Lunchtime Blues

There’s something queer about the food these days. You go to a restaurant to eat and half of the menu is designed for some kind of wedding feast. It’s all got fancy-dancy for some reason. Perhaps the Michelin Man is seated at table number seven. What’s wrong with ‘sat’?

In the good ol’ days, food was food. No cream doodah then, no fennel sauces or roasted swedes. Simple stuff. A salad was lettuce, sliced onions and tomatoes with a heavy and oily aliño; now it’s got enough different kind of vegetables rattling around the plate to make a rabbit blanch. The main course used to be a plate of what one hoped were mutton chops (or were they perhaps goat?) or slices of pork (known collectively in our area by the foreign contingent as ‘crotchmeat’) or perhaps a plate of chicken knuckles with chips.

How to prepare chicken knuckles. Take one chicken, have at it with an axe, then drop result into a sartén with plenty of oil and garlic. Fry to taste. Riquísimo.

All the best crotcheramas (as we called them) could manage this simple fare, and with a bottle of really quite nasty wine, the whole thing, plus pan, came to around sixty Pesetas a head. Now, what’s wrong with that?

There was no menu and no price list. If you didn’t know what you wanted, or couldn’t understand the waiter, you wandered into the kitchen and pointed.

In those days, if we wanted a decent roast, we’d have to drive to the nearest butcher. He was a blood-spattered German trading six hours down the coast in the Calle San Miguel, Torremolinos’ high street. We’d fill up the plastic freezer box, spend the night on the piss, and head home the following day.

The twenty or so who made up the foreign community in the village in those days would be waiting for us on our doorstep when we returned. One of them was a retired air vice-marshal with a plummy accent called ‘Tabs’. My parents had left the door ajar one particular evening and had gone round the corner to the first and only foreign bar for a nip while the roast roasted. Tabs, on his way up the hill for a pink gin, smelt the rich smell of the roast waftin’ on the evening air and stopped by the house to invite himself to dinner. He went in and found no one around, so he checked inside the oven – as one does - to have a look at his potential dinner. Satisfied, he carried on to the pub for a large one and to obtain an invitation from my mother, in which he was successful.

Now our oven was one of those old Butano three burner ones with a lid and a slight wobble. When the hungry party returned an hour later to check on the roast’s progress my mother found that Tabs’ tour of inspection had, by briefly opening the oven door, put out the gas. Tabs later recalled that ‘no one had ever talked to him like that before’.

The milk in those days was undrinkable. It came in two litre glass bottles with a thin neck. There was a slightly blue cast to it due to the fact that the manufacturer had substituted the cream for pork grease and added formaldehyde to keep it stable. This baby could sit in the sun all day. Tea, if we could get it, came in teabags brought out from England loose in people’s luggage, wrapped around the socks. Eggs and chips were the standby at home, and cocido in the restaurant in the square. Tabs would insist on the plates being warmed, without much success from the kitchen-wallah, so he would usually place his plate under his shirt for a few minutes to do the job. ‘Under trying circumstances’, he would say, ‘one tries to keep up appearances’.

Another dish of the time remains to this day a favourite of mine, although it is now extremely hard to find. You see, it’s too cheap. This is ‘Huevos a la Flamenca’, a small earthen dish with ham or some kind of donkey-sausage served with peas, peppers and a fried egg. The whole, cooked in tomato paste. I happened across one the other day outside Granada: delicious!

Food, back in those days, was scarce and no one was going to mess around with sauces. Actually, come to think of it, it may have been because you couldn’t get cream. Eggs, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, salchichón, chicken and pork was about your lot. The local grocers, known in a gesture of Spanglish relations as ‘The Foodings’, had a few tins on the shelves plus ‘Spanish’ bread, truly awful chocolate, some rather nasty looking sardines and a rack of wine in returnable bottles (two Pesetas back). They’ve still got the chocolate. Credit was extended to favoured customers; a dried lima bean went into your jar for each Duro owed. This system was eventually overturned – literally – by an escaped chicken that broke into the store one night. Reportedly, it ate most of the evidence.

Tapas, even more than today, were the solution. You used to get a bloody good tapa in Andalucia with your quinto or your tinto. A piece of magra, lean pork, with some chips and bread. Two fried cordoñíz eggs on toast. A ham, cheese and alioli cherigan. A small plate of whitebait... a fat chunk of tortilla de guisantes... home made potato crisps (when was the last time?)... a few of those would set you up nicely.

So these days it’s all la-di-dah. The menu’s in English (and Spanish, and French, and Italian, and German...), the food is all poncy, the wine list is exhaustive (and exorbitant), the postres all come from those fine people at Frigo and, worst of all, You Can’t Get Huevos A La Flamenca.

Requiem for Dr Galindo

We have a village doctor called Dr Galindo. He is the old-style kind of doctor who looks after his patients. He may be on the ball with the latest developments in medicine or not: it doesn't matter, because he's a good man with knowledge and understanding.

