Homage to the Foreign-Born Mojaqueros

Mojácar was just another crumbling Andalucian village until the beginning of the sixties, when the mayor, Jacinto Alarcon, had the idea of giving away scrub-land or houses in ruins to those who would improve them. The town had drifted from 6000 inhabitants before the Civil War to nearer 600, and the advent of enthusiastic forasteros become the beginning of a new chapter in Mojácar's history.
The new vecinos brought their new ways, their culture, their tastes and, above all, their money with them. The town thrived.
While few local people have ever acknowledged the impact on their lives of the 'foreigners', whether they came from Madrid, Munich, Manhattan or Manchester, and the Town Hall still merrily refuses to do so, local historian (and ex-municipal cop) Francisco Haro, son of the old boy who ran the Hotel Indalo in the Plaza Nueva, has written a book about those fascinating and peculiar people who descended on the pueblo in the sixties. Here you will meet Sammy, the gay New York mafioso on the run from his family; Fritz the eccentric painter who could down a bottle of anis at a sitting; Charlie Braun, the large German womaniser who skied for James Bond, Tony Hawker who built hovercraft in his spare time, my parents Bill and Heather, My parents-in-law Jim and Mary, and so on. Bars, shops, ateliers were opened; intrigue, stories and the occasional feud followed. The local talisman, the Indalo, the little stick-man with the bow over his head, became as well-known in London as a bottle of Terry brandy.
The town eventually allowed itself to be seduced by a large tour-operator who set about ruining (once again) the attraction which had, for a brief decade, made Mojácar the bohemian capital of southern Spain. Local greed brought poor choices for the village, demolitions of historical buildings, unimaginative architecture and a plethora of small rarely-used apartments squeezed into an inadequate infrastructure.
The book is called 'Mojaqueros de Hecho' and will be presented in August.

Submarine Stops Here (Until 11.00pm)

There's an opinion held by Officialdom that we can read things better if we go letter-by-letter. Which explains why ambulances and the police like to write their names back to front on the hoods of their cars. We might never guess who they were while trying to figure out the letters in our mirrors. Similarly, while driving and reading the letters written on the road for our attention (or would this sign be for pedestrians?). But this isn't a photograph of a sign for the bus, but a forward thinking councillor in Mojácar anticipating the rise in the sea level thanks to global warming (that and pumping all our sewage out there). Yes, one day it'll be 'No Spitting on the Sub'.


En castellano, aquí.

Morning Run

The morning run with the dog. He's a Briard, a French sheep dog - looking, sans aucun doute, for a French sheep to herd about, park in a field, stand on an upside-down bucket and, with a wave of his paw, oblige to sing La Marseillaise. Tricky this, since he can't see anything, what with the hair, and there aren't any French sheep around.

Parrot Joke

   En la zona de los loros
de un zóo que hay en Inglaterra
dicen hoy “trágame, tierra”
cuando ven el deterioro
que un papagayo grosero
les causa en la “lorería”
en la que oyen cada día
términos barriobajeros.
    “Barney” es el papagayo
al que hay que ponerle freno
porque tiene un grave fallo:
su lenguaje es muy obsceno.
    Si dice cuatro palabras,
tres, por lo menos, son tacos,
y es que está como una cabra
el maldito pajarraco.
    Unas veces son eróticas
las palabras que pronuncia
de una manera insolente,
y, otras, son escatológicas
…en la acepción maloliente.
    Él siempre ha de dar la nota
de una forma descarada:
más que un ave bienhadada,
animal es de bellota.
    No voy a emplear aquí
su sucia forma de hablar:
si lo fuera a repetir,
el verso podría oler mal.
    Pero lo peor de todo
es que “Barney” creó escuela
-aquí el que no corre vuela-
y hoy están todos los loros
con la misma cantinela,
y sus palabras son todo
taco viene y taco va,
insulto aquí, insulto allá,
y la cosa está que arde.
De ahí que los dueños del parque
tengan pensado mandar
a “Barney”, raíz del mal,
con los tacos a otra parte
o, si no, encerrarlo aparte,
pero separarlo ya,
que a los demás no coarte.
    Mas, si un loro es malhablado
es  porque habla mal el dueño,
ya que de un loro el empeño
es imitar a su amo.
   A “Barney” ¿quién le enseñó
a ser tan maleducado?
¿Quién le hizo tan deslenguado?
Ésa es, al fin, la cuestión.                      From Barney, el loro malhablado.

