The View in late April

Further to remarks made the other day, here is the village of Mojacar taken from somewhere below. Apart from the crane which currently dominates the scene, the notorious multi-storey car parking has been initially approved to go in front and below the bit there in the middle (an old multi-storey car park now doing duty as a tourist office and a cookery school). The town may well improve as a result of this service, if designed with some respect towards the surroundings. Time will tell.
The problem at the moment is that the Junta de Andalucía is most unlikely to approve this parking building (700 cars, offices, shops and the inevitable hotel) until the PGOU, the General Plan, is approved. 

Our Pueblo - Love it (or Trash it)

The pueblo of Mojácar is a symbol; it’s the reason that many of us came to live here. The playas are very ordinary, the surrounding towns are, generally, rather grim and the services are decidedly second-rate. But, no matter, the pueblo is a metaphor for our freedom of life-style, our courage to leave wherever-we-came-from and our galloping Bohemianism.

It’s a pretty village, with narrow streets and amazing views. Over the years, it has maintained its number of inhabitants – at around 300 – while the buildings have been converted into tee-shirt emporia, humorous ash-tray shops, bars (there are over fifty) or building sites. One such site, in the Plaza Nueva, has got around the two storey limit by ignoring it. Its ground floor alone is two stories high (higher than the Jamon Jamon building to its left) then there are two additional stories. Against the law? Fuck the law. Against good taste and aesthetics? Faggot talk! Against your own town’s interests? Screw you, it’s our town to do as we please.

The ayuntamiento has hired some chap to come along and, I suppose, beautify the pueblo. So far, this means knocking out the old square below the church (la Plaza de Parterre) in favour of some marble folderol with lots of Indalitos (too late, another mayor, Bartolo, flogged off the Indalo to the provincial government in 1987). Another job is to turn the rock garden next to the hideous ice-cream shop (now a late-nite bar) on the left as you reach the Plaza Nueva, into a rubble garden approached by a staircase made from chapa, from pressed pig-iron. Neat!

Mojacar pueblo is no stranger to philistinism. The Plaza Nueva used to have two arches off it, leading into the ‘medina’ or narrow back-streets. Pretty. They were knocked out by a Frenchman in around 1974 who built the horrible three storey nick-nack shop now called Angela’s. The beautiful theatre was knocked down in the mid-eighties to build some tee shirt emporia (the residents of the pueblo buy them by the kilo). The Fuente and the Castillo were both thoroughly trashed in the mid eighties as well. The Arco de Luciana was knocked down in 1997 and the next mayor actually got into office on the promise to rebuild it. Which he didn’t.

With almost no parking as another deterrent, together with the noise from the fifty bars, the ambitious illumination, the piss smelling streets, the graffiti and the lack of shops (another tee-shirt, Señor?), few people live in the village and many of those who live in the surroundings, while being fond of Mojácar pueblo, find justification easily enough for not visiting.

Sitting out Easter from my terrace

Easter is the time when the heavy drums are brought out from dusty store-rooms, tra-boom... tra-boom…, together with the figures of pale-looking Christs taken from their normal roosts behind the church altars. Christ suffering dreadfully on the cross, now equally fraught on the shoulders of the Carpenter’s sons. Perhaps la virgen follows behind, a large painted figure on a wooden plinth, with a purple mantle and, currently, a slightly bilious expression. She is carried, creaking gently, by six or eight devotees. Tra-boom… tra-boom…

The cadres of the faithful will be dressed in their sinister hoods and gowns as the whole procession lurches, stops and starts down the streets and through the crowds. The onlookers genuflect, perhaps for the first time in a twelvemonth and they pinch out their cigarettes as the figures pass.

In our pueblo, there’s not many people in the crowd and, tourist office excepted, not much enthusiasm from the participants either. Easter may be the main fiesta in the religious calendar, but it’s just an excuse for a few days on the costa and in the disco-pubs for most of the population. Some fifteen million people have left the cities for a few days off work, a chance for a ligue or a borrachera: an affair or a piss-up. Perhaps the faithful have gone to Sevilla; here they’ve come for the party.

The beach is full of visitors (no self-respecting local will go near the water until September) and the street that fronts Mojácar playa is nose-to-tail crammed with cars. I once ran an Easter picture on the front page of the paper. It was a pen and ink drawing by an artist called Ampudia in dramatic black slash. A picture of three crosses on a hill standing at slight angles to each other. Below, girls are sunbathing.

The bars, the restaurants and most of the souvenir shops are open on Easter Friday, even if the estate agents, mechanics and supermarkets have closed for the day. Certainly the gas station, with lead-free now at 1.16€, is doing wonderful business. You can pick up a box of chocolates, a bottle of whisky, some french letters or, of course, a sex-video while you are there. For some reason, they don’t sell cigarettes any more. It’s probably a moral thing.