Like the famous and much-loved Don Diego who died earlier this year after looking out for Mojácar for a lifetime.

Last year, word came that Galindo was being moved by the Servicio Andaluz de Salud and that a new doctor was to take over. We started a petition to keep Galindo and got 800 signatures. We passed them on to the mayoress who said she would see what she could do. But, as always, far-away paper-pushers triumphed and the new doctor, straight out of school, duly arrived to take over. She was very young and insecure, and would often send her patients on to specialists at the Huercal Overa hospital.

Everyone wanted Galindo back.

So, word came that he was at the Centro Médico on the beach. My wife, who has been ill for a long time, decided to 'change' to the beach to continue with Galindo's treatment.

Then, just after registering down there, we were informed that the young woman had given up in the village and that Galindo had returned... to be there for at least a year. However, despite the strength of our petition and rules that you can choose your doctor, my wife was told that she would have to stay on the beach for a minimum of three months before she could return to the village.

We can't afford 'private insurance' any more, after being stiffed by some fraudsters a few years ago, so a good doctor who understands B's condition is important.

So today, we passed by the village centre. Can we see the doctor? No, you are registered on the beach and anyway, he isn't here any more. We now have a new medic.

So, where's Galindo?

We aren't allowed to tell you that.

Politics Killed the Goose

Those of us who wanted, voted on Sunday in our local town. The local people voted with trepidation, since a vote for the wrong party-leader will mean four years without any projects, work or favours for them or their families. The non-locals - those who were on the voting-list - voted with enthusiasm or with hesitancy; they voted with conviction or they voted doubtfully and, from those who were sent home to get their passports, they voted with a dash of anger. Some thought they could vote, only to find they couldn't. Others, as usual, didn't bother to come along at all.

Our town is an exceptional and beautiful place ruined by thirty years of 'democratic' elections, where mayors and their teams have exploited the pueblo for their own ends, turning Mojácar from a moribund municipality in the 1950s with less than 600 inhabitants to the richest town per capita in the entire region of Andalucía only fifty years later.

Not that the wealth is very evenly spread.

The Town Hall, unlike any other I've ever visited, has no photographic memorial to past administrations. No oil paintings of previous mayors. In fact, I can understand their point - since Jacinto Alarcón, the old mayor who famously 'gave away' properties to outsiders in the early sixties, there's been no one in the Town Hall worth honouring. Here, it's all about greed. We may have the highest proportion of misers in Spain, I don't know: no one has made a study. Our wealthy local class certainly doesn't spread it around. You won't see any privately funded public buildings or even a park bench with a brass plaque on it, donations from the Rich and the Good. Here, the various multimillionaires (some of whom whimsically claim to be socialists) keep their money safe and unspent. Mojácar is to be sacked and despoiled. It's the rule.

In our town, there have been a long list of cynical projects designed to mine the public purse, from useless and ill-considered buildings to pointless stadia. Many having already fulfilled their purpose before the first brick was laid. Much of our town has been knocked flat, in exchange for poorly designed monstrosities which, in these straightened times, are hard to sell or rent. On the beach, vast numbers of small noddy houses and minuscule apartments lie empty: you make more money per metre on petite dwellings than larger homes, you make nothing on parking lots or wider roads.

During those fifty years of massive growth, Mojácar inevitably watered down its local population of lordlings. While many returned from their uncomfortable exiles in other lands, attracted by the new wealth flowing into their pueblo, and considering their bits of land and properties, inevitably a new type of settler was filling up the town, the 'forasteros': the outsiders.

These were divided into the not-from-around-here Spaniards (who knew the ropes), the rich foreigners with rights (the northern Europeans), the poor foreigners with rights (i.e. los rumanos) and the poor foreigners without rights (the sudamericanos).

Some of us having, since 1999, the vote. Although, Spain being Spain, we had to ask for it. In triplicate.

In our town, the forasteros knew that they were here because it was a great place to live, better than wherever it was we came from. We were dismayed by change, by poor planning and by being exploited by the locals, secure in their power. We were more than them, yet we remained without any say in the future of our community. We were divided, tricked and unloved. The rents were raised as the customers fell: and no local person would drink in our bars or buy from our shops.

So now, despite its wealth, Mojácar is once again dying. There's no enthusiasm or poetry left here anymore. Everything is for sale. There's little reason to try and keep the dream alive. The forasteros must leave. Without us, there will be no work, no income, no community. And thanks to our 'hosts', there won't even be much to remember us by. Like the Visigoths, we shall soon be forgotten.

In a few years from now, even the local people will have to board up their properties and move away, once again, to Hamburg and Lyons in search of work. We need another Jacinto, not a RosMari.

