The Battle of Almansa

The Battle of Almansa was an important battle during the War of the Spanish Succession. It was fought on 25th April 1707. Almansa is about 50 minutes from Culebrón.

The commentator was really positive. "Just look at that rainbow, how beautiful, one of the best I've ever seen!" True enough. Mind you he was in a nice cosy and dry caravan whilst we were suddenly in fear of drowning to death sitting in the stands. We found the beauty of the rainbow hard to appreciate.

When the Spanish Habsburg King Carlos II died in 1700 he left no direct heir. There were two rival claims to the throne - the Hapsburgs, through the Archduke of Austria and the Bourbons, through the French King. We British backed the Austrian claim but several European powers weighed in behind one side or the other. Between 1701 and 1714 battles raged all over Europe and in North America and there were even some skirmishes in the Caribbean.

At the Battle of Almansa, just outside Almansa in Castilla la Mancha, the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of James II of England serving in the French Army, beat the French Henri de Massue, leading British troops. Odd eh?

In the end the British were on the losing side but the Treaty of Utrecht signed near the end of the war handed Gibraltar over to the British. We're still there.

According to that same commentator the participants in this re-enactment, still something relatively unusual in Spain, had come from several European countries just as in the real battle. The Russians and Ukranians had apparently driven all the way. The Irish had brought their horses. Shame it rained quite so much.
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Easter

Usha mentioned in the Archers the other day that Alan, the Ambridge vicar, was very busy at Easter. If it's hectic in Borsetshire then it's positively frenetic in Spain with religious processions and events everywhere at Easter time.

We have good Easter processions in Pinoso. There are, I think, eight different groupings five of them with the tall conical hats (the ones the Klu Klux Klan thought scary enough to copy) a Roman Legion and a group of women dressed in black and wearing mantillas. I went out to see a couple of the processions but this year I missed the one that I think is most impressive on Maunday Thursday/Good Friday

The reason I missed it was that I was in Cartagena to see the equivalent procession there. I have to say that the Cartagena processions were incredible. Thousands and thousands of penitents, as many different costumes as anyone could imagine with attention to detail in every facet from perfectly straight marching lines and co-ordinated movements down to matching shoe buckles. Something of the military nature of the town was obvious from the escorts of serving soldiers and sailors marching goose step style in front of and behind the members of the various brotherhoods and their extravagant floats carried on the backs of hundreds of perfectly co-ordinated portapasos (float carriers).

It's not just the event itself either. Last night we had to move from our chosen position because of a mix up over chair reservations. By then it was impossible to get back to the front of the crowd so we wandered the streets. The bars and the streets were full of costumes and small elements of the procession being readied. Tuning instruments, polishing shoes, having that last fag, marshalling the people and sorting out those final details at every glance.

Splendid.
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The Long. arm of the law

The message said "Took police to your house to check GPS" It was from our pal who does a bit of gardening for us.

I hadn't realised that GPS co-ordinates and latitude and longtitude were different. The numbers have the same format but they are not quite the same for the same location.

Living in the country it's difficult to give an accurate address. Our address is simply Number X Culebrón. For those who live in the middle of nowhere up some track it's even more difficult.

If you house goes on fire or if you're lying on the floor suffering the effects of a heart attack the phone call to the 112 emergency services number will have people scurrying to your aid. Often though they waste precious time trying to find the place.

Someone had the bright idea of making a register, kept by the local police, to identify the house using GPS co-ordinates. It also asked questions like whether you had a brute of a guard dog.I was sent the form by email and I was offered the same form at the Village Association meeting. Being a bit of a belt and braces man I put both GPS and lat. and long co-ordinates on the form but it didn't seem to help. The police couldn't find the house in a dry run and ended up having to ring our keyholder for help.

Excellent idea though. I just hope we never need to test its efficacy.
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On Encebras

Before lunch we went to Encebras, a small village a few kilometres from us on the other side of the hill to home. From Culebrón. We didn't go into the village proper with its church, post box, restaurant, fountain and convent cum hostel but drove a little way up the hill to have a look at a sculpture and ceramics workshop run by a British woman.

