If Elda and Elche are the most important centres this area, in general, has a tradition of shoes and leather goods. The tiny village of Chinorlet about 3km from us has a factory that makes handbags. Our next door neighbour has a company that produces bows and buckles and the like to stick on leather goods.
Pinoso too has a history of shoe making. In the middle of town there is a small square dedicated to the shoemakers, (just like there are places dedicated to marble and to wine the other big industries of Pinoso). A local firm, Pinoso's, always has a stand at the celebration of the town's identity, the Villazgo celebrations, where you can don an apron and pose with a shoe last looking like you're doing something very footwear. When I taught one of my students said that her family had a firm that produced a part of the soles for shoes and another was a sort of shoe broker selling designs overseas. Just beside the library, on one of the principal streets of the town, there is an anonymous building which always attracts my attention when I walk by because the powerful smell of epoxy resin that issues from its open window. I have no idea what they are up to but unless they are the glue sniffing unaccompanied minors that the far right party Vox is always going on about then it's something shoe related.
So Pinoso is still a shoemaking town. I don't quite know where the factories are though. I had a vague idea there was one near the sports centre, Maggie thought so too, and maybe on the industrial estate. I asked a Spaniard I know who seems to know almost anyone local over a certain age. He wasn't quite sure where the companies were either - maybe on the industrial estate he said but he also wondered if it were more backstreet workshops than big factories. I asked if he thought a factory on the corner of Calderón de la Barca and Camino del Prado was shoe related - "Could be," was the response.
Sometimes it's amazing what you don't know even after ages and ages even if you're home grown.
