Life in Culebrón

The fiestas in Pinoso are just about to kick off. As a fully accredited member of the I don't approve of taunting animals and I've just had my hernia fixed besides which my knee is playing up, club, it's a bit unlikely that I'll be taking full advantage of the real partying that the fiestas have to offer. I will wander the stalls, I will eat out, I will see a band or two, I will look at the fair, I'll grin at the ofrenda and laugh at the whacky racers but I'm not going to be there for the incredibly loud music at five in the morning nor will I be running around after the bullocks and it's for sure that nobody is going to be invite me to join their peña to drink cheap alcohol or abuse other substances beside some parked car pumping out music when all sane folk have taken their contact lenses out for the night. Even if I join my age peers to see the equally compromised one (or two) hit wonder from the 1970s I won't know the songs. It won't stop me havi...

I saw something about the fiestas in Cañadas de Don Ciro this last weekend. Now Don Ciro really is no more than a wide spot on a very rural road but they have fiestas. It reminded me that I hadn't written anything about our own local fiesta which was a couple of weekends ago now.  The Culebrón fiesta is one of a series for the outlying villages which are part the Pinoso municipality. The first village fiesta takes place in late Spring and they go on through the Summer with the villages taking it in turns to have a weekend of festivities. The fiestas are not usually particularly exciting or expansive but they are deeply ingrained in local culture and they offer the villagers a break from the routine with a chance to have a bit of a natter with friends, family and neighbours against the backdrop of some planned activities. There are usually two key themes. One is religious. Nearly all the fiestas are tied in to the patron saint for the village. The saintly effigies usually get an out...

I drove over to Novelda yesterday to see La bajada de la Virgen. I'd never seen this particular procession and I'm always up for a good romería. The idea of a romería is that a saint, well the carved statue that represents a saint, is moved from one place to another in a procession - usually from some sort of chapel to a parish church or vice versa. Normally the saints are carried on the shoulders of the faithful using a stretcher like base but not always, in la Palma for instance the saint rides in a cart. There are all sort of variations. The shrine where this particular saint, Mary Magdalene, came from is on la Mola Hill so she was brought down; bajada implies coming down, subida is when the saint goes up the hill. The style of a romería can vary, some are pretty large scale like San Pancrecio in Sax, San Isidro in Salinas or the Virgen de la Nieves between Aspe and Hondón de la Nieves. Several are much smaller scale including very local ones like moving the Virgen de la Asu...

You may have noticed it has been quite warm in Spain for a while now. As I write, the word heatwave is on lots of people's lips; French lips, British lips, Portuguese lips and more. Spain is on fire too but we touched on that a couple of weeks ago. While it's a bit unusual to have such high temperatures in Paris or London it's not that unusual in Madrid or Culebrón. It seems pretty obvious to the casual observer that odd weather events are becoming more and more frequent. The weather's gone mad or, as we say in these here parts, el tiempo ha vuelto loco. Maybe we drove it mad. Those of us who live in Spain walk down the shady side of the street, look for the tables in the shade and often choose to eat inside a restaurant. We prefer to be coddled by the aircon, rather than go hand to hand with swarms of pesky and hungry flies under the sunshades on the terrace. It sometimes seems to me that Spaniards can take this to quite extreme lengths. Go on a coach and they will ins...

It's Sanfermines up in Pamplona at the moment. You know the thing, white clothes, red neckerchiefs, running with bulls - the Hemingway book. I often listen to the 8 am news on the radio and, for the past few days, today was the last, they've been doing a live broadcast of the bull running. It only lasts a bit over a couple of minutes so it doesn't interfere too much with the real news. Once upon a time I lived in Ciudad Rodrigo. There too, but at Carnaval time, they have an encierro. The bulls run through the streets, lined with very solid, railway sleeper type, fences to the town square. Encierro means locking up so, when they get to the square, they are penned up. The bulls are led along the route by mansos, bulls but not fighting bulls. Manso means something like docile but a five to six hundred kilos of bull isn't my idea of something cuddly. The idea is that these mansos have done the route before so they lead the fighting bulls to their destination. We'd watch...