As the sun sets over the pueblo, a brass band stutters enthusiastically through a mixture of Souza, pasodobles and sacred music as the volume in Mojácar’s six hundred bars swells and roars. The children in their flamenco suits gallop through the crowds, shrieking. There’ll be some thunder-flashes let off later. One way or another, we’ll stay up until dawn.

Trains

Apparently there's a speeding ticket waiting for me at home. I can't imagine why, since the car won't get over a hundred klix unless there's a high wind coming from behind.
The DGT, the traffic agency, has been accused of placing speed-cameras in easy, straight and non- dangerous bits of the nation's highways as 'recaudatorias' or cash generators. They are sometimes hidden on those rather useless panels with soviet-style messages ('don't drink and drive') which are beginning to decorate the motorways.
So, with petrol going up, parking prices through the roof, speeding tickets clattering through the post-box and nitwits scratching messages in your paintwork, it's easier these days to take the train. Murcia to Madrid is about four hours. You can read your book or wander about in a train, and although they won't let you smoke or open a window, you can a least sip on a beer in the calaboose.
I shall be taking one later today in the loose direction of home. First I must buy a book.

The Entertainer. A couple of bits

Twenty One
We were sat around the pool drinking wine or beer. The band was setting up in the corner. One of the rockers, known as The Fat Man, held out a copy of his new newspaper, The Entertainer. A Spanish journalist friend looked it over with surprise. 'You've got the adverts at the top of the page', he said, 'they're meant to go at the bottom!'
Mike (as he understandably prefered) said that he had wanted to start a radio, but the police chief had explained to him (through my wife who was interpreting) that the 'Ley de Fraga' stated that foreigners weren't allowed to own a radio station. How about a newspaper instead?
The first edition was a scissor, kitchen table and shorthand affair, put into final form at the printers in Almería. It was to be a weekly, it needed funding. It was April 4th 1985.

A few people were going to make a fortune out of it (if not the one who put a fortune into it).

Twenty one years later, the name survives in various not always wholesome forms.


*The rest of this article has been removed to comply with a court injunction

A Small Trip in Time

El Oasys Parque temático del Desierto de Tabernas

I’ve got this new car. I say ‘new’ in the sense that I have recently acquired it rather than ‘brand new’ as with heated seats, airbags and a television on the dashboard. It’s a huge old white Mercedes diesel that takes several minutes to get up to speed, a bit like a boat. I imagine howling down a speaking tube to the engineers down below ‘full speed ahead – there’s a straight bit coming!’…
The other day I steered it to Mini Hollywood past Tabernas to see the recent additions to the zoo there.
The zoo is a generous 25 hectares of cages, runs and paddocks which backs onto the Mini Hollywood cowboy town, knees-up can can show and hangman’s rope. All coming highly recommended by this reporter.
We (there were three of us in my party) were met at the gate by the company biologist. I entertained him with my plans to seed the surrounding hills with wallabies to encourage tourism. You should try saying ‘wallaby’ in Spanish, by the way. He seemed a little out of his depth as I droned on about the empty space and lack of biodiversity. ‘But there’s over eighty autochthonous species in the park,’ he argued. Boring ones, I pointed out.
We passed through the gates and allowed an eager photographer to take my likeness in a cowboy hat and pistola (picture ready at exit) and carried on through the intriguing looking cowboy film-set cum Clint Eastwood memorial park, past a very surprised looking ornamental Indian wedged in a window and into the zoological garden, called the Oasys.
We had been invited to see the improvements on the reptile house, which is a large single-storey building with snakes, lizards, terrapins and crocs in large and well-decorated tanks (with no smells), good lighting, interesting displays and surprisingly frisky inmates. The hall appears to be the work of Dr Herman Schleich, a herpetologist, explorer and writer. He has spent many years in such odd places as Cabo Verde and Nepal and now lives in Tabernas, no doubt with a pet chameleon clinging to his shoulder when at home. He has done a fine job of the display.
We moved on to larger things, including a superb and dramatic stadium full of tigers. A guide holding a crib-sheet followed us around: she confessed to me that she preferred cats to snakes. We continued past marmosets, parrots, porcupines, prairie dogs, past the bar-restaurant, past the macaws, duck, pheasant, lynx and panther to another new enclosure, where the bears live.
The park is massive and the backdrop to the whole thing is, of course, the Tabernas desert. The whole effect is most dramatic.
Waiting beside the bear-pens and the deep valley below them was a train-wagon waiting to take us slowly off to the larger animals, including two lumbering hippos, a clutch of camels (of both persuasions), some wolves and a variety of deer who looked, on the whole, pleased to be behind a different fence. They have secretary birds and buffalo. Giraffe and wildebeest.
As we chugged slowly past, the clouds came to a rare decision and it began to rain, which is always an agreeable yet novel phenomenon in the desert. The hippos looked faintly pleased and the giraffe tutted and went inside.
We continued on foot back towards the spiritual centre of the zoo (I think I had already mentioned the bar?) and helped ourselves to some refreshments. A magnificent male peacock watched from a nearby wall.
From here, we repaired to the snake-shed for another look (via the bat-cave and a room devoted to animals tracks). I noticed on this second visit that there was a model head of a Tyrannosaurus Rex (I’m generally quite observant that way) and a collection of fossilised lizards, crocodile and froggy toys, African and Asian denizens of the forest and desert floor rendered in wood, and several books on show from the pen of Dr Schleich.
The rain had stopped and we had been in the park for several hours. A bit wet but thoroughly satisfied. It was time to leave. The way out of the zoo takes you past a huge and little-visited cactus garden with perhaps as many as two hundred and fifty varieties collected from all over the warmer bits of the world. Some are in flower now, producing blooms which are rarely seen.