Plastic Bags

I was at the counter in the supermarket this afternoon, waiting to pay for my few and modest provisions, when I was reminded, yet again, that I had forgotten to bring a shopping bag with me. There was one in the car, but with my packets and cans and tins and bottles and vacuum-packed goods all waiting on the check-out tray, I had to bow to conformity and common sense and buy a plastic bag for a nominal couple of céntimos. They don't give them away for free any more, in solidarity with Mother Earth. How could I possibly complain about such a thing?

This whole plastic bag thing is an important gesture towards the environment. We must be true to our unborn future generations. We have been using plastic for years in ways which are an abomination and no doubt our land-fills are full of untold millions of tons of the stuff. I thank our leaders for showing us the way.

Of course, in the old days, we didn't have throw-away razors (with five or more blades for a really close shave: thanks Gillette), or disposable lighters. We washed and returned our beer bottles and left the milk bottles outside for the milkman. Alright, maybe it wasn't exactly milk here, but they used to wink gamely at you and call it 'leche'. Corks were made from an amusing thing called 'cork' which comes from a 'tree'. Goods came in a wrapper rather than lost in an unnecessarily large presentation box. A butcher chopped up your bits of meat, rather than the cooler-counters piled high with Styrofoam trays of sliced viands, vacuum-packed to last.

Fruit juice came in a fruit. Meat was wrapped in paper. Many items for baby were washable and re-usable and you could bring your own container to fill with oil. Water was just water and not a whole shelf of different brands all in their own uniquely-shaped bottles. I shan't go on since I'm sure you get my point, but consider this:

If the new rule on plastic bags are a small step back from the insanity of our throw-away culture - then why don't they give us our groceries in paper bags, like they do in America?

The Foreign Vote

It has taken a while to get as far as the title in last Sunday's Voz de Almería, which hardly needs translation. The story says that there are 7,500 Britons able to vote across Almería and elsewhere lists some of the candidates, giving honorary British status to Astrid Schröder and others. The picture is a presentation of Ciudadanos Europeos, which is fielding candidates in Arboleas and Mojácar.

The very Spanish Constitution itself had to be changed to allow Europeans to vote in local elections in Spain - to vote and to be voted for, or, as the Constitution puts it 'active and passive suffrage'.

Since 1999, Mojácar has been one of the leading towns for 'European' participation, with several candidates including myself floating around on various lists, and even - to date - two councillors: Matthew Shatford and Albert Schröter (no relation to Astrid). Neither managed a full term in government. In these elections of 2011, the town has two party leaders and a generous number of other candidates who were born in Northern Europe, in fact, with the exception of the PSOE, all the other parties have a foreign presence of greater or lesser extent. Even the PP has managed to cram a single Briton into their list safely near the tail at Nº 9 where they won't be any threat, but might make a difference.

Oddly, only two towns in Almería have taken the plunge: Mojácar with its aspirations to improve culturally and Arboleas, beset with terrible problems of what the Junta de Andalucía refers to with some satisfaction as 'viviendas ilegales' - illegal homes. Both towns have a lively interest in local politics and, in both these towns, the foreign vote will make a difference.

Not so elsewhere across the province, for with a few exceptions - Jim Simpson in Zurgena, Joanne Tissington in Albox and Lois Benson in Bédar - the majority of towns with a foreign element have managed to safely ignore the problem for another four years. Perhaps it's our fault.

A Question of Trust

We've been looking at old newspaper stories about Barbara's work with the disabled here in Mojácar. She started an association called Animo which helped children with physical, mental and sensory problems, by animal assisted therapy: in short, by riding on horseback. She ran the association with around 40 volunteers - many with RDA experience - from around 1988 until the early 2000s, when her health got bad (from an accident related to the charity work). She has now started it up again and has a blogsite here. Besides the charity work (with no support from the Mojácar town hall), annual horse fairs and donkey baseball-games for around eight years, Barbara helped improve life for about fifty 'students'.

I have also worked in something pretty close to a charity - putting out a free weekly paper between 1985 and 1999. The Entertainer was meant to help inform Britons about life in Spain, and to try and support and protect them as possible. I have lived here for a long time and know a lot about this country. Over the years I have produced or edited in all over 2500 newspaper editions, including 200 in Spanish. Eventually I sold the paper - although I was never paid and am now being sued by the 'buyers' for placing some tart remarks about them on the Internet.

Were we both wrong to trust people?

Sevillanas

See the outfits! The shoes! These little girls are going onto the stage with their dance mistress to show us some 'sevillanas', a type of white-bread flamenco preferred by the Spanish, safe from the anarchy of the gypsies original, passionate and exciting music - a bit like The Archies playing the blues.

Semana Santa

As we know, Semana Santa, Holy Week, is a long and agreeable holiday. We spend it on the beach or in the bars. A few of us might dress up in purple and perhaps even go to mass. But for most of us, it's a welcome week off work and a chance to relax.

Might even meet someone.