This week, in the Spanish media there has been a lot about Miguel Ángel Blanco, a local politician in the Basque country who was abducted and murdered by ETA, the Basque terrorist group. Miguel died in July 1997 so this is the 25th anniversary. As always with things ETA related or to do with the victims of terror there has been controversy. Basically some people say that the political party Bildu, which operates in the Basque Country, and is a sometimes ally of the present socialist government, is the direct successor to the ETA terrorist group. Others say that making that association is as unrealistic as following the trail of the very mainstream Partido Popular back to some hypothetical Francoist roots. I wonder if there is some sort of rule about how long has to pass before groups, people, finally lay old antagonisms to rest, acknowledge the damage and move forward. I understand the Catalans are still upset by a battle in the War of Succession that took place in 1714 but Coventrians...

I read somewhere that 10% of the Earth's surface is on fire at any one time. I couldn't actually find anything to confirm that on Google but I did find something very scientific looking which said 340 million hectares of the planet burns every year. That's a lot of land. A hectare is 10,000 square metres, the land required as the plot for a new rural build house in Alicante. If you're not a local hoseholder then an International football pitch is usually about three quarters of a hectare.  As I type the fire at Venta del Moro, on the border between Valencia and Cuenca provinces, is just about under control. A fire in Spain is classified as big when it burns more than 500 hectares. Venta del Moro left 1,300 hectares in ashes. A few weeks ago the Sierra de la Culebra in the North east of Zamora province burned 30,000 hectares.  Firefighters classify these forest and grass fires into generations. The sort we've had around here, so far, have been First Generation. This ...

I'm reading a book called España fea, or ugly Spain. Actually the full, and translated title is Ugly Spain: Urban chaos, democracy's greatest failure. Now this book is 506 pages long and I'm on page 98 so I'm being a bit previous here but it did set me thinking. One of the central themes in the book, so far, is that Spain followed the US model of delegating planning to local administrations which have been open to corruption and cronyism. The end result is a mish mash of badly designed, poorly built and inappropriately placed buildings. Lots of Spain is chocker with palaces and churches and big, big stone buildings. Around here in Alicante and Murcia those sorts of "monumental" town centres are far less common than in other part of Spain. Orihuela leans a bit that way and there must be others but, in general, this area is, architecturally, less impressive than many others. Pinoso is a perfect example. It's a great place to live, it's safe and tidy and ...

Roadkill always surprises me. I mean, the Pinoso Monóvar road, for instance, is not a particularly busy road and yet it is littered with the carcasses of dead rabbits, snakes, hedgehogs, foxes, cats and, occasionally, wild boar. I can't see how the sums stack up. Every now and then a lone rabbit crosses the road. Every now and again an occasional car comes down the road. What dread fate puts the two in the very same spot at the very instant for slaughter to occur? In our early days in Spain we did a lot of commuting to and from Elche to Pinoso. We noticed that there wasn't much wildlife to be seen from the car. Whereas the place we'd lived in the UK seethed with rabbits, in Spain we never saw anything alive. It was similar in the early years in our Spanish garden in Culebrón. A few wagtails, swallows in spring and summer but, in general, the bird population seemed very sparse in comparison to what we'd been used to. Over the past few years the number of living things ar...

I forget why, I forget what we'd been doing, I really do forget a lot of things nowadays, but we were with friends and and now it was time for lunch. The nearest place on the route back that might have restaurants was Polop so we drove into the town. We followed the signs for the ayuntamiento, the town hall. The road changed from tarmac to paving which is a sure sign that we were in the heart of the oldest part of the town, the part to expect restaurants. We passed the typical town centre buildings, the tourist office or the town hall or the parish church - again I forget. It's not that we were able to choose our route. We were funneled and shepherded, inevitably, by no entry signs and compulsory turn signs along the one way circuit through the old town. And suddenly the road became a street about two metres wide. It happens from time to time. You follow the SatNav without realising it's set to shortest route or you simply get funnelled into the old part of a town and sudde...