Mojácar Fiestas

On Friday, in the rest of Europe, it's Europe Day. Here in Mojácar, there's no time for this, we're simply too busy.
This weekend, our multi-cultural town celebrates the Romería de San Isidro, with fireworks on the Saturday and a jolly concert at the Artisan Centre from 10.30pm. On Sunday, there's a sort of traditional dress-up and picnic. The poster says '11.30, starting point La Fuente, stop at Las Alparatas with a little snack offered by Mojácar town hall and enlivened by Mojácar Municipal Band and going on towards Sopalmo area'. At 6.30pm, there's a mass in Sopalmo. Frankly, it's a local mojaquero affair.
Later on this month, things improve, with the rather grandly named 'Meeting of the V World Tuna Weekend', held on May 16th through the 18th. The Tuna are those gayly dressed 17th century university troubadours who go around in gangs with their guitars, mandolins and tambourines (rather a ghastly TV video example here) and they will gladly let you buy them a drink over the weekend frolick. Seriously, don't miss particularly the Friday session, it's like the old days are briefly with us again!
Mojácar's 'keenly anticipated' Moors and Christians festival is on June 6th through the 8th. Noise, light, music, bands, explosions, beauty, booze, bangs, exhibitions, crowds, wonder and, well, more noise! The final colourful Sunday procession of hordes of celebrants marching slowly down the hill from the main plaza is well worth the price of a sunburn.

90,000 Stories, Most of Them Untrue

The news in the Telegraph, followed by the rest of the British Media with that certain relish that the British 4th estate has for anything that proves us ex-pats to be delinquents, shirkers and lazybones, is that 90,000 Britons, living peacefully in Spain, suddenly all decided one day to up sticks and return to the glories of Olde England.

Perhaps someone has a spare room for them all.

The Spanish press followed the news, a bit more cautiously; after all, it wasn't like our venal and useless politicians had caused the abrupt exodus, they said, and maybe we could sell all those extra houses to the Russians and the Chinese anyhow, throwing in free visas for the wealthiest of them, although knocking down their pleasure palaces in a sunny future imagined by our idiot ecologists may be worth considering, this time around, a bit more carefully.

What, 90,000 Brits just left like that – 20% of them, apparently (believing the anal number-crunchers at the INE, who get their information in this case from the padrón, the town hall registers of this Great Land)?

No wonder our Mojácar Town Hall has dropped its plans to get a native English speaker into the Casa Consistorial to help with the Google Translations. There's no point now in adding to the 150 locals working there, since the percentage of the British element in our thriving village kleptocracy has precipitously fallen to not much over 60%.

In reality (and don't, for Christ' sake, tell the Telegraph), the thing about the padrón, is that most Brits don't bother to register on it in the first place. So, no one knows how many of them are living in Spain. The INE, in a burst of idiocy, says 297,229 – oops 228 – while the British consul vaguely waves its hands and suggests 800,000. No one can even say, in a European country without border controls, how many of one European race or another there are physically present, short of those who are registered for working, home-owning, studying or merely appearing on some police file. Plus, of course, those who want to be registered because it is their civic duty to do so.

The Spanish move, occasionally, from one town to another during their lives. They register on the new town's padrón, and the secretary informs their old town, who strikes their name. All easy and straightforward. With the foreigners, it's a different matter. Returning to Chipping Norton, Oslo or Timbuktoo is rather more final and the authorities in those fine cities will most certainly not bother to inform their Spanish counterparts of the change in residence. The local ayuntamientos must find this out for themselves and draw the appropriate line of virtual ink through the departed subject's name. Bearing in mind that the Town Halls of Spain have little interest in their foreigners – apart from a strong desire to demolish their homes – its easy to see that the numbers can get a bit wonky.