The Opportunity for Change

We are in the days of the 'pre-campaign', as defined by the rules which were quietly changed this past January. You can't put up your posters yet - although there are several in Mojácar for the delightfully named UM party, covered by tarpaulins to uphold the law, but just as effective for anyone who lives here and saw them in their glory for a month or two. 'Capacity', they say. 'Oh yes we can'...

Meanwhile, the main parties in the country, the national ones, have their opportunity. They will be on the television with their business as usual, their scandals and mutual accusations (carefully not mentioning anyone else, since, like most countries, we have the politics sewn up in a two-party system). Then, there are the 'routine' meetings when the party leader or a minister (or equivalent) is chewing a microphone in public, talking, naturally, about state affairs... not the upcoming local elections - that wouldn't be right. There are autonomous elections in many parts of Spain as well, where the non-Spanish Europeans are not invited to vote, but thankfully, Andalucía is spared that. Here, our autonomous elections are held with the national ones, in the hope that the eternally ruling PSOE-A gets in again. Since the autonomy is ruled and run from far-off Seville, it won't make much difference here anyway.

In the towns, the smaller parties must wait. We gossip and plot our modest campaigns as the larger parties look over their war-chests and order their billboards and teeshirts from Madrid. It's the calm before the storm. The mayors may have handled the voting list, but we shall get copies of them next week.

But what does this advert from nolesvotes mean? Don't vote for the establishment. It's about the institutionalised corruption in Spain, the sell-out to Hollywood ('Ley Sinde'), the 'war' on Libya (with Spanish munitions flying on both sides), the five million unemployed, the protection of the bankers, the alternation (and mutual protection) of the two parties, plus the CiU in Catalonia. 'Without your support', says the association, 'the big parties have nothing'.

Here in Mojácar, with the PSOE in collapse, the peril for our town comes from the local PP, who have not only mismanaged and affronted our citizens for the past four years, on their return to power, they are planning to eviscerate the square beside the church, making a pointless underground car-park for residents: a park for 37 cars. Will the workmen stop as they dig through 4,000 years of history as treasures from the past are unearthed? They didn't the last time with Gabriel, when ruins and graves were found in the Plaza Parterre, neither the time before with Bartolo while chewing up the surrounds by the Castillo. And all for what? Several million euros of scarce Town Hall money misspent. This party builds 'Padel Tennis' courts on the beach at a premium, without there being any demand or interest. The football stadium wasn't cheap either, even though we don't have a team yet. The Art Museum, switched expediently to a gallery earlier this month, has now been closed.

It's time for a change. Choose a party that reflects the make-up of your community, a party with a proper mixture of Spanish and 'European' residents. A Town Hall should at least reflect the make-up of its citizens and should, like the nation above it, be responsible to them - not to self perpetuation and outside interests.

Spell Me Right, Por Favor

If I am faced with a word or name I'm not familiar with, I copy it out carefully. I expect most of us do. However, foreign names are considered slightly frightening by many Spaniards. Too many letters or not enough. In today's newspaper, Helen Prior becomes Hellen. Even a simple John becomes Jhon or even Jhonathan. There was once a brand of Spanish denims called Jhon Jeans. I may have an old pair somewhere. My dad was called William, or rather more often, at least in print, Willian. My own name is pretty simple, but even after being here for 45 years, people can get it wrong. There's a mention of me in a book published by the diputación de Almería, about how I ran a newspaper in this province during fifteen years. So much for posterity, they've spelled my name wrong.

Perhaps this explains why everyone is called Pepe or Paco. In fact, when I was a kid, the local people used to call me Pipo.

I guess it's all to do with concern over the spelling.

Local Elections: May 22nd

I suppose there is a natural reticence in getting involved in local politics – or even going as far as voting. We’ve all either heard, or indeed volunteered, the various excuses of ‘it not being our place’ or ‘we don’t know the candidates’, either of which are really rather an admission of ignorance and a lack of enthusiasm for one’s community. Go and meet your neighbours! Find what you like and identify what you don’t. It’s now your community and it’s worth making the best of it.
To the comical line about how the natives are restless, as the fireworks are exploding, the megaphones are honking and the crowds are cheering, I would answer that we are not in some South Sea island uneasily wearing grass skirts. We are not colonials – this is our town: our future.
There are different issues that incite different people. Those unfortunate enough to live in an ‘illegal house’ (there are literally thousands of families in this position in the Almanzora Valley) would be wise, if they could, to vote for a party which offers solutions, rather than creates and exacerbates the problem. Other people want more sports facilities or perhaps residences for the elderly; they might want more discothèques and less police presence, or maybe the very opposite. It’s all about politics (and in my examples here, age and inclination).
There are the two main parties in Spanish politics, the PSOE – mostly responsible for the ‘illegal houses’ problem; and the PP, which favours and champions ‘land grab’. One is nominally socialist, the other, in theory, conservative. However, in local politics, it’s all about local personalities and local issues. Our mainstream party candidate for example is aware of the local issues and, despite pressure from ‘head office’ in far-off Seville or even farther-off Madrid, will seek to provide local solutions. At least, so one might hope. In reality, small town politics is often about local personalities, families and opportunity. We call it ‘clan politics’. We can ignore all of this and we will in turn be ignored.
Otherwise, it is better to participate, join in and integrate. Sooner or later the parties must open their gates to fresh ideas and finally face the loss of their baleful family influence. The community becomes the stronger and this in turn creates wealth and jobs. Property prices would even rise with the demand from buyers and potential settlers – because who wouldn’t want to live in a harmonious and well-treated town?

