The Saga of the Hotel Algarrobico

Driving over the coastal mountains from the Almerian tourist-trap of Mojácar south (or is it west?) to Carboneras is a delight. You pass through the hamlet of Sopalmo, which sits in tiny splendour over a sandy track that leads drowsily down to the sea, a mile away. Here is one of only two places in Spain where you can find a chameleon.  Cristobal has a small restaurant there and will fill you up for ten euros as the kids go exploring with their butterfly nets.

We are at the edge of the gigantic – and generally rather empty – Natural Park of Nija/Cabo de Gata.

But before the large municipality of Nijar, increasingly covered with plastic farms, we must pass through Carboneras, the ugly fishing town made famous by the Algarrobico hotel.

The curving road passes the scraped hill of the ‘Moors Blood’, a colourful slab of striated rock where a battle may have taken place half a millennium ago, and zigzags towards the highest part of the route towards Carboneras, with crags on one side and alarming drops on the other: a road straight out of The Italian Job – or perhaps the perfect final scene for Thelma and Louise. At the top, there’s a small parking area, liberally decorated with graffiti, where you can see for miles. Camera-phones record an empty dry mountain, a rugged coast, that clean blue sea and – off to the southwest  – the back of a monstrous hotel, several miles away and far below.

The only plant-life in this – and most – of the Parque Natural is scrub: no doubt of huge environmental value to our friends the ecologists, but, dress it how you will, it’s just scrub none the less.

The ecologists are simple city folk. They live through subsidies, European funds and obscure publications. They are like the Caliban of Shakespeare: rude destructive fellows, who flow from their apartments in the suburbs out to deal harshly with the countryside, subsidised by the gullible politicians from far-off Seville. In Almería, the ecologists must ignore the 350 square kilometres of plastic farms, which do huge damage to the environment but bring in much wealth. They will spend their time – and what European funds they can attract – on such foolishness as ripping up a small plantation of agave outside the city: a plantation that has been there for almost a century. The plants, they say, are invasive. So too, they say, are the prickly pear cactus (brought to Spain by the conquistadores) – as the entire south east of Spain is plagued by an unstoppable cactus-fly. The local tortoise must be protected, they insist (again with European backing) so the harmless creatures are collected and sent to prison camps in the high sierras, where they solemnly die of the ‘flu.

A French businessman told me twenty years ago: ‘in the next century, the two growth industries will be tourism and ecology’.

In a small and ugly town in Almería, ten years later, the two forces finally declared war.

As the car breasts the final hill on the route to Carboneras, the rear of the ghastly hotel becomes visible again: surrounded by land prepared by the builder for shops, restaurants and an urbanisation of 250 villas (land, incidentally, which does not fall within the new frontier of the Natural Park, and is thus still theoretically viable). These days, sightseers come to see the hotel. Aghast, they take pictures: perhaps they’ll stay for lunch in the town. Nearby is the small villa where Peter O’Toole stayed when filming part of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, and just past the Algarrobico on the other side is the dry river bed where the Arab horsemen attacked Aqaba in that furious cinematographic gallop.

Carboneras is a reasonably well-off, if unusually ugly fishing town. It has three ports – commercial, marina and industrial – some nice beaches, good fish restaurants, a huge power station responsible for producing 25% of all the CO2 that is clogging up the air in Andalucía, a vast and inoperable sports stadium, and an unemployment rate of only 20% (compare Almería province at around 25%).

Opening the Algarrobico and finishing off the surrounding satellite urbanisation would have brought many jobs to the town, but as a smirking Greenpeace spokesperson said after the latest judgement, ‘they can always help work on the demolition’.

The reality is that, after ten years of rotting in the sun, open to the elements, to the vandals and the ecologists, the twenty story hotel would be almost impossible to finish. Its time had come. But, what about the costs involved in demolition – money that could have been better spent? The politicians speak blithely of returning the several hundred metres of empty rocky scree back to how it was – but how impossible is that? And, is it even worth the effort?

The justification for the demolition comes from a rule that you can’t build in a national park, even though the hotel was not in a national park when work began; indeed the promoters bought the land in 1999 off the Junta de Andalucía itself (through a public company called Soprea) as urbanisable. The boundaries were subsequently moved as the PP in Madrid changed the coastal building limits. In 2006, the project which had the blessing of then President of Andalucía Manuel Chaves, fell foul of the Minister for the Environment Cristina Narbona from the Zapatero Government, who ordered work stopped when the hotel was 90% complete: it was being built on public land.

Almería is a large province of 8,000 square kilometres, of which 3,100sqkms are protected – about 35% of the entire province. We are talking here of perhaps one hectare. Couldn’t Almería afford to lose a tiny fraction of its empty, unvisited and largely pointless parkland to help create some jobs?

