Life in Culebrón

I've always been relatively interested in politics, not in any deep intellectual way, but in the way of knowing which side I was on in any political argument. When we first arrived in Spain, when there was hardly any Internet, when news came in newspapers and on TV and radio, keeping up was tricky. I could read the Spanish papers, finger pointingly slowly, but the spoken news was, initially, incomprehensible gabble. I was quite worried that I would turn from informed to stupid. For months I copied down the names, to try to make sense of the weekly political round-up in English in the Costa Blanca News. Nowadays I know, reasonably well, what's going on politically in Spain but I haven't a clue about the UK. This year there will be a general, local and regional elections in Spain. This May will be our fifth set of local elections here. We're on nodding terms with a few of the local councillors. One of those is the Pinoso Mayor, Lázaro Azorín. Now Lázaro as well as being o...

I thought we might take a look at coffee. At home I drink tea but Spaniards make such terrible tea and such good coffee that, away from home, it's coffee.  Let's start with the exception. We're in a bar or restaurant. That being the case I have no idea why you would, but, if you wanted an instant coffee, you need to ask for un café de sobre. I suspect that when decaf was first introduced it was only available in instant coffee form so some people got into the habit of asking for un café descafeinado de sobre in which case they'd get a little sachet of decaf coffee and a glass full of warm milk to dissolve it in. But here we're really talking about coffee from one of those machines that hiss and spurt usually at the precise moment someone talks to you. The noise makes it impossible to hear or understand anything but your native tongue. In the UK and the USA the coffee that issues from those machines seems to have Italian names. Not so in Spain. The short, strong, th...

One of the many complaints that Britons level against Spain is that Spaniards have lots and lots of days off, festive days. The implication is clear. In fact there can be up to fourteen days off in Spain. In England, unless there are additions for some particular event, the usual ration is eight days. It's very seldom that Spaniards get all fourteen days though. This year, 2023, there will be 12 and sometimes the number drops to 10.  That's because there is a slight, but important, difference in the thinking behind public holidays in the two countries. In one the idea is of a holiday entitlement and in the other the idea is that there should be a rest from work on a festive day. In England, each year, you get eight extra days holiday, on top of any work related holiday entitlement. If a public holiday happens to fall on a Saturday or Sunday then you will get the previous or the next working day off as a substitute. In Spain if the festive day falls on Saturday or Sunday then it...

On 12 February 1826, one of the most deplorable kings that Spain has ever had, Fernando VII, and there have been some duffers, signed the order to make Pinoso a municipality separate from Monóvar. Pinoso became a Villa. From Villa comes Villazgo which is an event in Pinoso to remember and celebrate that independence each February. Most Spaniards would consider that a villa has much less economic clout, a much smaller population and far fewer services than a city. Strangely the Spanish capital, Madrid, is historically, just like Pinoso, a villa. The Spanish Constitution divides national territory into three divisions: municipality (e.g. Pinoso, or Yecla), province (e.g. Alicante, or Murcia), autonomous community (e.g. Valencian Community or Region of Murcia). All the other divisions, used by the autonomous communities and in everyday speech, have a certain degree of willy nilliness. So comarcas ( a grouping of locations), mancomunidades (a community or grouping of municipalities), villa...

One disadvantage of living in a foreign country is that, often, the country you choose to live in doesn't speak a language you understand. It's one of the reasons why migrants, fleeing some terror regime, don't stop when they get to the first safe place. They keep going heading for somewhere that speaks a language they do. Most of we rich foreigners who move here want to be good immigrants. We try to learn a bit of Spanish before we arrive. We try to learn more as we live here but, in this area, and in others, we find that a lot of the information is in a different sort of Spanish. In Pinoso, which is in the Valencian Community, it's called Valencian. Although nobody speaks Valencian directly to we foreigners we see and hear it everywhere The current Spanish constitution says: 1) Castilian is the official language of the State. Every Spaniard has the duty to know it and the right to use it (Castilian is the language that is known worldwide as Spanish) 2) The other Spani...

You see a lot of police officers in Spain. Google says there are 238,000 of them. By comparison there are around 136,000 police officers in the UK.  The structure and organisation of the Fuerzas y Cuerpos de Seguridad (Security Forces and Corps) is complex, so take this as a rough and ready guide rather than the definitive truth. I've omitted the blood soaked past and avoided any sort of critique so I apologise now if the post is a bit dry and dusty. Nationally there are two police forces. The Guardia Civil and the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía (CNP). In very broad stroke the CNP operate in urban areas and the Guardia Civil operate in rural areas. The Guardia Civil use a green and white colour scheme while the CNP uses blue and white. Both add the Spanish flag into their livery. Both these national police forces are controlled by the Interior Ministry but the Guardia is a military unit with responsibilities to the Ministry of Defence.  In any town with more that 5,000 inhabitants...

Around here grapes are grown for eating and for making wine.  Pinoso is a bit too high and a bit too cold, to grow eating grapes, but just down the road in la Romana, Novelda and Aspe they're all over the place. The eating grapes are easy to spot. The most popular variety is called Aledo and it is often grown under plastic, protected from the sun, birds, and other pests by paper bags. The bags slow the grapes’ development and produce a grape that's soft and ripe for picking at the end of the year. How very fortunate that one of Spain's most widespread traditions is that of eating twelve lucky grapes, keeping pace with the midnight chimes of the clock in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, as the old year becomes the new. Nearly all the grapes are from around here and in Murcia. The grapes in the Pinoso area are for wine. Wine is made from mashed up grapes. Grapes grow in vineyards. They are harvested and taken to a nearby bodega, winery, where they are turned into different types ...

There are plans to build a solar farm just around the back of our house. Not eyesore close but close enough. We knew nothing about it. Well, actually that's not quite true. I probably knew but I didn't know that I knew. I remember seeing a piece on the Pinoso Town Hall website a couple of years back (8 September 2021 to be precise) with the snappy title (translated here) of Public information of authorization on undeveloped land for the photovoltaic power plant called "PSF IM2 Jumilla" in the municipality of Pinoso. The website entry mentioned several plots and plot numbers but it didn't give any real clue as to the location, no map, no village name. Obviously there was no purposeful intention to hide the location. Now the way that things are made public in Spain is that they are published in a sort of official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Estado or the Official State Bulletin. I suppose it's just published to the Internet nowadays; no paper version. The B...

Novelda and Alcoi both have lots of Modernista or Art Nouveau, buildings. Other Spanish towns boast a different architectural style, mediaeval walls or a castle. Some are littered with stone built palaces. Pinoso has none of that, in fact it has quite a lot of horrid buildings and plenty of buildings which look alright except that they are in the wrong place. Nonetheless, while Pinoso isn't exactly breathtaking in its architectural beauty, it does have lots of detail to notice if your life is not so full of care that you have some time to stand and stare. For some reason traditional, as in traditional costume, seems to mean 18th or 19th Century. The first Levi's were made in 1853, but I suspect we're unlikely to see the local dance group, Monte de la Sal, in jeans. There's a certain unspoken aesthetic about what classic and traditional mean. Maybe it's the same with houses, traditional implies some sort of fixed time in the past. Apparently Alicantino houses, those ...

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 thro...