El Fraile
From here, you are in the alley behind the cowboy town of El Fraile, which you will suffer a strong sense of déjà vu. As far as I know, and the museum of posters and projectors will back me up here, if it wasn’t shot in Tabernas, it wasn’t a spaghetti western. The museum, we’ve crossed the main plaza by now (without getting shot at by some loitering desperadoes) is crammed with posters of The Greats. I shall mention my own favourites here (sorry, Clint): Anthony Steffen, Giuliano Gemma, Lee Van Cleef, Bud Spenser and Terence Hill. Marvellous, and, with the exception of Van Cleef, all Italians. Music from the greatest Italian composer of them all, Ennio Morricone, echoes from gigantic speakers disguised in the roof; that dramatic piece with the single chord - just as it did in a Fistful of Dollars: dum di di dum di… dum di di dum. People are outside in the plaza, gathering…

And then the Hero, upon being given a four-barrelled shotgun in The Stranger Returns, quips, "Old man, there'll be hell raised in the village tonight,"


El Oasys is just to the west of Tabernas. Coming from Vera, take the motorway towards Almería and turn off towards Sorbas. Taberenas is the next town (the old N430 to Almería) and the park, still remembered as ‘Mini Hollywood’, is on the right, a few kilometres past Tabernas.

Pamplona

Once again, I'm in Pamplona for a few days. I come up here to the north of Spain fairly regularly so am now getting to be an old hand on this fine city of Iruña (as the Basques call it) or Pamplona as everyone else in the world prefers.
The Basque dream is to make Iruña their capital when Zapatero hands out another chunk of Spain to the nationalists. There is a small problem for the Txistorra eaters, Navarra is not part of the Basque provinces of Spain (or, rather obviously France) which will become, one day, the glorious country of Euzkal Herria. Navarra is a one-off autonomy (like Murcia or Madrid) which used to be something else a thousand years ago, but is now resolutely Spanish. The province is bi-lingual, but I have actually heard just one family talking euzkera on a hospital visit. Everyone I ask here looks gloomy and says that they only speak Spanish and that Basque is a language from the high mountains.
I just asked the bloke at the next table about the foregoing in the cyber-cafe where I write this. Hooting with indignation. He says 'Euzkera isn't a language! It's a dialect!'
He doesn't speak a word of it. Won't on principle. I mean, it's not like you having a few words of French or German or something. The upper limit of Basque spoken here is 'agur' for good-bye.

Carmen

Mojacar is to host a special evening of Bizet's Carmen, by a Russian Opera group (sorry – I’ve lost the bit of paper). It promises to be a wonderful event. It has been organised by the Unicaja, for (according to a rare poster put out by the emblematic Almerian savings bank) April 1st at 10.00pm at the Artisan Centre in Mojacar pueblo. I went to the bank to get a poster, or maybe even a picture for the newspaper, or, goodness! Perhaps an advert. Nada! Tickets, I was told, are available at the local police. Free? Dunno.
In any event, I found that the tickets are in fact available at the Tourist Office, at ten euros, and the event is, according to them, at 9.30pm (not 10.00) at the Building Formerly Known as the Artisan Centre. The culture department from the ayuntamiento, in a press release, reckons it starts at 10.30pm!
It will be fun. Come early!
Perhaps they will even take down the posters from the Michael Strogoff show from last January and put this up instead. However, it's not the town hall specifically running this one.
Here we have the age-old problem of a local agency being given some cultural doo-dah to deal with. No interest, but some slight obligation. I remember a friend from the ministry in Madrid recalling ‘we would ring up the Russians and say – I’ll swap you a dozen Flamenco dancers for the Kirov Ballet. Vladimir would say.. 'Hokey!''
So, once again a major act appears in Almeria (in this case Mojacar) which is under-promoted, under-supported and under-rated. It’s as if we have been given some ‘cultshure’ by someone whose job it is to pass this stuff around (‘Hello, yes, send them down with a bit of information on them by fax’). You can imagine the reviews in the local daily, or – Hell, I’ll write them now…