Thus, in its wisdom, the Ministerio del Interior recently ordered the Town Halls to check their registers – every two years for the foreigners and every five years for the comunitarios, the Europeans who walk among us.

So, those 90,000 absent Brits, rather than leaving last Saturday after the Match, as has been suggested by the Telegraph, have in fact tended to fade away over the past five years – sometimes returning to the UK, sometimes going forward to another country or destination within Spain, or sometimes by quietly dying!

Another piece of news, which is appearing shyly in some quarters, has it that a full 13% of all Britons living in the Sceptered Isle, would move to Spain in a heartbeat if they could.

And finally, an observation for the statisticians. Rather than counting on the padrón as a guide to population numbers, use the electric companies who at least know how many foreign households there are. Then, simply add 300,000, being the number of homes occupied in their majority by 'those who left their brains on the plane' and live in 'viviendas ilegales' without water or electricity.

Sounds uncomfortable that. I wonder if any of them are considering leaving.

The Plague on the Prickly Pear

The ecologists, when not encouraging the demolition of foreign-owned homes or over-sized hotels, are concerned with fighting aliens. Not in this case the extranjeros, but rather the animal and plant life that doesn't (didn't) belong. They would like to be, of course, like Rousseau's Natural Man; and it sounds like a splendid plan, if only there was anything much left to dance about in after the exotics were weeded out.
As for the local people, let them eat sand.
In the natural park that stretches across most of southwestern Almería, it seems that the pita and the agave have got to go. The pita is the Century Plant, a spiky looking number, which after a great deal of procrastination suddenly shoots out an enormous stem with yellow flowers on the top of it, and then the whole she-bang keels over dead. The stalk was used in bygone times to make roof-beams (I had a few in an old house in Bédar. They rot after a while). The agave, sisal, was used for making raffia, rope, cloth and paper at one point. If only they had thought of Tequila. The plants were brought back from Mexico by the conquistadors (the ones who didn't find gold and therefore had plenty of space in their bags), and planted in the Cabo de Gata, thus giving the area something interesting to look at and, at the same time, upsetting their ecologically-minded descendents working out of the Consejería de Medio Ambiente y Ordenación del Territorio (that's right, the same department that has such a lively interest in foreign-owned homes in the interior of the province).
The ecologistas of today are, and it's documented, the Holy Inquisition of the sixteenth century.
I once wrote a learnéd article for a Spanish magazine about the Nijar/Cabo de Gata natural park and suggested it needing salting with a few critters such as the odd wallaby to move things along. At least the tourists would have something to photograph. The suggestion went down like a lead brick.
However, while the ecologists are busy getting excited from their fifth floor apartments in downtown Almería about how best to impoverish both the countryside and those unfortunate enough to live in it, they appear to have dropped the ball when it comes to a long line of insect infections we have suffered (beyond and above the German Cockroach, which prefers the cities anyway). We had the horrid palm tree beetle (palm trees come from Egypt, and tourists like them, so the ecologists looked the other way and instead made a great fuss of trying to catch racoons which had been left 'in the wild' by a few owners). We have the Eucalyptus fly which can only, apparently, be killed by the Eucalyptus spider, and we aren't allowed to import any: spiders that is. The old story about the old lady who swallowed a fly must be more popular here than I had thought. Besides which, even our IU green-minded mayor of a few years ago, Carlos Cervantes, had no compunction in uprooting an entire Eucalyptus grove on Mojácar Beach - the damn things come from Oz. Do you remember Carlos, the noisy and opinionated chap with the big black beard? He was the one who was against a ring-road for Mojácar because it would crush a rare plant called the limonium, a kind of lily.