The Bonfires

We used to have a number of pine trees in the fields around the house. They were planted originally by my father about forty years ago. He was a keen tree-planter, he said, because there weren’t any in this part of Spain. Trees, that is. Or planters, come to think of it.
He would drive up to the village fountain with several large plastic bottles that started out life holding industrial chemicals (for the swimming pool – the water came by truck). Fill them up then lug them out of the old Renault and over to the seedlings. In the end, there were about 500 trees, almost all pine, and quite a few of them festooned with a type of disagreeable caterpillar which regularly makes its presence in the pages of the ex-pat press. More because of its rash-inducing hairs and its processionary characteristics that anything it might do to the unfortunate pine tree.
A brush fire in the high hills of next-door Turre a couple of summers ago was improperly put out and a second fire duly caught a week later and rushed down the hill, across the valley and into our municipality, burning, among other far more important things, our five hundred pine trees, along with their resident caterpillars as well.
So, two winters on, the trees are dead and dried up, ready for some attention. They fall like skittles in the wind, their roots rotted away. I have a hand saw and have been pruning away at the smaller trees as and when the house needed firewood, but now, with the trees falling in any direction, crushing whatever is underneath, some friends have come by with chainsaws: some wood for them, some for us.
For the past three days, I’ve been burning the remains of the forest – the small branches, fir cones and other detritus – in some large bonfires. Here, you should get your burning permission first, unless you intend to have a good brush-fire and burn down the neighbourhood (don’t get caught – an Englishman in Granada recently cooked half the province and got fined ten million euros).
In the old days, you went to get a licence from the local police, but now, a special fellow from the department of the environment shows up twice a week (although not on any set days, unfortunately) to give out exactly the same permit. Several of us were waiting for him last Monday. Our policeman phoned to ask where he was. He said he couldn’t get a car to come in that day.
So, I’m using an old permit. It’s not as if anyone is going to check.

The Queue

There's a graffiti outside the Centro de Extranjería in Murcia, the place where, from nine to three, five days a week, scared or patient or bored foreigners must queue for hours in the hope of getting their work or residence papers. It says 'burocracy or apartheid?'.

Oddly, the pintada has been there for at least five years, the time I've been going past to get to the train station.

Either the ayuntamiento de Murcia is very lax about painting over the scrawl... or perhaps they agree with the sentiment.

Being a European with my passport and absurd A4 - ever since the Ministerio del Interior took away our 'tarjetas de residencia' (I'd been a resident in Spain for 40 years - alas no longer!) - I sympathise with the poor North Africans and South Americans as they patiently wait in line. Reading the graffiti.

The Odd Job Woman

Long time Mojácar resident Struan Robertson (owner of 'The Time and Place') has written a thriller available from Amazon. Just type in 'The Odd Job Woman' for details.
A thriller set in expatriate Mojácar, when an English odd job man answers a call from an isolated villa to open a locked deed box - he also opens a deadly can of worms and soon discovers that life will never be the same again! Both a whodunnit and a thriller, the action is nonstop and full of twists, leading to a final denouement set against a backdrop of British expatriate society along the coastal strips of southern Spain. This book is for anyone who likes thrillers - while its eviscerating look at life on the Spanish Costas will appeal to everyone who has ever been there on holiday, lived there - or thinking of moving there...
Struan says: 'I've been writing most of my life but never seriously tried to get published before; except for this book. I'm now half way through another thriller, also set partly in Spain, where I've been living, on and off, for the last thirty years. I'm also writing a memoir. I was brought up on a Scottish Highland sheep farm. Went to sea when I was seventeen and stayed there for the next fifty odd years - except for ten years as airline flight deck crew. Er, that's it..!'.