Recommended websites about Spain

*INFORMATION
The Entertainer Online at www.theentertaineronline.com Updated daily.
The New Entertainer (monthly newspaper) www.thenewentertainer.com
El Indalico at www.elindalico.com you'll find a Mojácar webcam here as well.
Sur in English www.surinenglish.com and Valencia Life www.valencialife.net
The Costa Press Club www.costapressclub.com (which kindly made me an Honorary Member recently).
*A good site for general Almeria information and with an extensive message-board is at www.costaalmeria.com, another full service site is at Viva Almeria www.viva-almeria.com
*An eccentric interactive site for Madrid (in specific) and Spain in general, is Jeremy's Multimadrid at www.multimadrid.com/.
*The most complete (and impartial) site available on Spanish news, information and events is, without doubt, Typically Spanish www.typicallyspanish.com.
A complete site for visitors is www.spanishholidays.com. Then there is EuroResidentes (in various languages), a full site, at www.euroresidentes.com and the useful SpainExpat at www.spainexpat.com.
Gibraltar news is covered by David Eade’s www.straitsnews.com.
A full site for Galicia visitors and friends is Galicia Guide at www.galiciaguide.com.
Barcelona Reporter covers Catalonia at www.barcelonareporter.com.
Locally, Roquetas de Mar has a three-language site at www.roquetas.com
and Mojacar’s Tourist office is at www.dipalme.org/mojacar/.

*POLITICS
Ciudadanos Europeos, with good information for residents on laws, taxes, politics and so on, presented in English, go to www.c-euro.org. For help on land-grabs and the Ley de Ordenación de Territorio (LRAU or LUV in Valenciano), go to Abusos Urbanisticos No! at www.abusos-no.org The British Expats Association (Spain) for all your paperwork woes at www.ukgovabusesexpats.co.uk. Neighbourhood Watch (!!) is here at www.nhwinspain.com and, for those worried about their investments, there is The Costa Action Group at www.costa-action.co.uk.

*BLOGS
There is news and comment from The Spain Herald at www.spainherald.com (right-wing). The Expat Blog Directory at www.expat-blog.com has a full list of blogs worldwide and a forum written by extranjeros.
There are all kinds of blogs around, try some of the following: Per Svensson and his blog, Periscope, at http://periscope.a4r.org/. For funny comment on Spain, go to Sal de Traglia’s Virtual Tapas Bar at http://saldetraglia.blogspot.com/. Thoughts From Galicia is a well-written commentary on Spain at http://colindavies.blogspot.com/. Scribbles from Tenerife is fun – at http://tenerifescribbler.blogspot.com/ and El Casareño Ingles comes from the Costa del Sol at http://elcasarenoingles.blogspot.com/. A Wandering Woman Writes from Spain (from Salamanca) at http://www.wandering-woman.blogspot.com/. Another amusing and stimulating one, this time from Barcelona, is Guirilandia (a joke on foreigners-ville) at http://guirilandia.blogspot.com/, and from Madrid, the always well-written Spanish Cockpit at http://almendro27.blogspot.com/.
*Locally, environmentalists should check www.salvemosmojacar.org.
*A (slightly spurious) site called El Mirador www.elmiradormojacar.com has some tasteful photos of the Mojacar area, plus a few the tourist department probably wouldn’t care to print (no update recently).
*For your spiritual health, go to www.mojacarchurch.org
*Barbara’s Animo – Animal Assisted Therapy – is at http://animospain.blogspot.com/
*A good pan-European blog is A Fistful of Euros at http://fistfulofeuros.net/

...always glad to hear about other sites...

Time-share Touts and others who won't leave you alone

I receive an e-mail as follows:

'I have just returned to the UK after a memorable holiday in Palma Nova.
My family and I regularly visit Spain and Mallorca in particular, as often as four times a year, and during the winter months we love to visit the Palma Nova area.
Regrettably, I must say that "street touts" (time share and holiday club sales people) offering scratch cards and surveys are spoiling the resorts. My family were continually approached by these people who refuse to be put off and even shout abuse if you fail to stop. I actually saw one English man being restrained by his family members because he was about to attack a street tout.
These people are a desperate nuisance who take away much of the charm of the area and any steps to outlaw this practice would be really appreciated by visitors.
I do hope that somehow, something can be done - Geoff'

