A Portrait of Mojácar

Mojácar used to be a town of around 6,000 people in as far back as 1870. It maintained this number of inhabitants until round about 1900 when, slowly, numbers began to fall, speeding its descent in the 1930s. Through the various local vicissitudes of the drop in the local water-table, the end of the de-forestation, a peculiar plague of locusts in 1901, the end of the mines in the 1920s and the troubled times of the Civil War, the area in general eventually became depopulated with mass emigrations to Barcelona, Algeria, Germany and even Argentina, and Mojácar itself began its long descent into what was, by 1960, a moribund village of just 600 souls. 

The late XIX Century had seen lead and iron mines in the Sierra Almagrera and the Sierra de Bédar bringing wealth into the area, served principally by the port of Garrucha. By 1911, Mojácar had 4,979 people on the padrón, and the town had just installed public lighting (run on acetylene). There was a café, a ‘cantina’, two butchers, a carpenter’s, three food shops, a pharmacy, a post office and a bookshop. 

Mojácar’s politics were divided into two rival families, the Carillos and the Flores. In 1881, the mayor Francisco Flores Grima signed a contract with the British vice-consul, based in Garrucha, George Clifton to deed part of Mojácar’s fresh water to Garrucha. As the tubes were being laid to channel the water to the port town, Mojácar erupted in a ‘mutiny’ and the leader of which, a certain ‘Blás’ took the staff of office from the mayor Francisco and ‘broke it over his knee’. 

But let’s meet another mayor, Nicolás Carillo Murcia, whose ‘reign’ lasted for just one year, 1900, when he was 28. Nicolás is perhaps better remembered as Mojácar’s first hobby artist and this picture – possibly the oldest extant portrait of the village – would have been painted somewhere in the first decade of the XX Century. The scene shows the ‘Espiritu Santo’ on the right, Mojácar in the centre and Garrucha in the distance on the left. Nicolás was also known as a sculptor, although most of his wooden figures, including two Christs for the churches of Mojácar and Turre, were destroyed in the first weeks of the Civil War in 1936. Better known to Mojácar residents, the terrace windows and the wooden porch of the Torreón were designed by Nicolás. He also helped build and decorate the famous Aquelarre theatre opposite the church in Mojácar in 1925 (torn down in the frenzy of easy money in the 1990s). 

Nicolás Carillo Murcia left Mojácar for good in 1930, migrating to Barcelona, where he died in 1955.

Books

Most of those who arrive here like to read.

We know people who don't, and good luck to them, but as someone says - they only gonna live once, while we will live a thousand lives.The life I'm living at the moment isn't a particularly rewarding one - I'm on the back of a truck, a Hudson Super Six, shuddering slowly along Route 66 on the way to California during the Depression with a couple of families of Okies who were unable to pay their rent on the miserable acres of dust where they had lived raising cotton. The book of course is John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath'. We have good moments and bad moments in our journey along a thousand lives - right now, we've just lost Grandpa.  

When we first moved to Spain, long before TVs, PCs and Kindles, we brought half a ton of books with us. 

I, at a tender age, was in charge of them. The few foreigners who lived in our town in those days - the ones that liked to read, I mean - would drop by and borrow a few books and, sometimes even return them. 

Our collection leaned strongly towards tripe, and I remember the sensation of one year was a book called 'Mandingo', which involved a very well-endowed slave and an endless number of southern

daughters. I see it was written in 1957, but our copy, from the publishing house of Pan, would have dated from around 1968 or so.  The author, Kyle Onstott, wrote a few more in a similar vein (as one does, when one hits on a winner) and they all found safe harbour on our shelves.

 

There were many thousands of books, occupying an entire room in the house, plus the book-shelves that lined the sitting room and dining room. 

The lavatory in the Smallest Room had a table beside it with a few decorative and useful items, including an ashtray, a dried up geranium, and an autobiography called 'George of the Ritz'. George used to welcome customers at the door of London's most famous hotel and would palm the notes of the realm that came his way from the rich and famous. This, on his retirement, formed material for a book - and an honorary place in our bathroom. I picked it up the other day, and found to my surprise that most of the pages were missing - there were just a few photographs left, printed on non-absorbent paper. 

 

One day my father decided to turn over several hundred of our volumes to the newly-formed British library (I've had an honorary membership ever since). Of course, the freed-up shelves at our house slowly filled with more books as they do (including a few, shall we say, late returns?), and, many years later, here we are.

 

My daughter says that she wants to keep the hardbacks (probably for decoration. Huh), but I have to clean out or at least manage the paperbacks.

Bottom line, I've got a number of boxes to go through. 

A few years ago, my wife made me throw out some books, and I remember sorrowfully bidding goodbye to Fodor's 1957 edition of 'Amsterdam', which I was quite happy just now to see had somehow been reprieved and was once again in my possession. Either that, or I might have had a second copy.