So now, we have another blight, this time one that attacks the Prickly Pear, which is about as ubiquitous in our desert landscape as it can get. It is spreading slowly west, from Murcia. Here's a picture I took of some affected by cochinilla. It's on our neighbour's land.
Will the local authorities be given some squirty stuff by the Conserjería to get rid of this plague, I wonder? In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter. The Chumbo comes from Mexico as well...

A Lifetime of Pictures

Our daughter Jessica is here for a week - over from the USA - and we were going through the old photographs, which are in boxes, crates, trunks and albums: endless albums. And that's just the good ones. Almost fifty years of living in Mojácar plus the inevitable 'before we arrived' pictures, mostly in black and white. School pictures and me as a small white-haired child with my dog posing in the garden in Norfolk.
Then there's the slides, lots of dusty slides. I had taken to them for a year or two - long before digital cameras made a mockery of everything that went before. I was looking for a 'slide-viewer' to see what, and who, I had. In the end, it's holding them up to the sky and squinting most fearfully.
Now the pictures, taken with a digital camera rather than the old click, wrench and fiddle things we used to have, expensive and tiresome, rest quietly in the bowels of the computer, at least, the recent ones do. The previous rash of digital pictures are in the entrails of the earlier home computer, now in another box somewhere and probably irreparable. Perhaps the answer would be to print the photos I like the best and then find another cardboard box to stash them. Yes, that could work.
Meanwhile, the better ones find their way to the 'Mojacar Golden Years' on Facebook. The picture here is of our son, Daniel, admiring an early edition of The Entertainer, I newspaper I ran from 1985 to 1999. But don't get me started on old photographs, I've got thousands of them...

Mojácar Spring 2014

Welcome to Mojácar. The Town Hall has fixed the place up for the season, with repaired roads, new sidewalks and a fancy new roundabout. The elevator up to the village - I call it El Ascensor de Luciana in honour of a departed arch in the old village - is pretty much completed and will no doubt be opened shortly.
On the beach, there's a great selection of bars and restaurants, with a wide choice of venues (Greek, Italian, British, Irish, Indian, Thai, German, Mexican, Argentinian, Brazilian, French, American, Lebanese, Chinese and many good Spanish places). There are some new venues to try and a number of old-favourite beach-bars to return to.
There is plenty of sport (including a new lawn bowls green), music and culture.
The weather is good - of course - and Mojácar is a great place not just to visit, but an even better place to call home.  

A Question of Semantics

This is a picture taken on Wednesday of a number of people entering Melilla. Apparently around 500 souls, merrily waving their passports and duty free bottles of scotch, are now enjoying traditional Spanish hospitality.
I suppose the question arises - for the purposes of the statisticians, will they be treated as in transit, tourists or as residents?

Paperwork

So what happens to those millions of documents our friends the funcionarios are so keen on producing? Eventually, they go to the 'Junta de Expurgo', which orders their destruction. And the whole beautiful cycle of life begins anew. Here, from today's Voz de Almería, 70,000 old court documents are incinerated.

The Torrecárdenas Hospital

The provincial hospital is in Almería and is called the Torrecárdenas. It's a gigantic building which is stretched to the limit. Hard-working staff, nurses, doctors and emergency crews working long hours. An immense army of patients and out-patients, family members and entire gypsy clans wheel around the wards and passageways, while patients in pajamas creep outside with their drips attached to have a not very furtive cigarette. Over the way, there's a bar/restaurant doing splendid service, if a bit less than in the good old days when it also sold brandy. Indeed, back in the day,  if you gave blood, you got a chitty for a free drink, a coffee and biscuit perhaps, or that aforementioned brandy. Like most services in Spain, there isn't enough parking for the enormous number of visitors, while cars are regularly being towed from inconvenient 'spots' they've found or created. An army of the disabled collect a coin from each driver who is obliged to leave his car on a giant field of rocks just about within walking distance of the centre.
It's a fine and noble hospital, daily forced to work miracles. Perhaps the politicians should spend a little less on their high-speed trains, and a little more on their hospitals.

