiers from Yecla, under the command of a Captain Soriano Zaplana, went off to fight in line with some treaty signed with a Catalan noble. The Yeclanos were in Cataluña for six months but they were never called on to fight. They all got back to Yecla safe and sound. They were well pleased so they went up to the Castle in Yecla, did a lot of praying and suchlike and then took a picture of Our Lady of the Incarnation, known as the Virgin of the Castle, down  to the town where she stayed in a church for a few days so that people could do even more praying and genuflecting. As the soldiers carried the picture down the hill to the town they shot off their guns Hezbollah or Hamas style. That was the start of the tradition. The Virgin in procession with lots of men shooting off guns. That's what you can still see today.

The celebrations were a bit of a movable feast at first but in 1691 a group called the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception was formed and, as a result, the town adopted that particular version of the Virgin Mary as their patron saint. The brotherhood commissioned a statue and when she was finished, in 1695, she replaced the original picture, from the castle, in the processions.

There was a bit of a blip in the celebrations in the late 1700s because of a fifteen year nationwide ban on the use of gunpowder. The Yeclanos kept asking for their fietas to be exempt and in 1786, Carlos III granted that concession. The guns, silenced for 15 years, took to the streets of Yecla again. The regulations for the revitalised fiestas, written in that year, remained in use right through to 1986. I presume that the style of the suits worn by the soldiers date from that time too.

There was another blip in 1936 when the Republicans set fire to lots of churches and burned lots of religious statues amongst them the 1695 Virgin. The one that gets an outing nowadays is a copy of the original. It was carved by Miguel Torregrosa in the 1950s and given a Papal blessing in 1954.

To be honest I'm not quite sure about all the details of the celebrations. It's a very male festival, and women are notable by their absence. Things like flag kissing and even flag waving are reasonably obvious but there are also children, referred to as pages, who have some part in the festival which I don't quite understand. The web in general and Wikipedia in particular has not helped. The key part though is that there are sixteen groups of soldiers (plus a couple on non aligned groups), each led by a Mayordomo, which dress up in those 18th Century clothes and process through the streets of Yecla shooting off their guns as they escort the Virgin from one place to another.

Should you ever decide to go you will need ear plugs. It is very, very loud.

The Yecla Amusement Park?

I keep a database of the films I've seen. For complicated and boring reasons one database ran from 1986 to 2009 and a second one from 2010 to present. Thanks to my brother in law the two were, finally, combined into one long list just a few days ago. Apparently I've seen 2,706 films at the cinema between 1986 and today. The busiest year was 1995 when I saw 132 films. The quietest was 2008 when I was living in Ciudad Rodrigo. In 2017 I saw 81.

Ciudad Rodrigo is in Salamanca province in Castilla y León very close to the Portuguese border. It's a clean, safe, friendly, walled town that's lovely to look at. It's a long way from anywhere though and the nearest decent sized supermarket or car dealer or cinema is in Salamanca about 90km away. In fact I'm lying because the nearest cinema or main dealer for the Mini was actually in Guarda and that was only 75kms away. Guarda though is in Portugal where they speak Portuguese and as we don't we tended to stick to Spain. It was too far to pop over to the town to see a film but we did see a couple in the multiplex in Guarda when we were there anyway having done something else. The big advantage, for us, is that the Portuguese show their films in the original language with subtitles, unlike Spain where most films are dubbed. Because it was too far to go to Salamanca or Guarda we generally saw films in the Cine Juventud in Ciudad Rodrigo.

The Juventud was a really old fashioned cinema in some huge stone built building. The admission, the sweets and the popcorn were cheap, the seats were past their best and the sound and projection quality were a bit dodgy too. As I remember it the emergency exit lead out through the gardens of the Bishop's Palace. The huge plus of course was that it was close: we could walk into town, see the film, get a drink and walk home. There was only one show a week and, sometimes, that film wasn't for us which is, I suppose, why we only saw 21 films that year.

This evening we went to see a mentalist type magic show in Pinoso at 6pm and then we hurried off to Yecla to see the 8.15 film. A movie that we missed when it was first released; La librería - The Bookshop. We've never been to the cinema in Yecla before. We've seen posters for films but I've always presumed they were shown in the municipal theatre. In fact there's a cinema, the Cine PYA (Initials for Parque Yeclano de Atracciones - the Yecla Theme Park), which apparently opened in 1952 and "closed for good" in 2013. Google has nothing to say about how or why it reopened. The cinema doesn't have much of a frontage but it does have a big screen and, by modern standards, it is a big theatre with row after row of seats on a traditional theatre stalls type plan rather than the steeply raked seats in a modern multiplex. The ticket was torn from a roll, there were no computers in sight to deal with seat allocation and there were even some red velvet curtains over the multiple entry and exit doors. It was a good sized crowd, our regular cinema, the Cinesmax in Petrer would be glad to have such a big audience, and a surprising number of them chose to sit on the same row as us. I read somewhere, in one of those strange surveys that you see from time to time, that Spaniards are one of the nationalities with the least need for personal space in the world. Spaniards, unlike Britons, like to be up close

I didn't particularly care for the film, a bit television drama, but it was a really good outing.

