Life in Culebrón

I like to do things, to go places, to get out to Spain. To concerts, to parades, to fairs and fiestas, to restaurants and landmarks, to open days, exhibitions and guided walks. There always seems to be lots going on all over the place. I've never been quite able to decide whether this is because there are a lot of things on offer or because I've got into the habit of hunting them out. It may be a combination of both. It may also be because of where we happen to be based. Pinoso is surrounded by other towns and, as everywhere does things, the cumulative effect is impressive. When we first got here there were a whole load of new cultural experiences to tap into. A lot of the information came from posters. It was both comical and frustrating that the posters often failed to give basic information - when or where - for instance. That's because the posters were a gentle reminder to a local audience. As the event hadn't changed in years, everyone who mattered, the locals, kne...

In my diary I often use the expression sunny and blue to describe the daytime weather in wintertime Spain. Hardly a cloud in the blue, blue sky and a temperature anywhere from the low teens to the low twenties. This year it's been particularly warm. But warm is relative. In the sun, in a pavement bar, in our garden, it's warm, but in the same spot, half an hour later, in the shade it's chilly. Our incoming water pipe passes along a North facing wall and often, during the winter, it would freeze up and leave us waterless till around noon when the day warmed up. Nowadays it has layers and layers of lagging and duct tape and we no longer need to venture out either smelly and tealess. Our kitchen door opens onto a patio. l leave it open as I'm cooking lunch and I'm fine, temperature wise; not so good chef-wise. Our living room, on the other side of the kitchen though is distinctly chilly and, before Maggie comes home from a hard morning at the office, I put on some heat...

I've always liked going to the pictures, to the cinema. It's not just the film but the experience. It's true you can see the pictures and hear the words on Netflix or Apple TV, or even on the broadcast telly, but it's hardly the same. The cinema is total immersion, a darkened room with one focus of attention, and a screen that dwarfs even the largest television screen. I also like that it involves popping out of British territory and into Spain. I used to go to the pictures in the UK too. A huge advantage that we Britons have, in relation to film viewing, is that we speak English. This means that the films produced by the US film makers aren't seen as being foreign, even though they are. Italian and French and Iranian films, those that come with subtitles are foreign. I don't think I ever saw a dubbed film in a cinema in the UK, foreign films always came with subs. Not so in Spain. Here nearly all foreign language films (which obviously embraces Hollywood produc...

There are plans to build a solar farm pretty close to our house. I've mentioned it before. The main development is going to be run a "field" back from the main road, the CV83, that's the road from Monóvar to Pinoso. The larger part of the development will start just past the Culebrón roundabout, on the left hand side of the road going towards Pinoso, and run up to finish near the track opposite the ecoparque. There's a secondary part of the development a little higher up the hill from our house too.  Now, to be absolutely honest I'm not that bothered about the panels. Like nearly everyone I think solar energy is much better than coal, gas or nuclear plants. It's not as though the unploughed field alongside the CV83 is particularly picturesque and from our house we already have views of a bunch of falling down buildings, out of place brightly coloured monocapa houses, goat sheds and any number of telegraph poles, posts and cables. I'd much rather have t...

Now to explain a little. The usual way for anyone to refer to the Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, AEAT, the Spanish tax collection agency, is to say Hacienda. Each year Hacienda publishes figures, based on tax returns, to say which is the richest municipality in Spain. They give the median (declared) income as their yardstick. The figures are always a couple of years behind because the tax return we will do in Spring of this year will be for 2023 and with the time it takes to finish everything off this latest set of figures are for the tax year 2021. I have no idea why a news article turned up on my phone about these figures this morning, they were published in October 2023, but they did and I thought they were just about interesting enough for a blog especially if I added a few local numbers.  The richest place in Spain is Pozuelo de Alarcon close to Madrid with a median gross income of 80,244€. In the Valencian Region the richest town is Rocafort, a small town to th...