Copyright, Copywrong

Some notes from this week's Business over Tapas*:

No one seems quite sure what the new 'Ley de la Propiedad Intelectual' could mean for the Internet in Spain. Heavy control and censorship? Perhaps. The idea in the proposed rule is to charge 'aggregators' who supply links to news stories, sites like Google News and Menéame, and share part of the spoils with the AEDE, the Spanish Daily Press Association. But how far will this go? To the television guide? To Business over Tapas? Here, we could continue, with a summary but without supplying links (that's to say, to the Spanish media, not the foreign ones). Or perhaps link without quotes. Or plagiarise (by not supplying the link, so easy). Or then again, pack the dog and move next door to Portugal. Either way, we would lose some stories as they passed 'under the radar'. Perhaps some news outlets would indeed prefer to allow linkage while others will want to charge locally-based reportage (although the law, if passed, would be obligatory), but isn't it useful for the media to receive extra readership (and potential new fans) through precisely these introductions? In short, the whole idea sounds ill-thought out and silly, much like this Government.

A number of articles on the proposed news 'copy and link' law promoted by the 'Culture Minister' Ignacio Wert: 'Euphoria in the world of culture. Ecstasy in journalism. The crisis of the press – pillar of democracy, the rule of law and good manners at the dinner table – is finally holding a miracle cure. Several newspapers dedicate their front pages to this. We have saved ourselves. Or rather, the Government has saved us from... (music of terror) the piracy!'. From Guerra Eterna. The BBC notes simply that '...Websites can link to freely available content without the permission of the copyright holder, the European Court of Justice says...'. An interview with Internet expert Enrique Dans in La Información includes the gem: 'this Government is completely analfabeto (illiterate) when it comes to the Internet'. Lastly, El Mundo interviews Ricardo Galli, the head of Menéame, a Spanish version of Reddit: 'It will do a lot more damage to the newspapers than it will to us', he says.

Another aspect of the proposed LCI is to charge a canon of 5€ per university student for using technical publications on the Internet (ignoring, once again, the whole point of the Internet, which is that material posted there is freely available). Gizmodo en Español has an interview with Internet lawyer Javier de la Cueva discussing this subject.

'Things have been moving in newspaper circles recently, with the owners expelling their editors (El Mundo, La Vanguardia and now El País), even though these titles are all pro-system, in favour of new apparently more malleable editors. The newspapers themselves are becoming more pro-Government, softening their criticism and reporting Government activities in a more favourable light. The deal seems to be that the newspaper association AEDE can now look forward to becoming protected by the CEDRO (copyright for printed materials) in a way similar to the SGAE, charging and controlling usage under obligation. Will Twitter and Facebook have to pay up?' A Facebook Page here. Of course, many readers come to newspaper articles, directed precisely by aggregators. So, with this rule, readership would fall. 

*Goodness, will I be allowed to link to my own websites? 

