Life in Culebrón

The rights and wrongs of running cars in Spain, originally registered on foreign plates, is one of the staples of the many expat Internet bulletin boards. Whatever the legal technicalities the idea is pretty simple. If you live in Spain your car should have Spanish plates, Spanish insurance and the rest whilst if, for instance, you live in the UK your motor should have UK plates, tax, insurance and safety checks. Living here means you spend more than 183 days of the year in Spain. A Swedish chum who lives in Pinoso was pulled over at a police checkpoint a couple of weeks ago. Her car, which was running on Swedish plates, was briefly impounded until she was able to register the vehicle on temporary "tourist" plates. Now she is going through the process of re-registering on Spanish plates. The police told her they were having a bit of a blitz on foreign cars and that there would be no fine (I can't remember whether she said that could have been two or three thousand euros...

On 12 February 1826 good King Ferdinand VII granted independence to Pinoso from the larger nearby town of Monóvar. Nowadays, on the most appropriate Sunday nearest the 12th, the town puts on its gladrags, well lots of traditional smocks and frocks, to celebrate the town's coming of age. The main event centres around eating - as do all Spanish celebrations. In this case punters buy eight tickets which can be swopped at the participating stalls for a drink, a snack or other edibles. It starts slowly but by 2pm the site is heaving with people balancing wine glasses and local delicacies on paper trays as they elbow their neighbours to create enough eating space. Spaniards have a remarkable facility for eating without stopping speaking and the noise level is incredible. As it all starts to tail off the heaps of rubbish and food on the floor become more noticeable and make for an interesting orienteering exercise. As well as the food there is a traditional competition a bit like hors...

The town Hall in Pinoso produces a glossy magazine each month, called el Cabeço , as a way of keeping its citizens up to date. It's always good fun with plenty of argy bargy between the political parties in amongst the real news and those human interest stories with a local flavour - Pinoso man moistened; Titanic sinks! Big stories this month included the idea that Spain's strategic oil reserve may be pumped from the refineries at Cartagena into the caverns formed where salt has been "mined" from our local mountain. There are our new water prices too, a new tiered pricing system which will see those houses that use most charged a massive 1.10€ for every 250 gallons of water - luckily for us we don't like washing much and I expect we'll be in the 28 cents per 250 gallons bracket. It was the population figures that I lingered over most though. At the start of 2010 there were 8,031 people living in Pinoso (that includes the villages such as Culebrón), 6,627...

I hear that in the UK it's only MENSA members who have a chance of keeping track of which rubbish has to be put out on what day and date - Tuesday for the organic stuff, every third Friday for household waste etc. Here in Spain there are no household collections. There are big containers dotted all over the place though. Round Pinoso the basic green jobs are for general stuff then there are the recycling bins - yellow ones for containers, blue for paper and light green for glass. You have the responsibility of getting the stuff to the bins. The general rubbish is picked up overnight in urban areas and maybe two or three times a week in rural areas. The recycling bins are cleared less frequently. It's a simple but effective system.

I'm on the dole. Not drawing cash you understand but signed on in the vain hope of finding a job and being eligible for retraining. Being on the dole also maintains my entitlement to free health care. For lots of technical reasons I am registered at an office in Alicante province about 25kms from here and about 140kms from my weekday home in Cartagena. I only need to sign on once every three months and last time I made a lot of effort to get into the office but, once there, I realised that I could have signed on using the Internet. Official Spanish websites are notoriously difficult and unreliable. I got up about 7.15 this morning to try to sign on. If it all went pear shaped that would give me time to get to the Elda office. After about 40 minutes tinkering I seemed to have got a result except that I couldn't download or save the document to prove that. The website stressed that without the document I had not signed on. Problems with the website were being complicated b...

Pinoso, our local town, is keen to promote tourist activity. After all tourism was one of the engines of the Spain's recent economic growth and it is still an enormously important industry here. So Pinoso has been getting involved in promoting a wine trail, is talking about turning part of the huge marble quarries into a tourist attraction and re-equipping the old flour mill as a museum. Good stuff. As a part of this drive they have just opened a new tourist office. It's only open weekdays from 10 till 2 at the moment to see how business develops. Being blessed with clairvoyant powers, I predict that it will be an utter failiure. Maybe if they had put it somewhere in Pinoso town rather than over a kilometre from the town centre, in the last building before open countryside, there might have been a better chance. Who thought of that? We went to the building where the tourist office is today because they also stage exhibitions there from time to time. We were the only peopl...

Down on the coast, near Cartagena, I mentioned that there are gangs working the fields to crop cabbages and similar green winter produce. I also tried my hand at picking oranges . We've just arrived back in Culebrón for the weekend and we stopped off to pickup 5 litres of the local wine (5€ well spent) ready for an evening in front of the telly. Our bodega is also an almazara, an oil mill, and people were queing to unload their crop. It's olive harvest time up here in the hills. They weigh in the olives, get a chit and they can either swop the chit for cash or for the equivalent in fresh pressed oil. Roberto thinks it is quite amusing that we Britons always take the profit in oil whilst the Spaniards take the cash.

Along with a group of other people I'm doing some bits and pieces for the blog of a local, English language magazine. I've added the link in the box to the right but, if you want to have a look it's here

I'm told that there has never been much of a tradition of written communication in Spain and that's why the postal service here is a lot weaker than that of the UK. Its great that we no longer get piles and piles of junk mail but it still seems strange that Spaniards don't expect or send birthday or Christmas cards and that post offices don't have the "semi official" status they have in the UK. If you want to sort something about your car here you go to the Traffic Office or the Town Hall, the Police deal with passports and if you want some sort of official form you will probably get it from the tobacconist. The Spanish post has a pitiful reputation amongst Britons and I think it may have something to do with addresses. All my life, in the UK, I've known my address. In Cartagena and Ciudad Rodrigo the addresses have been simple and well established and the post has never been the least problem. But, here in Culebrón, it wasn't so easy and we cert...

We were in Pinoso. Maggie drew my attention to the smoke. It's probably the bakery I said but it wasn't. There was a fair bit of action so I thought I'd have a nosey, camera in hand. Thankfully the fire was put out pretty quickly. We didn't hang around to get details but my guess is that the owner of the Peugeot was adding on some electric gadget and managed to set fire to the wiring loom of the car. He rolled the vehicle backwards, out of the garage, to save the house but, by then, burning plastic and rubber had fallen on the floor filling the garage with smoke. We heard some female passers by discussing the number to ring for the police because it is they who act as the clearing house for local incidents. A neighbour appeared with a bucket of water. The man in the red jacket went to the bakery where he collected the extinguishers that all businesses have to keep on the premises and they did the job. Cool thinking in my opinion. The owner of the car rolled around o...