I went to see a fiesta in honour of Saint Anthony in Vilanova d'Alcolea last weekend. I've seen some pretty bonkers fiestas in Spain over the years but, so far, this one takes the biscuit. I seriously thought, for a few moments, that I might burst into flames and die in a ball of fire. Castellón province seems to go to town on Saint Anthony celebrations. The events are pretty obviously pagan at root, with a bit of Christian updating. In 2022 we went to the Santantonà in Forcall where a band of devils take two saints, Anthony and Peter, captive, tie them up and drag them around the streets on the way to be burned in a bonfire. Occasionally the devils are distracted from their primary task of immolation when they spy fair maidens watching the proceedings from their balconies. The devils climb to the balconies intent on another of the three tenets of the classic Viking battle plan: burn, pillage and rape. This year, as I said I went to Vilanova d'Alcolea, a village with a popu...

I don't know if you're old enough to remember a short lived comedy series on the BBC called Fawlty Towers but, if you are, you will remember the waiter, Manuel, played by Andrew Sachs. Trading on the popularity of the Manuel character the BBC used Sachs as their guinea pig, a typical Spanish learner, for their beginner's series called Get by in Spanish. In one of the first lessons the word "adiós" was highlighted as a way to greet someone when you didn't have time to stop and speak. So, you see someone you know but you have to be somewhere else, you don't have time to exchange even the most desultory of conversations. You can't possibly simply look the other way or pretend to be inspecting the pavement so you use that one single word to greet, acknowledge and dismiss your friend, or acquaintance, as you speed on your way.  I think "adiós" as a greeting underpins the Spanish attitude to acknowledging other people. Imagine you have ended up in ...

Let's presume you're in Spain and you want a t-shirt or a bikini or a pair of trainers or a new phone. Even with the upheavals in retailing there are still real physical shops where you can go. Most of them will have the majority of their stock on show for you to browse. Occasionally you might have to talk to someone, to get your size in shoes for instance, but most people can do most of their shopping in, Bershka or Carrefour or MediaMarkt and a whole lot more, without speaking. You might need to make some sort of grunting sounds at the till but that's all. It was not always so. Not that long ago shopping in Spain required a conversation. There was a counter and behind it there was someone to ask for whatever you wanted. They showed you things that you may or may not want and may or may not like - it could all become quite complicated. Also shops were pretty specialised. When we first needed electric bulbs for our new house I went to an electrical shop but it turned out I ...

I was chatting to my neighbours the other day. We were talking about the plans for the solar farm which will run along the Southern side of the CV83 (that's on the right as you drive from Pinoso to Monóvar). In the way that these things do the conversation drifted and we ended up talking about our water bills. My Spanish neighbours, whose main home is in Petrer, were blissfully unaware of the system for billing in Pinoso and they didn't know about this years price increases either. I reckoned that if they didn't know then neither would other people. An easy blog beckoned. I posted this same information in an entry on the Pinoso Community Facebook page back in September 2023. If you read that post you can save yourself effort and stop now. Here in Culebrón, and I presume throughout Pinoso, households are charged for drinking water on metered use. The bills are raised by Pinoso Town Hall, because they maintain the water system, but the money is collected by an organisation ca...

I know I shouldn't, and I have the belly to prove it, but I like to eat those sugary sweets from the pick 'n' mix when I go to the pictures. I'd never really thought about where the sweets came from, so I was a bit surprised when I bumped into an article that told me that the Region of Murcia, which begins where Pinoso ends, is one of the main centres of production of Spanish sweets. In fact, one of every three sweets eaten in Spain comes from Murcia. I find it odd that I didn't know. Somehow you can't help but know the importance of Novelda in spices and, at this time of year, you just bump into something about the production of turrón, in Xijona/Jijona ( old blog about turrón here ) or toys in Ibi. To hear that firms like Vidal, Fini, Dulceplus, Aunón, Jake, and 59 other sweet brands are Murcian-based was a bit of a surprise.  The Vidal group, for instance, pumps out 75 million sweets a day, and they sold 200,000,000€ worth in 2022. They don't just sell in...