La Plaza Nueva

With the first democratically voted mayor for Mojácar, back in 1978, Paco el Marullo as he is called, the town made a convulsive change from a sleepy international artists' retreat (and drinkers' paradise) to an uneasy tripper destination, which eventually turned into the small 'd' disneyland we know today. Odd that Walt Disney is said to have been born here (he wasn't, it was an invention of Old Jacinto when he saw a magazine photo of Disney getting married in Mexico. Coño, he looks just like Diego Carillo's family, he said...).
The first building to reflect the new worship of Mammon was the Sondra building, here on the left of the photo. Before, there had been a carpenter's shop with a small arch over the narrow street on the left and a larger one over the road on the right climbing up towards the church. The new shop was the successor to another nick-nack shop in the back of the village (now an Italian restaurant) built and operated by a Corsican called Paccini. The shop windows broke with tradition: they were huge. The stock was exclusively for visitors: Mexican hats, jarapas, tee shirts, post cards, humorous ashtrays, indalos and so on. Business was good - there was a Horizon hotel in the village with a regular turn-over of impoverished but enthusiastic guests. Several other shops soon opened to provide competition with the Corsican.
The old Hotel Indalo, in the larger part of the square (to the right), was bought up and demolished, along with a famous and quite beautiful theatre. Two dozen more nick-nack shops took their place. Mojácar was disneyed. The bars and restaurants in the village returned to their now-monied original owners. They were demolished and re-built, but the rents were too high for the ever-reduced number of patrons. Of over fifty bars thirty years ago in the pueblo, now maybe a dozen remain. Even the old Horizon hotel, El Moresco, is closed and condemned.
Sadly, the town is now empty eight or nine months of the year, as - apart from the view - there is now little reason to stay. Tourists are bussed up to the back of the town and must puff their way uneasily up the rest, to be told a bowdlerised version of the town's history. A massive proportion of the town is now foreign residents, who cluster below on the low hills and approaches to the beach, where they are tolerated for most of the year and ignored during the summer months. Despite their massive and regular injection of capital into the municipality, the recent Town Halls have preferred hotel tourism, which they see as a panacea to the area, where in reality it is merely of some moderate use to those who own shops, bars or restaurants.

The Bitter Tourist Montage

A funny picture I found on Facebook (where there are many angry comments, both from the British and from the Spanish). The scene is the World Travel Market in London (although this week is the FITUR in Madrid) and the picture is of Susana Díaz, the new President of the Junta de Andalucía saying -we knock down their homes but now we are here to ask them to come visit.
You see, in far off San Telmo, the palace in Seville which houses the Andalucian Government, decisions are made daily which affect the lives of people in Almería.

The Indala

The Indalo is the old totem from Mojácar. Forget about all that stuff from the Cueva de los Letreros up towards Vélez Blanco, the little fellow is a local protection against the elements and sometimes bringer of good luck. He used to be known here as the hombrecillo mojaquero and was painted above the doorways as a charm. Worked a treat, with his protective bóveda which keeps us from harm's way.
Only problem is, of course, that the Indalo is really an Indala.
In olden times, the Gods ran the violent side of things - storms, thunder, lightening, war - and the Goddesses were in charge of shelter, warmth, agriculture, sex and re-birth. They protected us from the elements.
You will note that our little figure is standing in a certain way that denotes Woman.
Her legs are open.
The Indala, bless her, is a female.

Dancing with the Priors

This is a picture of a retired British couple enjoying a birthday dance outside their home in Vera, Almería, sometime last September. The 'Dream': to retire to Spain, buy a house, a car, furniture and possessions; to dine under the stars in quaint little restaurants, enjoy a bottle of local wine, travel around the country and stay in a few hotels. The chance to broaden one's horizons and spread a little wealth among one's new neighbours...
Silly, really, but there are upwards of 750,000 Britons, and many many other Europeans, doing just that in Spain.
But this couple is different from those many hundreds of thousands of foreigners, rejoicing in their new life in what should be Europe's answer to Florida. This is Len and Helen Prior, whose house was inexplicably demolished by the Junta de Andalucía six years ago, on January 9th 2008. Since then, Len and Helen have lived in their garage, which unaccountably escaped the attack. Now, they also have a tent, which is just as well, as they have been camping in their own ruins following the loss of their home. Their water comes from a hosepipe and their light is provided by a generator.
The most famous 'English' residents in Spain, as far as the Spanish are concerned, are Richard Vaughan (who is an American and provides English classes over the TV) and Michael Robinson, an ex-footballer and now Spanish TV pundit.
Yet, the Priors are infinitely more famous. Unwillingly perhaps, as all they wanted was to retire peacefully in a country they thought was safe, but Helen and Len have occupied more column inches and more minutes of TV time across Europe than any other ex-patriate couple, ever.
Now the Junta de Andalucía, apparently eager to impoverise still further the province where the Priors chose to live, with its 38% unemployment (far higher in the small towns of the interior) is demolishing more British owned homes in Cantoria and threatening to do so in another dozen small, moribund, dry, hopeless towns of its far-away satrapy of Almería.
The Priors meanwhile have put on another piece of dance music... .