Not knowing what you don't know

I think that we do pretty well at getting out and about. In fact the last few days have been a bit of a culture fest.

Just tonight we were at the Yecla Jazz Festival. On Saturday it was the open doors day in Petrer when we visited the Castle, a Civil War machine gun emplacement and some other stuff. Oh, and earlier on Saturday we went to an animal rescue centre outside Villena that majors in apes and monkeys. On Sunday I popped in to see the Fallas "monuments" in Elda and, spurred on by all this activity, I also got around to booking a couple of events for this season at the Teatro Chapi. And right on our doorstep I signed us up for a visit to the local salt workings. I even got to the cinema twice last week and, if the second film hadn't been so incomprehensible to me, I might have made it three.

I mentioned the Fallas event to a Spanish chap I was talking to this morning. He'd never heard of it. Moors and Christians in Elda he said; didn't even know they had Fallas. I can't say I blame him. I had the full 136 page glossy event magazine and I couldn't find most of the structures they were going to burn. There were times and events and lots of photos of young women in traditional frocks in the programme but it was a bit short on locations. Elda Tourist Office is in receipt of one of my snotty emails.

It was lunctime. I was driving home after buying the ingredients for today's gastronomic delight whilst Maggie was driving back from an appointment in Petrer. We both heard José Miguel López presenting his show on National Radio 3 from the nearby town of Yecla. He was there to host the Yecla Jazz Festival which started today.

So, this evening we popped over to Yecla to hear the free concert by Miyram Latrece. It was excellent stuff. Good crowd, splendid musicians, lovely atmosphere. I think Miryam was a bit carried away by the event; she described Yecla as "lindisma" - really pretty. I like Yecla myself but describing the town as pretty is pushing it a bit.

There are plenty of things we know about that we choose not to do but I often wonder what else me miss simply because we don't know it's there?

Secret Wine Spain

Maggie likes wine. It's no secret. She likes a good Rioja and she likes Ribera del Duero too. But Maggie thinks it's very unfair that so few people recognise the quality of some of our local wine particularly the product from the Jumilla wine region.

Jumilla shares a border with Pinoso so it's very local. We also share a border with Yecla which has a separate quality mark for its wine and, of course, we are in Alicante which produces some excellent wine too. We even have a small bodega in Culebrón village. There are lots of bodegas to visit but some tours and some wine are better than others.

Maggie likes to eat out. She can wax lyrical about some of the local food though she can also be disparaging about the chop and chips menus of so many places. You have to know where to go she says. You need local knowledge.

Maggie says that we have some breathtaking scenery around here. I can't disagree. Sometimes just driving up from La Romana or over to Yecla I just break into a big grin as I watch the landscapes pass. Staying here can be a treat but knowing where is more difficult.

So Maggie had an idea. Maybe she could help people to appreciate our local wine, our local food and our local scenery. So Secret Wine Spain was born. It's a work still in progress as Maggie comes to grips with marketing, website building and blogging but if you fancy a tailor made wine tour in Murcia or Alicante then Maggie's your woman.

Furniture

Yecla, a small town very close to us here in Culebrón, has a national reputation for furniture making. Every year they have a furniture trade fair with the final Saturday being open to the public.

We went along not knowing quite what to expect but hoping that in amongst the extended furniture shop displays there would be some old bloke with a flat cap turning chair legs on string driven thing. There wasn't. Just stand after stand of pretty gruesome furniture. Well I thought most of it was pretty horrid anyway.

Never mind, at least we've done it now.
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Tourist offices

I usually start most phrases in Spanish with a mistake. It comes from my insecurity about speaking. This, as often as not, is the cue for any Spanish person who can manage a few broken words of English to take over the conversation.

Yesterday we went to the tourist office in Yecla to pick up a map that we knew existed showing the delights of Murcia province. I vaguely remembered that there were cave paintings close to Yecla which means within easy striking distance of Culebrón.

I fluffed my lines but the Information person picked up what we were after and produced said map. Then she started to explain about the place we wanted to see, we asked a question, she expanded the detail, she produced another map - and so it went until we had a fistful of leaflets and maps and all the information we needed. She never once doubted that we understood what she was saying or talked to us as though we were imbeciles

Maggie commented, as we walked away, on the quality of the tourist people in Murcia. We remembered how well we'd been treated at the office in Jumilla when we asked about the bodega tours. No condescending attitude, quality information and, on that occasion, she even rang and booked a tour for us. In Cartagena they are busier and perhaps a little more brusque but their information is always good and nearly always includes the stuff you need - the where, when and how type information.

We saw the cave paintings and we're thinking of going back to Yecla today to see all those things that we've missed before. Good result all round.