In our own fair corner of Almeria, street touts are still just a twinkle in the eye, but we are beginning to attract other unwelcome guests, notably the pernicious accordion players from the eastern states. If only they knew some decent tunes – but incessant rounds of ‘jingle bells’ and ‘New York New York’ all the way through the season, plus a cap being thrust under your nose as you try to relax with a coffee, is a regular pain in the ass. We may also receive attention during the summer from deaf nick-nack vendors, looki looki men, flower sellers, poets, gypsy women with twists of rosemary plus, of course, the usual round of lunatics, nutters and oddballs that feel obliged to 'pick you up'.
Returning to property-sales, the worst ‘hard-sell’ techniques belong to those outfits with liveried cars shooting around with a white-faced couple in the back (I always imagine the inside door handles have been removed). The victims are flown out, harried at all times and may find they were, like the time-share types, given little chance to decide for themselves.
The Spanish view is simple: as long as the foreigners just stick to questionable tactics or rip-offs against other foreigners… we’ve got better things to do.

The Birds

The Asian or Avian Flu is coming. Something like an undersea rumbling, a wave forming far away that may or may not rush ashore to drown us all, the Flu is coming. It helps to name it and offer blame to the birds, as if they in some unspeakably dishonest way are responsible. It helps if we can identify this disease, to give it a name (and to know that our scientists have given it another, a set of letters and numerals like a far-off star system).
It’s the birds that did for us, like the Daphne du Maurier story filmed by Hitchcock. The birds are coming!
As the reports get ever closer to our homes, we search the skies as the migratory birds, usually the innocent harbingers of springtime, return in their flocks to infect us with some foul disease. We must corral them, close them, kill them.
In Spain as elsewhere, the trick from the Ministry of Health is to slow down the disease, to appear to be doing something useful. Watch the birds in the wetlands. Intern the chickens and close down the markets.
But the disease is not in the birds, it has travelled to the cats. They too must be controlled. The pigs, the cattle, the wild things of the fields and woods! The neighbours.
Soon this grippe will pass through our communities, to infect or spare us. We must be patient and should not panic. It will come. It will pass.

Edited

Title and article removed by Court Order!

Mojácar's Ten Parties. That's Democracy!

There was one town that produced ten parties in the 2003 local elections - a fairly large town in Cadiz (Sanlucar de Barameda). Three or perhaps four being the more usual number.
Mojácar managed nine (PP, PSOE, IU, ASIZ, GIAL, PA, NGM, Mojacar 2000 and PSA - the last two not getting any councillors) and, with the (inevitable) coup d'étât held in 2005 (the four parties in power were dislodged after one member of the PA was persuaded to 'cross the floor' and seek his fortune elsewhere), we now have the curious mixture of 2 socialist PSOE (not supported by their own party secretariat) running the town hall and supported by 4 PP conservatives (the leader of which had earlier been in the PSOE and was instrumental in another coup) plus, of course, the turncoat ('transfuga') now in the 'non-aligned' or Grupo Mixto party. Which makes ten.
Meanwhile, one of the PP has died, and the ex-mayor (ASIZ communist, allied with the Right Wing GIAL, the NGM and the nationalist PA), right after announcing he was joining the PSA... has been forced through ill health to abandon politics.
So now the PSOE mayor (supported by the PP, although the pact has not received support from the Almerian PP - understandably) is coming up to a year in power. There's one final year to go in this legislature and, one can't help but wonder...
Will the PP leader be given her chance to be mayoress?

Certainly, few of the above worthies will have much more active politics left in their futures... One can only hope they have other plans...

What will happen, too, when the foreigners decide to vote conscientiously? In Mojacar, better than half the potential voters in the local 2007 elections will be British residents. Assuming the padrón (from which comes the voting list) isn't re-examined...
Say again, what will happen if the Rumanians get the vote?

Close Call - and me so young...

The last entry on this site touches on the T-junction at Mojacar’s fuente. It’s narrow, blind and dangerous. There are two zebra crossings just off it (both dedicatedly ignored by the local inhabitants) and there’s a bus-stop right on the junction itself, causing the traffic to stop while passengers alight, climb on… or ask the driver for directions. The right-of-way changed a couple of years back so those coming up from the beach going towards the pueblo have to give way to oncoming (blind, round the corner) traffic.
As some bastard failed to do to me this afternoon, missing the front of my old banger by an inch. Quite a shock. I’m gonna have a drink now. And then go driving…

The Road to Mojacar

Welcome to Mojácar. You have just left (the quite simply glorious) municipality of Turre and are heading towards the coast. The road is full of pot-holes and curves, but, in a few kilometres, you will arrive at the fuente where you can turn left towards the playa or right towards the pueblo.