N:B - book available only at amazon.com (not amazon.co.uk)

A Solution for Mojácar

Well, the Town Hall has spent a fortune on the two large empty squares up by the church in the village. The Mayoress wanted to build an underground car-park for 37 cars at a cost of two million euros (around 60,000 euros per car) and says that there were lots of ‘takers’. The Town Hall has spent around 250,000 in buying the rather mungey Loro Azul bar and apartment (where I first lived in Mojácar in 1967 for a couple of years) so as to presumably knock it down. They spent another 42,000 euros on a study to build ‘several municipal buildings’ in the area, although without any plans as to what they might, eventually, be used for.
The whole, rebuilt area, with its car-park nestled safely under it, would, naturally, find space for the much missed Arco de Luciana, a stone tunnel under a nearby bar where a Moorish virgin threw herself to her death after her gallant Captain perished in battle. Or, at least, she might have if the tunnel hadn’t of been built in 1910. Hey, in our town we sell 'fantasy' (witness the Moors and Christians spectacle).
Luckily, there was a schism in a recent pleno, and the lunatic project was dropped – at least until after the next elections. In short, those in favour of an underground car-park, sundry non-specific buildings and a racetrack through the pueblo, vote for Rosmari and the Partido Popular. Those against, don’t.
In another pleno, held on March 11th, the Council decided to offer a modest 3,000 euro prize to anyone who could come up with a sensible idea for the area. Here’s mine.
First of all, I think that it would be a good idea to improve the looks of the pueblo. We could encourage those who live there to improve their surroundings and we could bring fresh ideas to repair the village and, in short, make property there more attractive and perhaps even a ‘good investment’. To do this, we need to return a ‘theme’ to the village, which would clearly be to make it look more ‘ Moorish’. Some arches, overhead beams, ‘ Moorish doors’ with their curves, their charm and their mystery. Lucinda’s Arch should be returned, but it doesn’t really matter exactly… where. It can be in any spot which would be improved by a romantic, arched Lover’s Leap. We shouldn’t build two squares (and underground car-park) around and on the back of a centenary tunnel knocked down by a mayor and ignored both by him, and the three of four that followed. Thinking back, it was just a narrow tunnel outside two bars where people used to piss.
The front of the pueblo, the Plaza Nueva (so called, by the way, as it was built in the Seventeenth Century) is the commercial entrance to Mojácar. It’s pretty attractive, although could be improved. However, it’s where the trucks and suppliers must park to maintain the pueblo and its shops and bars. It has a good ‘look-out’ point, the marbled ‘Mirador’, which unfortunately needs to be urgently replaced or repaired. Perhaps it could return to its earlier function of a two storey car-park… for about thirty cars.
However, the main parking for Mojácar remains around and at the foot of the back of the village. There’s a considerable walk to regain the Plaza Nueva. Most people don’t and won’t visit, even though the pueblo is the lodestone of the area. We love Mojácar pueblo, but we stay on the beach.
To repair this, the pedestrian entrance to the village, the route taken by residents, shoppers and visitors alike, can easily be the same Plazas de Frontón and de la Iglesia. All that is needed is a short vertical ride from the ample car-park below. This car-park, now thankfully relieved from having a Wednesday fruit and vegetable market, has a large number of parking spaces. There are further parking-spaces in other next-door fields and levels. By bringing pedestrians up to the village with a mechanical lift, to be decanted into those upper squares, the whole problem of a pedestrian village is largely resolved. With these two upper squares turned into either gardens or, please, slightly ‘upmarket shops and taverns’, Mojácar could once again regain its pride of place as the leading destination and residential attraction for the area.
Could I have my 3,000€ now?

The Headless Jesús

It seems that a lightening strike decapitated the Vera Sacred Heart yesterday. The ten metre high statue was erected in 1949 on the Cerro de Espiritú Santo, the hill which overlooks the city and which was also the centre of a previous Vera, destroyed in an earthquake in 1518.

The mayor has promised to return the statue to its former glory as soon as possible.

La Cutreza

¡Ay, que gusto ir a comprar en Mojácar donde siempre uno está asegurado de encontrar prendas y otros recuerdos de calidad! "Hay un pelo entre mis dientes y no sé de que coño viene". Muy poético. "He follado en Mojácar", "Me han jodido en Mojácar" y luego, "Mojácar - ¿A ti, como prefieres tu polvo?"

La verdad es que, hasta subimos el tono de nuestras triquiñuelas, no vamos a subir el tono de nuestros visitantes.

Tenemos tiendas que venden las camisetas en las fotos, tenemos tiendas que venden sombreros mexicanos (no se sabe porqué) y tenemos tiendas que venden navajas, muñecas horteras y productos "Made in China". Luego, siempre puedes hacerte un tatuaje o ir a Garrucha a comer pescado. Lo que no se note mucho en nuestro pueblo, que una vez fue el más bonito de la provincia, es vida. Quizás esto cambiará después de las elecciones.

Perfectly Welcome

It was to be a quiet party, just five or six of us. Maude had baked a cake and John had bought a bottle of champagne. There were a few beers and some sodas in the fridge and I had lit the barbeque ready for my speciality of burnt sausage à la birthday boy. Furthermore, in case my older sister Rachel, who works at the tourist office, could make it, we had some roast potatoes and a salad prepared – she’s a vegetarian. I went to put on some quiet music on the CD player.
Just then, a large blue bus stopped outside our house and people began to disembark. Rachel seemed to be there with them, shouting some instructions. The mass of people began to swell towards our gate. I ran over to see what was happening.
“Rachel, what on earth are you doing?”