 

Some books do need to go, of course, including Langerscheidts Musterbriefe's 'Muy Señor Mío - how to write a nice letter to a Spaniard'. It's in German, a language I don't speak, and - hey, who writes nice letters any more to anyone? We have email now. Hola and Un saludo will get you everywhere. 

I also found 'Truants from Life'. This has the complete case histories of four disturbed children who could not be helped by the ordinarily available methods of Psychotherapy. 

Anyone?

There's also an Agatha Christie mystery with the last page missing but I'm pretty sure it was the Butler who did it. 

 

So maybe a few will have to go this time. 

Back in the boxes I found an excellent novel from Nevil Shute, which I read just this past weekend, and piled next to the bed in a holding pattern there are currently books from Eric van Lustbader (kung-fu and lots of sex - a sort of 21st century Mandingo, now I think of it), James Lee Burke (a terrific American detective-novelist) and Eric Newby's 'Round Ireland in Low Gear': a book about an elderly couple on bicycles looking for a place that serves both Guinness and a Pink Gin.  

I just found a book from Erich von Däniken, who was very popular in Mojácar in the seventies. His thesis (written while in jail for debt) was that Man came from Outer Space and he has some blurry photos from Peru (probably swiped from the prison library) to back this up. 

I think he may be right. 

It would explain the Indalo.

The other day I went in to Almería to the Picasso bookshop and picked up a couple of clean virgin unread books (for a change) from their English section downstairs. New books cost around twelve euros each these days. Then on Friday I was in Turre and dropped by the charity shop. I bought a dozen books from them (all of them corkers!) for the bargain total price of two euros (don't for Goodness Sake tell my daughter). 

That works out at 72 books from Turre would cost the same price as just one from Almería.

Hmm.

 

I've never cared for the TV, and - while I learned Spanish by going to the movies (my first words in castellano were 'hands up!') - I've had to give up on the pictures since they don't make 'em like they used to, you can't smoke, and the local open-air cinema is long closed down: sold to a speculator. 

With a book, of course, the world is yours to make of it what you will. 

Although they say the film from 'The Grapes of Wrath' was very good (here's the old car turned into a truck), the book was better. It won the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Five more boxes of books to go through - and I suspect that my daughter has found some more that I thought I had safely hidden up in the attic.

 

 

 

Paul Polansky

Paul Polansky author, human rights activist, journalist, historian, poet and cultural anthropologist died Friday March 26, 2021 at the age of 79 in Knez Selo, Serbia after a brief battle with Cancer.

Paul was born February 17, 1942 in Mason City Iowa to Nell and Victor Polansky. He was an accomplished athlete, football player and won the Golden Gloves in boxing while attending Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He studied journalism with a minor in history and speech.  In 1963 he travelled to Spain and never returned.  Paul was a journalist for a local paper in Madrid before embarking on a very successful real estate development career in Almeria. He developed several enduring seaside and golf communities including Lomos del Cantal in Mojácar and Cortijo Grande in Turre.

Around 1990, Paul retired from real estate development and pursued his lifelong passion as a human rights advocate, activist and tireless supporter of disenfranchised people. He fought against the genocide faced by the Roma especially, but not exclusively, in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He lived and worked with the Roma in over 19 countries. He worked tenaciously for the next 30 years to educate people and fight for the rights of the threatened and persecuted people.  Paul was renowned writer and poet and published more than 40 books, spoke at over 50 universities, and founded the Kosovo Roma Refugee Foundation.

He won numerous awards for his reports on human rights violations for such international organizations as the Society for Threatened Peoples, Voice of Roma, and the Kosovo Roma Refugee Foundation. Amongst the most prestigious of these was the 2004 Recipient of Weimer Human Rights Award for which he was unanimously selected following his nomination by Nobel Laureate for Literature Günter Grass. A collection of his oral histories was acquired by the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. A full collection of his work and awards can be found at www.paulpolansky.net

A funeral service was held Knez Selo, Serbia; the village he called home for the past 15yrs on March 29, 2021.

If so inclined, donations in honour of Paul Polansky can be made and will be used to further his mission of fighting genocide and the persecution of threatened people.

Please send to:

John Polansky, 5401 Stone Creek Cr, Ste1, Loveland CO 80538 

...................... 

I remember Paul from the early days. He was a young, handsome fellow who came down from Madrid in 1966 to work for Manolo del Ayo on a project along the beach of Mojácar called Lomos del Cantál. His brother Ric joined him a year or two later and Manolo pulled out leaving Paul as the boss. His charm was legendary, even if sometimes the houses had some issues. 