The road was built in 1950 and has received little attention since. It is narrow and dangerous. The last bit goes through a populated area where the huertas are and this final half kilometre or so is heavily used by pedestrians. There is no pavement and a cliff on one side and a drop on the other make it an alarming place to walk, especially if you are dressed in black and on your way to the cemeterio on a visit.

The fuente junction features two zebra crossings, a blind corner and a bus stop. Right on the road. There's nowhere to pull off. This is also the location for the Sunday flea-market where parking is chaotic. The current plan is to make a rather small and cramped roundabout here.

The road is heavily used as it takes both the Turre traffic and also completes the one-way system through the pueblo. The pot-holed, narrow and serpentine road is not safe and the diputación (county council) seems to lack interest in widening it and building either a pavement or an alameda (a separate pedestrian pathway). They have, however, fixed the Turre high-street so one can always live in hope.

It falls to the Mojácar ayuntamiento however to solve this problem. They can either oblige the diputación to come in or they can incorporate the road, or at least the last bit of it, and make the necessary repairs themselves. The money (our money) is certainly there, but appears to be earmarked for rather more exotic use: like attracting visitors rather than attending to friends.

Animo: Charity-work in Spain

If you have made it this far with your researches on Spain, you may want to carry on a bit further, to find another blogsite, this time about helping the less fortunate, the physically, sensorially and mentally challenged. It’s kept by Barbara who worked for many years in Almeria in ‘Animal Assisted Therapy’, after working in the USA in various projects - particularly with children who needed special attention. She worked with dog training programs for the deaf, with ‘handi-dogs’ and she rode horses. Since a small child, she always rode horses – bareback at that!
Back in around 1988 here in Spain, she introduced hippotherapy to the country, which responded by attending her seminars in Mojácar, following her ideas at her centre ‘Animo’, which had around forty volunteers and as many ‘students’ (no charge). She was fêted by the charities here in Spain, particularly those in Almeria City, who promptly followed her ideas, copied them, and re-tabled them as their own (one charity taking 90,000 euros from the government for a proposal based on Barbara’s work).
She kept eight horses, four donkeys, wild boar, sheep and goodness knows what else. She travelled to Madrid, Barcelona, Albacete, France, Switzerland and Germany to give speeches and attend international conferences with, for example, the FRDI (International Riding for the Disabled Foundation). There wasn’t any official help for these activities, and someone stole the tins we left in the bars.
Many charities in Spain enjoy a sinecure, a position which provides jobs and security, and for the senior staffers and wise old-timers, a new car every couple of years, position, notoriety and wealth. Not much work, necessarily, but a steady income and few criticisms. Even when they swipe things. We know of:
A charity which places jobs for the disabled, and takes 20% from the employee – for the life of the job.
A national charity which sells off properties and pinches the money.
A national charity that forces another national charity to close down part of its operations.
A charity which works with wheelchair users on the second floor of an office-block. No lift.
A charity which takes children from the Sahara, only to return them as the accountant has walloped all the money.
A charity that doesn’t use trained personnel.
And so on.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. Collecting money in government grants is time-consuming, competitive and labour intensive. The nation is partial to its paperwork, and no where truer than in the search for funding.
There are agents who will do it for you – for 20% of the pot!
There are, of course, many wonderful people to be found in this field, selfless and extraordinary people working in fine organisations. Médicos sin Frontera, Sac Xiroi and Asprodalba (Vera) being just three very different but entirely magnificent examples.
However, a few bad apples…
Barbara doesn’t write about that stuff on her site, she prefers to concentrate on how animal assisted therapies can work, for whom, how to do it right, the dangers and the triumphs. Find her site at http://animospain.blogspot.com/

Almería: So many Houses

The main income for a town hall, where its projects, dreams, plans, trophies… together with those massive wages and social security payments for the (usually) swollen civil servant force… come from the ‘urbanismo’ department. Granting building licences, collecting property taxes, selling off odd bits of public land to developers (for sometimes decidedly bargain rates) and receiving incentives and occasional bequests.

Planning or building should never be a haphazard affair, and town halls are meant to produce a General Plan to drive the municipality forward for the life of the plan, which is for eight years. Since General Plans tend to ‘lock in’ the way forward for the urbanisers, these documents are hard to reach consensus, and many a town hall has ‘fallen’ before these agreements can be ratified and cast in stone – or, rather, concrete (viz. Mojácar three times in the past 20 years).

These plans, once thrashed out by the Good Ole Boys, are then sent to Almería for approval, or redesign.

Imagine if the town hall plans -the PGOU’s - for the entire province of Almería were accepted by the provincial representative of the Junta de Andalucía. We would have – instead of the current 600,000 inhabitants, somewhere around 7,600,000 of us by 2013. Here are the proposed populations (gleaming in the developers’ eyes) in eight years time for a few of our local dusty, dry and sleepy villages.