It was very still, very peaceful. The only sounds were those we made and the sounds of the countryside - a cuckoo, the flies buzzing, water gurgling. It was warm too, around 30ºC, with a deep clear blue sky and intense sunlight. I wandered off, camera in hand, whilst Maggie chatted about glazes and potter's wheels. I ambled up the middle of the road past vineyards, I took photos of almond trees and terracing.

Soon the weather will be like this all the time. Things will crack and sound with the heat, the cigarras will start their singing and Spain will be like it should be. Excellent.

I love the light

One of my favourite places in Spain is Trujillo, no I mean Santiago, no, no, the Peña de Francia, ooh, or maybe that ride down to Granada over whatjamacallit pass?

Spain is chockablock with eyepopping landscapes and lively, interesting cities but Alicante and Murcia don't feature too highly on my list. Nice enough, some interesting spots but, overall, a bit ordinary.

Tonight we went to an art exhibition mounted by a couple of local British artists at one of the exhibition spaces in Pinoso. Nice show, good space, good little event.

I know one of the artists from when she was a customer in the furniture shop where I worked. In her welcome speech, in Spanish (good job Linda!) she said how the local landscapes and the light inspired her. Later I was talking to her husband, Richard, and he was full of praise for the area too - about the landscapes he rides on his bike and about the general lifestyle though, like me, he's waiting for the flag cracking heat.

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on the place.

Benjamin Franklin again

A couple of years ago the local weekly newspaper - El Canfali - disappeared from the newsagents. One of the first victims of the hard financial  times I suppose. El Cabeço, the erstwhile monthly magazine produced by Pinoso Town Hall went missing after February 2010 and only two editions have been printed since then so my news and information resources rather dried up. It's true that there are Internet sources but I don't find them as accessible. Grey hair related I suppose.

Culebrón is a part of Pinoso and Pinoso was a very rich town. The huge local marble quarry provided 85% of the Town Hall's total income. Stone extraction and the secondary industries associated with it were also a major source of employment. The local politicians found themselves in the perfect position. They had money rolling in and no need to upset the voters by raising money through taxation. No wonder we had some splendid facilities.

The marble quarry has been hit hard by the collapse of the building boom Worldwide. The money tap was turned off and lots of people lost their jobs.

By all accounts it took the local politicians a long time to come to terms with the idea of making cuts in local services or increasing their income through increased taxation. The debt piled up. It was about that time that my information sources went South too. Reliable information was replaced by gossipy stories passed around the expat network.

I knew there were going to be local tax increases but I wasn't sure at what sort of percentages. I still don't but I did get my first round of local tax bills today. The car tax was still a very reasonable 50€ but the rubbish collection charge has shot up by about 70% and our water was nearly five times more costly than the same bill last year. Mind you the water is on a metered supply so it could be estimated bills catching up with us or that we've been thirstier and cleaner over the last few months.

Nonetheless the annual car tax, annual rubbish collection and six month water bill still all came in below 250€. The same bill back in the UK would have had me whooping for joy.

Well that was useful then

There was a notice on the rubbish bin to say there was a meeting of the Neighbourhood Association in the Village Hall tonight to receive last year's accounts and plan this year's fiesta.

I toyed with the idea of going to a talk on olives and almonds in Pinoso; I have an unusual idea of interesting but, finally, a sense of duty to the village prevailed and I went to the meeting. I go every year and every year I understand next to nothing. Obviously the main reason is because my Spanish is crap but the echo in the room, the multiplicity of conversations (Spaniards, in my experience, don't take well to the discipline of someone else controlling when they can talk) and the occasional lapse into Valenciano all contribute.

I came home and Maggie was watching something on the BBC so in a vain effort to pretend I live in Spain I went into the kitchen to read the paper.

I understood next to nothing. No problem with the headlines, no problem with the gist but the detail escapes me. I read and re-read parts of the piece about Marta de Castillo (a 17 year old girl who was killed probably by her ex boyfriend) because I thought I should try to understand the story. I know more than I did but I still haven't got the facts straight.