Later: The article appears in Spanish at El Ideal.

Jacinto Alarcón: El Alcalde de Mojácar

This is Jacinto Alarcón. He was the famous old mayor of Mojácar who got the village 'going' in the sixties. Following the Civil War in Spain, plus a drop in the local water table, there was no future for a forgotten town like Mojácar, which by the end of the fifties was down from a population of 6000 (recorded in 1920) to a miserable 600 souls.
Many mojaqueros had left for work (or political considerations) to Catalonia, France, Germany and even Argentina. The town was so miserable that there was talk of Mojácar becoming part of the municipality of Carboneras.
The representative of the national government was the Gobernador Civíl, who lived in Almería. His office chose the mayor in those days, and Jacinto was given the job in June 1960.
Jacinto was a rarity in Spanish politics, he followed his own version of the Kennedy doctrine ('Don't ask what your pueblo can do for you; ask what you can do for your pueblo'). He more or less, pace a proper article later, introduced the Indalo; encouraged culture and art; painted the town white (it was brown yeso coloured before); gave away old houses or land to those who would bring in money and fix them up; arranged with an architect (Roberto Puig from Valencia) to keep strict rules on the appearance of the town; got the town a Parador Hotel; made friends with several internationally known people, including Fraga Irribarne (at the time, the Tourist Minister for Spain); won the town an award from Madrid as the Pueblo Blanco 1964; and found new residents that would make Mojácar more famous internationally than the province of Almería itself.
Jacinto retired in 1976, a poor but satisfied local hero. We would never see his calibre of politics again. Following his departure from the town hall, the opportunities of ready money proved irresistible to many local would-be politicians and entrepreneurs, particularly builders, none of whom appeared to harbour any respect whatsoever for their town.
Many emblematic buildings have been demolished - the village theatre, the fountain, a famous arch called 'El Arco de Luciana', an entire city block last year to make way for an underground parking... and architectural rules have been relaxed or even, on occasion, abandoned completely (the Centro de Artesanía for example).
Incidently, the iconic Indalo, the upright metal man that was known in Madrid and Valencia, and from Belgravia to Greenwich Village, was later sold to the provincial authorities by another mayor, which is why we have a 'drunken Indalo' substitute these days. Cheap hotels and the accent on second-rate tourism (plus the chance to build and sell small and tasteless apartments) rather did for the town by the mid eighties. Jacinto died in around 2001 and the mayor of the time, Salvador, did him the ultimate honour... of knocking his house down.

The Bank Got me Drunk

Here's a disappearing custom - the complementary glass of hootch at the bank while you wait to see if you can afford that silver trinket for your wife. The petrol station also used to offer a glass of Christmas cheer, but I haven't seen this particular custom for a few years now. I blame society! In modern times rather, we are regaled with endless stories of the revolting Catalonian caganers, little Nativity figurines - usually politicians - taking a dump. Very charming. Personally, I'll stick to the Anis del Mono.

Where are the Ecologists?