Cuevas, 500,000. Vera, 400,000. Antas, 200,000. Mojácar, 110,000 (no roads of course...). Bedar, 20,000 and Los Gallardos 25,000. Albox 50,000 and Arboleas 40,000. No doubt, our local friends all plan to have large families in the next few years. Either that, or they hope to sell everything to the foreigners.

There is a debate going on in the province at the moment as to the advisability of building so many ‘homes’. A debate between politicians and builders, urbanisers and property owners: in other words, an excellent cross-section of our community!

Almería is already the fastest growing province in Spain, with 44 new houses per thousand population built in 2005 (compare the second ‘fastest’ province, Guadalajara, at 19 per 1000).

While the residents currently living in those communities are, presumably, reasonably content as things go, increasing the numbers of neighbours by a factor of twenty is not going to improve the quality of life of those who have chosen this province to live their days in, nor, indeed, the quality and quantity of their water, their views, their safety and their society.

Those residents who fail to register themselves on the padrón – the town hall register – are partly responsible for the lack of existing services, whether taxis, policemen, doctors, teachers or – in point of fact – English-speaking personnel (or even, blow me down, British-born personnel) working in the public sector.

The padrón accounts for the number of population. Each person counted allows some small extra funding to the municipality from the government. There is more road-works for the ‘larger’ towns, more help, promotion, more aid and importance for those communities.

A ‘tourist town’ always suffers in some degree from having its population numbers (and therefore its services and funding) being rather lower than the reality. By having a number of residents not bothering to support their community – to their own disadvantage – the problem is shamefully compounded.

In Almería, there are officially 9,800 Brits. The British consul, on the other hand, reckons there are 25,000. That’s better than half of all the British citizens living here not bothering to support passively their adopted communities.

To register on the padrón, just go to your town hall with a copy of your passport, and your escritura or a long-term rental contract. The information is not passed to the tax authorities. Repeat: ‘not’!

Finally, if you are worried about your town growing into a giant residential monster in the years to come, you could be re-assured by being on the padrón, as this puts you (if you are European) onto the voting register: and there are local elections in 2007.
You could vote for moderation.

Red Letter Day

A letter arrived today for the Indálico from a reader who considers the paper (the sister paper to The New Entertainer) to be right-wing. Hooting, it was, about Jesus Carreño (a very funny and, admittedly rather pig-headed republican writer). He calls Zapatero ‘el risas’, the smiling one. The letter-writer was incensed.
This month, so far, two other letters are on my desk for inclusion which accuse me, I suppose, of the same thing. Being right-wing that is. One deals with an editorial I ran in January about the Catalonian ‘estatut’, a translation of a very funny piece from Angel Medina, while the other letter throbs with indecent rage about Peter Gooch’s regular political articles.
Peter Gooch, in fact, gets more ‘fan-mail’ (in the form of comments from John Q. Public) than the rest of us put together. About three quarters of them are favourable. The other most assuredly aren’t. His articles are certainly anti-government and anti Zapatero, but this doesn’t make them rabidly right-wing – just ‘sensible’.
Both papers operate on a ‘as long as its well-written’ basis and we have never taken the Partido Popular shilling (supposing they were to offer it).
Some of our writers are leftist, some are rightist. It makes no odds.
At least we get letters, for which I am grateful. Generally, I try not to answer them in print, leaving the letter-writer with ‘the last word’. After all, the letter is commenting on an article. The writer of that article has already said his piece…
Like classified adverts, letters are a proof that there is a reaction from the street. People evidently read our newspapers, and they use them to communicate between one another, through those two services, small adverts and (usually) indignant letters to the editor. Me!
A newspaper or magazine with no letters or private adverts is, at the very least, a bit lightweight, don’t you think?
To make a paper interesting, to generate some reaction from the readers, one needs to sometimes climb over the top with fixed bayonets. It’s more of a trick that a reality. Otherwise, editors would choose cereal-packet journalism.
Come to think of it, some of them do.