It's an odd life here sometimes.

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La Colonia de la Sierra de Salinas

In Cambridgeshire Henry Morris invented the Village College to try and help to stem the flow of country folk to the towns. In Spain the 1907 Law of Interior Colonization and Repopulation had a similar aim.

Today we drove up the Sierra de Salinas mountain chain on the recommendation of one of our pals who had been up there on his bike. It was a lovely spot on a splendid blue sky day. Along the route we passed through an area that was signed as La Colonia de la Sierra de Salinas where, according to the information boards, 49 "poor but suitable" families were given their share of 1400 hectares of public land to farm in 1914. Each tenant received a house, land, a cart, a horse and farming tackle with which to try and cultivate the typical Mediterranean crops of grapes, olives and cereals.

As well as the 49 houses the Colony also had some public buildings namely a storehouse, a police post, an administration block, a school and a church. I noticed there was no bar or other social area which sounds, to me, like a grave oversight for any Spanish community.

At its height the colony had 287 inhabitants but the bad harvests, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the general harshness of rural life half way up a mountain meant that the colony was abandoned. Nowadays the homes are used as weekend cottages.

We drove down to Villena after our visit to get a bite to eat, exhausted by our exertions. The Colonists used to need a whole day to make the same journey. Maybe they got a spot of something when they were in town too.

16 pence a pack

I really approved of the radio doctor on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. Full of good advice. He wasn't the sort to recommend a trip to the GP if you had a bit of a sniffle. He did suggest that men of a certain age should take low dose aspirin though and I'm still taking his advice.

As I remember in the UK, in 2004, a packet of aspirin in a supermarket or one of those shampoo and  sun cream shops was going for around 16p. A hundred dispersible 75mg aspirin were about a quid so it was a bit of a shock when I got to Spain and a pack of 30 tablets was around 4€.

Then I found out that Aspirin is a Bayer trade mark in Spain so, by asking for Aspirina, I was asking for the equivalent of Anadin  rather than the generic. Acido acetilsalicilico may be a bit of a mouthful but salicylic acid is the generic name and the tabs come in at about a quarter of the price.

As older men we were talking about illnesses. My pal Geoff said that he didn't take all the aspirin that he was prescribed and would I like them? When he dropped them off I wondered why he was being prescribed the Bayer brand rather than the cheap generic equivalent. I could have sworn that the Spanish health care system had pledged to save millions by prescribing generic. Maybe I misunderstood or maybe it's the doctor who misunderstood.

Businesswomen in Pinoso

Everywhere in Spain boasts some dish that is considered to be local and special. The other day in one of my classes there was a gentle argument about whether Café Asiatico, a coffee loaded with a sweet liqueur, typical of the area around Cartagena, had been invented in the Murcian village of Albujón or whether everywhere in Spain had some form of alcoholic coffee.

Pinoso lays claim to producing the best longaniza sausages, light cakes called perusas and a thick pancake used to make the local stew called gazpacho. Another speciality is a sweet bread produced in dome shaped cakes dusted with sugar and usually served with thick hot drinking chocolate - chocolate y toña.

Today was the tenth edition of a fair in Pinoso dedicated to the town's businesswomen and women entrepreneurs. It was opened by a local actress called Ángela Boj and there were a bunch of stalls to represent the majority of the local businesses owned and operated by women. It was fair enough but the most popular stall was the one giving away chocolate y toña. I got my ration.

Furniture

Yecla, a small town very close to us here in Culebrón, has a national reputation for furniture making. Every year they have a furniture trade fair with the final Saturday being open to the public.

We went along not knowing quite what to expect but hoping that in amongst the extended furniture shop displays there would be some old bloke with a flat cap turning chair legs on string driven thing. There wasn't. Just stand after stand of pretty gruesome furniture. Well I thought most of it was pretty horrid anyway.

Never mind, at least we've done it now.
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