A recent interview with the President of the Superior Court of Justice in Andalucía says that ‘judges sometimes contradict themselves – we are human and can also get things wrong’. A spokesperson for ‘Salvemos Mojacar’ (an extremist ecological organisation) does not suffer from the same doubts: ‘it must be demolished and the promoter should not be reimbursed by as much as one penny’ (they seek 70 million).

So, as sometimes happens in Spain: the building can never be completed, and it can never be entirely demolished. Jobs are lost in an area of high unemployment, and a rotting and monstrous hulk of a building will perhaps be turned one day, after at least a decade of uselessness, into a mountain of rubble.

Perhaps the rabbits, its future residents, will be pleased.

Article appeared in The Olive Press edition 234 March 2nd 2016

Foreign Representation in Spain

Back in 1994, Felipe Gonzalez decreed that some of the foreigners in Spain – the EU residents plus the Norwegians – would be able to vote in both local and European elections. His Minister for the Presidency was the appalling Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba (he of the doomed European Residence Cards), who evidently worried that we Europeans would vote in a conservative way in the local elections. Thus, we were allowed in 1995 to vote only in the European elections, which of course had no impact. It wasn’t until 1999 that we were first able to vote in the elecciones municipales.

Where, of course, and no doubt much to Rubalcaba’s surprise, most of us didn’t bother.

In that local election in 1999, following a small change to the Spanish Constitution, we Europeans were even able to run for office. Few of us put down our names for this honour.

Sixteen years later, there are still very few extranjeros in local government, even with a handful of extra countries with bi-lateral voters agreements with Spain – perhaps for lack of will on the part of the immigrants themselves and perhaps, too, because the local Spanish would find it problematic to give us their vote. Still, there are a few in various town halls across Spain, which must be a healthy development.

An interesting part of the recent plan by the PSOE/Ciudadanos coalition is to give all foreign residents the right to vote (and stand for office) in local elections, and better still, we would all be automatically inscribed on the election roster. The coalition probably won’t make it into Government, but the idea is now on the table.  A further notice to gather in the foreigners comes from a European study called Pathways to Power which bills itself as ‘The Political Representation of Citizens of Immigrant Origin in Seven European Democracies’. It seems that, in Spain, we have even less foreign immigrants in our governing bodies than is found in other European countries.  El País in English carries the story and says that Spain comes out bottom of the list for integration in the analysis of European parliaments. Again, the subject is now in the open. Why is this important? Without representation, a citizen has no voice. Without full integration, a city is divided.

In Favour of Bullfights

An article in favour of bullfighting, they said. It’s not going to persuade anyone who hates it to open their minds, or to give it a chance, I answered. Those who have their ideas made up about ‘animal cruelty’ or ‘Spanish stone-age traditions’ aren’t going to be swayed by me talking loftily about ‘art’, ‘culture’ or that fruity word ‘catharsis’.

Many of the British residents in Spain have been got at by their diet of white-bread satellite television and entertainers of the standard of Ricky Gervais, who makes his name by publicly playing with puppies and repeatedly announcing that anyone who doesn’t follow his wholesome lead is an utter shit.

In Spain, we have those who like the toros, those who don’t like the toros, and those who don’t like those who do like the toros. Members of this last group are known as ‘antitaurinos’. They feel a pious pressure to inflict their arguments – sometimes violently – on everyone else.

So, what’s the point of rolling out artists who loved the bullfight – Picasso, Goya, Dalí, Hemingway, the poet Lorca and the author García Márquez (the man who wrote 100 Years of Solitude and who famously said ‘I’m a Nobel Literature Prize Winner and I love the toros.  You: you who fancy yourself an antitaurino... what do you know of culture and tradition?’). When you have already made up your mind – or had it made up for you?

Joaquín Sabina, Spain’s premier folk singer, said just last week, ‘I think that there is a lot of ignorance among the antitaurinos and a lot of scorn over a thing which has lasted for centuries and which can be absolutely supreme: a metaphor for life and death’.

Perhaps that is part of the antitaurino problem – they can’t accept the profound truth that, without death, there can be no life.

So: to the Bullfight. I go sometimes with my friends and my companions, all Spaniards. I am a part of this culture and spend much of my time speaking Spanish, reading, watching, living the vida española. Thus, I do Spanish things and, naturally enough, enjoy this wonderful country and its people to the full. In my own province, Almería, there are sixteen bullrings. Some are modern or large city rings, others are small and a couple, I am sure, are no longer in use.

I might join a group of friends to see a novillada – free to the public, where the young and inexperienced (sometimes as young as fourteen) will buy a bull, hire a cuadrilla (the crew) and rent the bullring. All for one expensive shot at getting the magic right. Another time, we might go to see some of the stars of the bullfight: the matadores. There are people who treat them the same way as we used to treat The Beatles. With adulation.  One young woman of my acquaintance knows all of the bullfighters: their names, colours, favourite pases and so on. She keeps photographs of herself posing with some of these heroes of hers.