After Laing moved to Mojácar to start its construction work for Horizon Hotels, Paul accepted an offer from them to swap his land - where the future Pueblo Indalo was to be built - for a large and apparently useless chunk of land in the hills behind Turre. Paul put in a golf-course and starting building front-line luxury homes to clients, while retaining all the water-rights. 

He later left the area, and his brother Ric took over the business. 

I last saw Paul around three years ago, with Ric, in the MariCruz restaurant in Turre, where we shared lunch and some memories.

Un abrazo Paul; and in the hope that You and Ric don't start urbanising Paradise!  

Lenox

Satellite Life

 I live in a satellite town - a community on the edge of the city that doesn't have a municipality or its own town-hall, making it a suburb. At 9,000 souls, it's larger than my old stamping-ground of Mojácar - if not as famous - and it has a few things to recommend it - a playa that's maybe six kilometres long, a university, a shocking amount of graffiti and a lot of plastic farms - some of which grow marijuana and cause the occasional shoot-outs between the owners and the customers. 

The town doesn't have much else of interest, besides the usual Spanish charm, and it consequently has few northern Europeans living there. A couple of Brits who work valiantly trying to teach the locals a bit of the Queen's English, maybe one or two at the university, a couple I know who are retired and live on the other side of the burgh, and then there's me over at the stables. 

There is, however, an urbanisation along the coast called Costacabana, built by a German in the sixties, and it may belong to our non-municipality (nobody seems sure), and indeed there could still be a few Brits living there. This urbanisation has a beautiful beach, with eight breakwaters which have attracted lots of sand although, since Almería is different, there are no beach bars. The two joints located in the bosom of the urbanisation must have pulled strings. 

None of the maps available from Google seem entirely sure where the borders of our community begin and end - but let us be inventive, and claim six kilometres of coast, and a few kilometres inland, made up of township, plastic farms and scrub. It is a bit surprising that the brief Wiki reference to our pueblo is so sure of our numbers, without appearing to have a clue about our extension, our history or our culture - beyond the singular detail of a son of the pueblo called Antonio de Torres, who is remembered as the father of the modern flamenco guitar - he's the Stradivarius of the Six String, says another Wiki post rather pretentiously. No doubt unimpressed by our sundry charms, Antonio left his home for foreign parts in 1833 at the tender age of sixteen.  

The coast, which stretches north-east from the dry riverbed that makes up the boundary of Almería City, has a sea wall, a bike path, a pavement and a coastal road. On the other side of this, to the surprise of any urban planner who doesn't come from Almería, is a line of abandoned plastic greenhouses. After a couple of kilometres of this hike along the shore, we reach the University of Almería, with its teeming hordes of students - built for some reason with its back to the sea - and onwards towards Costacabana, the beach still resolutely walled, cycle-laned and little else. The abandoned plastic farms resume with a merry look of decay, until we arrive at the corner of the urbanisation (which may or may not be in our non-municipality) and our one beach-bar, located uncomfortably on some rocks. The food there is good, of course. 

Our settlement is inland, up past the university and then through the narrow unplanned alleys and dead ends to the magic of the High Street. Here the traffic is entertaining, with few parking spots, how could it be else? The cars will double-park, clogging up the narrow street, but obligingly leaving their emergency blinkers on - as if to say, 'I'll be back in a mo', just off to the bank and maybe grab a quick coffee...'. The savvy ones will park in the bus stop, bringing the circulation of that regular commute to the city to a brief halt, while others will triple-park, cutting off all movement whatsoever. There is no roundabout or square to change direction, so one must either drive a couple of kilometres in the wrong direction or throw chance to the winds and try a narrow side-street. Unsurprisingly, driving instructors choose our high street for their advanced students - they say, if you can negotiate the Calle Mayor - then your licence is as good as in the bag. 

I had hoped to get away with not telling you the name of our settlement, since, with the proud exception of Los Gallardos, it is the ugliest dorp in the province, but mention must be made. It's called La Cañada de San Urbano. 

San Urbano, or Saint Urban, may not have been named by his doting parents after his possible proclivity for the city lights, but he wound up as an early Roman pope who tragically lost his head in some theological disagreement back in 230AD. How he came to be honoured by the people of La Cañada - a settlement which can apparently count its history to around the 1800s - is a mystery; but his saint's day, if you are visiting, is on April 2nd, where his effigy placed on a cart is towed around the streets by a team of bullocks. 

There aren't many other attractions for the wealthier foreigner. We have a number of café-bars, most of which - covid permitting -  close at one o'clock. That's one in the afternoon. The few that tarry after this hour will offer beers and tapas until the wee hours of maybe 6.00pm. It's not a place for a jolly late-night out, although there's a 'Mexican' in Costacabana that stays open late. Anyhow, one can always cross the bridge heading south-west over the dry riverbed and mosquito sanctuary and find oneself rapidly enveloped in Almería City with its myriad attractions.  There are no hotels, foreign bars (although there's a Moroccan place which doesn't sell booze), souvenir shops or charity shops, however we have three supermarkets, who's walls touch one another, and a number of Chinese bazaars which are open until all hours. There are no grand old buildings, unfortunately, none of the graffiti could be described as tasteful and the church is decidedly modest. Aeroplanes - when the crisis is past - will fly low over the town as they arrive at the airport just next to Costacabana. Their passengers will either be headed to Mojácar in one direction, or Roquetas de Mar in the other. 