“Well”, she said, “they’re tourists. They’ve come to join in. Could you take their picture?”
And so it is. Tourism today is so ubiquitous, that any fiesta, celebration, public event or exhibition must somehow cater for the visitors. Often at the expense of the locals, for whom the event was designed. While the bars, restaurants and knickknack shops all make out like bandits during these affrays (or at least, should), the local people will find themselves relegated to the ‘second row’ or even unable to attend at all.
Take our late summer fiesta. The four day long San Agustín fiesta is a very enjoyable thrash that seems more concerned with its commercial element than its social or religious one. Not only are the shops open until all hours, but a large number of out-of-town vendors come along to see what they can earn. The attractions are staged in a relatively small part of the municipality, so the bars and restaurants who failed the ‘location location’ test will not get much out of the affair (besides paying for the fiesta handbook). Lights are put up and taken down again, bands are hired and fireworks are let off. Is all this effort for the residents – or for the tourists?
The mainstays of commerce are industry, agriculture and tourism. There is precious little of the first two here and so we are obliged to cater for the third. I think that some of our shops sell needlessly vulgar tat – perhaps reckoning along the famous line of ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ of Jack Cohen – and cheap Chinese souvenirs may attract cheap Chinese souvenir hunters. I’m not against tourists – unless they stand in my way – but I’m against hordes of them. Why not cater for less but wealthier tourism – Monte Carlo rather than Benidorm? We could make our town look nicer and even attract a wealthier type of visitor. After all, the Parador is a better hotel than the Pueblo Indalo.
So, the question is this – why does the tourist office advertise a local fiesta? Is it to help the citizens, or to help the shopkeepers?
In fact, sometimes it is clear that the public fiestas are just private affairs. We have two of this type, the Día de la Vieja and the Romería de San Isidro - both town hall picnics in the country where tourists and even non-local residents are simply not invited. Perhaps because there are no commercial advantages to doing so.
It is an axiom that, before you invite your friends over to your house, you clean the place up. Dust, wash, air and plump and even sometimes even paint, plaster, repair and rebuild. Then you feel better, proud of your home and ready to receive. The visitors come away favourably impressed and satisfied. Shouldn’t our resort receive the same consideration? Why not make our town look nicer and more attractive so the tourist will like it better? (To say nothing of how we might like it better as well). There’s plenty enough to be done. Meanwhile, by all means, give them their free paella, but save some for us.

This article isn’t about just Mojácar, but it’s clear that the pueblo itself is a kind of magnet to the area, a magnet which we all acknowledge, but don’t bother to visit…
Benidorm, by the way, works very well as a tourist destination. It takes a massive proportion of all British visitors to Spain and serves them well. It has a grid-system of streets leaving everyone close to their destination and also close to the beach. For residential tourism however, you will have to go to equally wealthy nearby town of Altea (which has just one large hotel).
My story at the top of the page? Well, here’s a true one. Barbara was hosting a small party on the hill behind the village. She and her pet cow along with some friends were celebrating San Fermín. The running of the bulls – or rather the trotting of one very affable pet cow called Petite Suisse. There was a picnic and some gypsy friends played the guitar, passed the bottle and sang. Some walkers joined in, eating and drinking with the group, while everyone vaguely thought that someone else must have invited them. The walkers, it turned out, thought that it was a town hall funded fiesta. So what – they were made perfectly welcome.