The plastic farms of Almería, the invernaderos, occupy around 260 square kilometres of land: almost exactly 100 square miles. They are sometimes cited as the only man-made thing you can see from space, depending on which part of space you happen to be occupying...
However, it's still a lot of land under plastic, about twice the size of the city of Seville. Odd, then, that the ecologists who influence the Seville government don't seem to be fazed by this attack on the environment.
There is no doubt but that the ecologists, treated with the same power and fear as was once accorded to the Holy Inquisition, have had a massive effect on the wealth of Andalucía, by ruining the business of residential tourism, and the chance for small villages to grow (through the POTA, a peculiar law which allows villages to expand by a maximum of only 30% of their number of inhabited homes every eight years). Indeed, the area of the Almanzora Valley, where many of those houses planned, built, promoted, sold (to Northern Europeans) ...and only then declared illegal, has a population of 40 per square kilometre, versus the entire province of Almería at 72 and the Comarca del Poniente (where most of the plastic farms are) at a respectable 230 people/sq km.
Villages that aren't growing will lose their young. They will move to the cities where there is work, opportunity and diversion. The elderly sometimes retire back to su pueblo and may generate some modest work on the old casa. But the chance of those small villages having much of a future is small. Indeed, of the thirteen municipalities in Andalucía with less than 200 souls, nine of them are in Almería.
Here's a quote from an 'Amusing Planet' piece on the invernaderos of Almería from August of this year: '...A few small towns in the area have been completely swamped by the white plastic farms. Plastic manufactures and recycling companies have also set-up in the region, where discarded plastic sheeting and rubbish lies wherever blocking up riverbeds. Last month the death of a sperm whale that washed up on Spain’s south coast was linked to the Almeria greenhouses after it was found to have swallowed 37 pounds (17kg) of plastic waste dumped into the sea. Empty pesticide containers bearing toxic warnings lie among the plastic litter. On the coast at El Pozuelo plastic waste is piled calf-high'...
A mess. So where are the ecologists?
They are too busy with the 'illegal houses' sold to the northern Europeans between 2005 and 2008 when Len and Helen Prior's house was suddenly bulldozed down on their dime. The Priors have been living in the garage of their home (which escaped the demolition) since January 8th 2008. Six years ago. The area, incidentally, where the Junta de Andalucía - with the connivance of the same ecologists - wants to build a macro-city of 70,000 people to be called El Llano Central (a flood plain, by the way).
The best major article on the greenhouses I've seen comes from The Global Mail, an Australian newspaper. Written by Eric Ellis, it's called 'The Stain on Spain'.  '...Morrocan Mohammed El Hosni paid a human trafficker 3,000 euros to get across the Straits of Gibraltar to Almeria three years ago. Today, the 33-year-old tends zucchinis for 30 euros a day, going home to his family of five who live in a chabola outside La Mojonera. 
These crude chabolas are the hovels that punctuate the hothouse region here, and embarrass Spain. Fashioned from scavenged cardboard boxes and discarded plastic, they are erected by homeless Africans on abandoned plots or on land not yet turned into greenhouses. Water is brought in by bucket from nearby wells and stored in discarded pesticide containers. Cooking and heating is by bottled gas, the electricity lifted off the main grid by running illegal, fizzing wires'...
Periodically, the Spanish authorities bulldoze down some of these chabolas. Indeed, the 'Defensor del Pueblo', the Andalucian ombudsman, is currently investigating a mass demolition of chabolas in El Ejido from September last year.
Again, where are the ecologists? Are they with the Caritas charity, which claims that there are about 10,000 people living in Almería without shelter, including around 7,000 on the farms. Those who live this kind of life won't last long, a study shows their life expectancy to be 20 years less than the rest of us, thanks to their lack of access to the Health System and to proper shelter, and they will be doubly frustrated to know that there are some 25,000 vacant bank-owned homes in the province. More at El Ideal.

...And those bank-owned properties. 2.5 million of them stretched across Spain. Not one of them illegal? How pragmatic of the ecologists!
We hear of the old Cortijo del Fraile in Nijar, where Lorca set his play. It's falling down now. So too is the Palacio del Almanzora in the village of the same name. So too (not!) is the enormous Hotel Algarrobico on the coast along from Carboneras. What are the ecologists up to?
I imagine them as city folk. Young, serious and bespectacled. They know nothing of economics, and care nothing for the livelihood of the villagers. They love projects, such as the absurd 4 million euro tortoise sanctuary built outside Bédar, but they know nothing of the countryside. For them, it's precious walks along old paths used by shepherds in centuries gone by, but now those sheep must wear microchips. The shepherd will be a Moroccan being paid in the black.
Almería could have been the Florida of Europe, but instead it has chosen to become the Georgia of the antebellum. I blame the ecologists.


Page three leader in current edition of Actualidad Almanzora as ¿Donde están los ecologistas?