There is one country store nearby where I live, which is known as un ultramarinos - a shop that sells food, drink and imported items, including exotic spices. It is delightfully old-fashioned. You can fill your own bottle with moscatel or a dry white wine, and try the cakes and sausages brought in from Serón, Berja and other places. You buy them by weight.  It's at the Cruz de Martos if anyone asks. The estanco next door serves beer and coffee. 

I live on a horse farm, with my Spanish wife who teaches riding. We have thirty horses and, by the time the day is over, we're too bushed to go out for a smart dinner in the nearby city.

 

The Tortoise Wars

A few years ago, the Almería ecologistas managed to push through the Junta de Andalucía a rule saying that we couldn’t keep the tortuga mora in our gardens. 

This rare Spanish tortoise needed some good old TLC from the tree-huggers. 

Specimens would be handed in to Seprona (the Guardia Civil animal protection unit) and re-housed in safety. 

The two places built for the purpose were one in Bédar at 600,000€ which was never used (except for occasional BBQs and botellones) and another, above the snow-line, in Velez Blanco.

 Fines were considerable if you were caught with one of these tortoises (Mojácar has lots of them in the campo). 

At the time, I wrote ‘if you find a tortoise in your garden, either give it to the cops, or quietly brain it, or throw it over the garden wall into your neighbour’s property. Let them take care of it’. Happy times. 

Now we read , to no one’s surprise except the politicians, ‘The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Sustainable Development (CAGPyDS) has responded, a year late, to the request from Ecologists in Action regarding the fate of the tortugas moras collected at the Centre for the Recovery of Threatened Species in Vélez Blanco-Almería. 

The answer is devastating: thousands have died in this centre, where it is assumed they were recovering for their reintroduction into the natural environment…’. 

Ecologistas en Accion here carefully dodging the bullet.

 

Train-Station Scene, Almería

We had just returned from a trip to Paris where, although I can't remember many of the details, we had bought half a dozen chipmunks and a cage off some marketeers along the River Seine. 

My step-mother will have taken the picture. You can see her two hat-boxes among the luggage. She was a professional photographer, which is probably how the picture came out so well. 

In those days, the Madrid to Almería train had a sleeper, a British carriage made in 1928. Going the other way, you would bed down in the train around 11.00pm and wake up, fresh as a daisy, in down-town Madrid, the Atocha station, at 7.30am, ready for business. 

This picture comes from 1984. I had been living in Paris for a few months and had an apartment there. Smoked Gauloises then.

Edifice Genesis

A few years back, an American called Zach Allen contacted me and said he had once spent a summer vacation in Mojácar – where I was living – way back in 1956. He was the guest of a fellow college-student, whose father was the Spanish ambassador to Washington.

Zack sent me a couple of slides he had taken, one of the village (there wasn’t much to see) and one of the ambassador’s holiday home, el Palacio de Cháverri which was just off the beach. The first owner of the palacio was the Marquis of Cháverri, and he owned a shipping line. His captains were (apparently) instructed to fire off a cannon salute from their ships as they navigated past the estate on the way to or from the nearby port of Garrucha.

I wrote a story about the building here.

Zack had told me he had some more slides but that they were misplaced. I still hope that he finds them.

Old stories about Spain are fun to read, because we foreigners will have had little or no exposure to Spanish history and Spain, at its best, is a deeply eccentric place to know.

Historical structures are increasingly a good business too depending on circumstance, as, many venerable buildings have been knocked down, or they fell down, or they were fortuitously turned into luxurious hotels, or museums, or apartments. The Marquis’ palacio (above) is now attached, to its mortal embarrassment, to a four hundred room box-like package-tour hotel. Honk as you drive past. 

The Parador Hotel de Úbeda

Thus the old buildings that, against all the odds, have managed to have stayed erect over the centuries without too much of them falling down have the chance to be turned either into hotels (the government-run Parador chain creates very tasteful hotels out of old palaces, convents and other historic buildings) or repaired as simple money-makers (or ‘cultural tourist attractions’ to be more precise).

Unfortunately, tourists only have a finite period to go and see the historic sites, and the larger and more obvious ones will generally be higher on their list than some obscure pile of moss-covered stones which was once a fortress just a few kilometres walk upriver from a village in the hinterland.

Still and all, if you’re going anyway, it might be worth a photograph.

Or a story.