Watch Your Language

There’s a cracking little documentary on the telly tonight – about The Singing Postman. Marvellous! Unfortunately, it’s been dubbed into Spanish. Well, not really dubbed, what they’ve done is to overlay a Spanish version on top of the original, which has been turned down slightly. Perhaps it gives the professor or the interviewee more authority. Perhaps it’s ‘good television’.
Now, this doesn’t matter if the quiet language there underneath is Inuit, but it’s a bloody nuisance when it’s English, because you can understand the underlay, you can understand (espero) the overlay… but you can’t understand a bloody word when they are both going - more or less - simultaneously.
The Spanish rule on dubbing is easy enough. You name it – they dub it. In films, they turn the original soundtrack off completely and let the dubbers do their worst. The exception to this – in most but not all cases – is when the singalong arrives. Here, the song is left in the original, with subtitles added. These can be quite useful if you never understood the words of the song in the first place (ejem. The Singing Postman).
On Spanish satellite telly (which I hope you have at home), there’s a facility for watching the show in its original language, which makes sense in a place like Europe. They will, since being European is no threat, also show films made by the French. Who are masters of the ‘Seventh Art’. Of course, the original version, as supplied by a button on your remote control, will be in français, but you can always watch it in Spanish…
With this idea - original language at the touch of a button, there would seem to be little reason why much original material, whether comedy shows or BBC documentaries, suffer having the original language wiped. It happens. I watched a BBC film about Sam Cooke the other day – in Spanish, followed by another music documentary – this time about Queen – in English.
Dubbing was an invention of the bad old Franco years. Only Spanish to be spoken, gracias. It is a good way to lightly censor films, helps our less literate members of society with the longer words and… keeps about ten people in the style to which they have become accustomed.

Wipe away a tear for the Catalonian flag

I was trying to post a few thoughts about Catalonian nationalism on another site, but it bounced, and then I wrote it again but the power flipped so, third time lucky, and re-written, I’ll put it here instead.
Over the past hundred years or so (and perhaps before), the Andalucians have thought of Catalonia as a place to go to get a better paying job. Not surprising, really. Catalonia is the wealthiest part of Spain. I don’t think that the Andaluces – or any other immigrants to that area – are particularly concerned about the politics as long as it doesn’t affect them much. Catalonia’s plan to become its own nation, however, supposes a couple of things that fly in the face of the rest of the country.
Firstly, the insistence of the Catalonians on speaking (and forcing everyone else to speak) their own patois, a language which may have some cultural consolation for the Catalonians, may be natural to speak at home or amongst one’s own, but is in international or commercial terms, a dead duck. There are no institutes elsewhere in Spain that offer catalán as a course, and, there’s no one who would want to learn it anyway.
By insisting on the use of this language, it divides Spaniards living in Catalonia into first and second-class citizens. By using it in public pronouncements (when everyone knows that the speaker can just as easily say it in Spanish), the rest of the country feels provoked.
Spanish, or rather ‘Castillian’, is the third (or second) most used language in the world. Celebrated in 2005 as the language of Cervantes… and yet, there’s a part of Spain which wants to use another… patently useless language.
I think that this is the issue that most bothers the Spanish.
The Catalonian claim on retaining half their taxes, if spread to the rest of Spain, make an imbalance more acute. Other parts of Spain receive less as things go, and with the national government releasing funds to the richest part of the country, and promising further and extra investment in Catalonia – for purely political reasons (the PSOE government is in Madrid with the support of sundry minority nationalist parties) – the rest of Spain is becoming indignant. Even ‘barons’ of the PSOE, like Ibarra and Bono – and even to a degree Chaves, together with Felipe Gonzalez and others – are in disagreement.
Spain is in danger, so it appears, of being broken up. Spain, the country of Una, Grande y Libre, may soon become a country of cantons and mini-nations. If Catalonia is allowed to declare itself ‘a nation’ (supposing immediately that any control from Madrid becomes ‘foreign intervention’ or ‘occupation’), then the Basque Country and Galicia are ready to follow. Even in Andalucia, the junior partner on the left, the Partido Andalucista, is talking of ‘Andalucian nationhood’.
Arrayed against this is the slightly unwilling COPE radio broadcaster. Owned by the Church (loosely speaking), the COPE is under threat from a singular Catalonian institution that exists nowhere else in Europe. This is the CAC, a government controlled body that can fine or close-down any broadcaster that ‘strays from the truth’!. Since no Spanish journalist can call a spade a spade, but must wander past a subject and then rush up from behind and bite it on the ass, this is quite a threat. Since the CAC shares the politics of the Generalitat, it is in an excellent position to close down all the COPE radio stations in Catalonian territory. Some fifty different ‘freedom of speech’ groups from around Europe have so far petitioned the Generalitat to drop the CAC. Impressed, Zapatero is considering introducing a similar body to the rest of the country.
The COPE is Spain’s second largest radio broadcaster (after the SER, owned by a group of socialist millionaires) and, not only uneasy about being taken as the champion of the Right, is now under pressure from Madrid as well (twice in the past few months, a government minister has gone to see the Pope in an effort to persuade the Church to close down the COPE). It has no other products to fall back on, again unlike the SER, which is part of a huge multinational media group with many newspapers, magazines, television and satellite companies in Spain and Latin America.
Catalonian pressures have shaken the rest of Spain in a time when the country wants to move closer to a federal Europe.