Rural Tourism

Here’s a piece that caught my eye (from the local daily newspaper): ‘The Comarca of Andarax has enough natural resources - scenic, cultural, economic, agricultural and gastronomic - to exploit a model to attract new tourists…’
A touch inelegant the text, perhaps, but it was the best that me and the Spellcheck device could do between us at a moment’s notice.
Tourism is the answer to all of our ills. A quick morning presentation, a chat with the local minister or councillor, a glass of ‘vino español’ and a tapa or two from the local ‘School of Gastronomy’ and all is suddenly well. We shall create jobs and be wealthy. The tourists are coming.
Spain has a touching belief in its own skill in attracting tourists, after all, it’s the world’s second-most visited country. No, hold on, fourth.
Let’s say that there are two sorts of tourists. Those on a short holiday to the beach, here in Spain (because it was cheap… or because the neighbours came last year and liked it… or because of the sun and the beach and the… no. I’m kidding: it’s because it was cheap), and those who are here for a longer period, perhaps with their own car, who perhaps even live here.
The first group are here for a brief time, to have fun. They may be customers of a tour-operator, flown and bussed in to some hotel in some – and who cares which – resort and they will be glad to be away from their desks, or their machines, or their shovels. Their contact with ‘gastronomy’ (as the Spanish like to call it when using what they fondly imagine is English) is no more than the odd meal outside their hotel and a non-fatal exposure to the catering service within.
If those visitors wanted ‘culture’, they wouldn’t be staying on the coast of some random tourist region: they’d have flown to Granada, or Seville, or Cordoba, or Madrid or Valencia. Barcelona even; but not, I think, the region of the Comarca of Andarax. ‘Two weeks on the beach, with paella, beer, girls and… Oh… within striking distance of the Comarca of Andarax’, said Mr Jones to the nice lady at the desk…
The main village in the Andarax is the agreeably pleasant mouthful of Canjáyar. The Junta de Andalucía, of course, won’t let anyone build in this village of 1500 inhabitants (falling every decade since 1901) so attracting full-year ‘residential tourism’ is out. In short, it’s down to the trippers. However, I really don’t think that it will be easy to tear away the visitors to our fine hotels along the playa to persuade them to come along and visit or even to buy its local wine or olive oil.
Perhaps the national tourist industry will be intrigued. They come from the cities for long weekends, and have a whole month off in August. Maybe they would want to drive up to the hills of the lower Almerian Alpujarra to have a warm day’s visit (up to 45ºC in the summer) and a bowl or two of lamb and chips with some local wine (they bottle a good one in Laujár, another pretty village in the area - see photo above).
I am sure that the initiative to attract tourism, and therefore money to the Comarca of Andarax is a good one. The ‘turismo rural’ hostals in the hills up there will be full. Tens of people will be visiting during the summer months.
Meanwhile, along the coasts of Spain, tens of millions of visitors will be slowly turning pink under the omnipresent sun. The buses will be turning on their diesel engines and the hotels will be unpacking their frozen dinners.
Another day, another dollar.

Alan Simpson

Alan Simpson died the other day, on his way home at lunchtime. He was one of the Mojácar 'old-timers'. We gave him a good send-off at the local cemetery, where he joins more friends than a person should decently lay claim to.

Here's something I wrote together with Emilio Aramburu which appeared in our local daily La Voz de Almería:

Alan Simpson murió en Mojácar el domingo 6 de febrero después de una caída fortuita. Alan, conocido por igual entre los mojaqueros y extranjeros por su sobrenombre ‘Alan One Wine’: el hombre que tomaba un vasito de vino en cada bar en su diario deambular por las calles del pueblo de Mojácar. Llegó por primera vez a estas tierras mojaqueras en 1968, camino a Inglaterra desde su guarida en Azila, en la costa atlántica de Marruecos. Los pocos forasteros de entonces estaban congregados en la plaza de Mojácar, tomando el sol y no menos brandis. Ambas cosas estaban igual de baratas y agradables. Para Alan el viaje a su país terminó aquel día. Nació en Inglaterra en 1930 y tuvo la fortuna de sobrevivir a una bomba alemana que cayó sobre su casa en los últimos meses de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, sufriendo la deshonra de ser sometido al examen de sus heridas por el médico, mientras permanecía, asustado y desnudo, tendido sobre un piano bajo la nieve. Comandante en la Guerra de Corea, ganó una medalla por salvar a una tropa de un campo de minas. Después de la contienda siguió en el Oriente, en Malasia (durante su guerra por la independencia). Viajó como explorador en Nueva Guinea, en una canoa de madera en compañía de unos cazadores de cabezas, durmiendo bajo las estrellas junto a los fardos de los "trofeos humanos" de sus compañeros de viaje. Más tarde, determinado a no volver a su país natal, viajó por el África tribal y el Sáhara -donde conoció a Wilfred Thessiger (muchos años después, Manu Leguineche escribió un libro sobre el destacado explorador, pero no antes de consultar unos apuntes con Alan)- antes de encontrar trabajo en África Occidental. Allí comandó una tropa de seguridad de 650 hombres en Sierra Leona para proteger los campos de diamantes, que luego fueron la razón por la guerra civil que duró veinte años en aquel sufrido país. En Ghana llegó a ser jefe de policía y, después, minero de oro, plata y estaño. Estuvo en Zanzíbar en una revolución y vivió en Marruecos, antes de inclinarse por lugares menos peligrosos. Tras vivir alternativamente durante años entre Marruecos y Mojácar, finalmente eligió su residencia definitiva en esta última localidad en 1990 y, desde entonces, ha sido siempre apreciado por todos sus convecinos, que, por su afabilidad, discreción y cortesía lo han considerado un verdadero ‘gentleman’. Hace unos años, escribió un libro, Naked in the snow (Desnudo bajo la nieve), en el que recogió todas sus anécdotas y vivencias por el mundo, terminando con algunos capítulos sobre esta población almeriense. Ahora descansa en el cementerio de Mojácar junto a muchos amigos lugareños y "expatriados" que, desde hace casi medio siglo, eligieron esta tierra para vivir para siempre. Goodbye, Alan. One wine for you.