The crowd alone is worth a trip to the corrida. They are friendly, enthusiastic, vocal and generous. You will be lent a cushion to sit on, given a beer or a sandwich, or a squirt of warm red wine from a goatskin bota.  You will see, together with a few thousand others, astonishing acts of bravery, of skill and an indifference to danger, to injury.  This is Life, because Death is nearby. Do the onlookers like to see the bull suffer, and die? No. Many turn away from the moment. Are they cruel? No again. Death accompanies us all – I think that the Spanish are tolerant of this finality.

The crowd, so noisy during the spectacle, leaves quietly, and goes home. There is no truculence or fighting or drunkenness, like after a football match. A corrida is a social affair. The whole family came, from small and noisy children to gouty old grandparents dressed in black.

There is an industry behind bullfighting. Many jobs and much money are involved. The raw material, the fighting bulls, known as los toros bravos, are extraordinarily well looked after – if you like – because they are expensive. They will have free range on giant farms and will be bought to their destiny when they are four or sometimes five years old. Contrast this with a bullock taken from a small pen and killed by an electric bolt to the head at eighteen months or less just to make you a nice sandwich.

Will bullfighting ever be stopped in Spain by the well-meant interference of those with shrunken souls? Not in our lifetimes. 

Article appeared in The Olive Press February 18th.

Consequences of a Brexit

There will be a referendum in the UK this summer - apparently - and while it will affect those two million Britons who live in Europe, only a very few of us will be voting, or able to vote, to influence the outcome. This is of course the consultation over whether Great Britain should leave the EU, the choices being: staying, which is Good for Business, or leaving, which is Good for Nothing.
The 'Stay Vote' is interested in exports and not expats. A good example of the joys of Europe comes from a box of Kleenex tissues. You will find that the contents - paper handkerchiefs - are written in every language where the product is sold. Paper handkerchiefs, mouchoir de papier, pañuelos de papel and so on down to languages so obscure and peculiar, the good people at Kleenex HQ must have a job correcting the syntax. Meanwhile, if an Englishman buys some Kleenex in Bulgaria... well, good for him. End of subject.
The 'Leave Vote' seems concerned about the glories of the past. When Britain, with its two Trident subs, ruled the waves and Johnny Foreigner knew to doff his hat as we passed. In these days of finding those guilty of our falling standards, it's easily provable that the foreigners settling in the UK are to blame, taking our jobs and our womenfolk. That's about it, I think. Did I miss something?
While the debate rages in the British Media (controlled and owned by Moguls who have their main residence in the Cayman Isles), we read that 'Those Britons who have moved to Europe (there are two million of us) have lost any rights to influence British policy'. Oddly, the British are much more generous with the Gibraltarians (30,000 of them) and the Falkland Islanders (2,900 of them) than they are with us expats.
It must be something to do with the land. The British are not to be swayed by questions of applied freedoms. We should remember how Downing Street gave a British Island in the Indian Ocean, Diego García, to the Americans back in 1968 for purely strategic reasons, sending the entire population of 2,000 into a forgotten exile.
What, if anything, will happen to the British expats living in Europe in general - and Spain in particular - if the UK votes to leave the EU?
Short answer - nobody knows; and no one in a position of power either wants to tell us, warn us, discuss it with us, or indeed to worry about such an inconsequentiality. So let us explore the possibilities ourselves.
If the UK were to leave the EU - if 'Brexit' became a reality - then one of the chief demands of the 'outers': the UKIP, the right wing Conservatives and the grist and mill of the Nationalists and Britain First along with assorted closet-racists and elitists, would be to attempt to winnow out the foreigners. Hard, of course, with the Commonwealth citizens, but easier with the Europeans. There are 200,000 Spaniards living and working (but not retiring, never retiring) in the UK, and 500,000 Frenchmen. In all, around two million Europeans are said to be there - including plenty of Poles, Romanians, Estonians, Bulgarians and what not. Any inconvenience handed to them - from withdrawing medical rights, or insisting on work permits, and down to deportation - would immediately be answered by Madrid, Paris and Berlin in similar terms. Events happening in far-off London, or Birmingham or Glasgow, could suddenly be felt in Fuengirola, Marbella, Mojácar, Altea, Jávea and Ibiza.
The expats might find that Madrid would be treating us as they currently treat non-Europeans, or (for those who remember) as we were treated before Britain joined the EU. We could expect the return of visas, convertible accounts and those hard-to-obtain work-permits (we have over 30% unemployment in Andalucía). We would lose all and any voting rights if we stayed in Spain - in European and local elections as we have now (not that the former do us any good - there are twenty million unrepresented Europeans currently living in another European country without a voice in Brussels). We would lose Spanish health privileges and that over-65 bus pass. The demand for property would fall, and property-values in expat towns like Bédar, Benhavís and Benissa would crumble.
If the racists really took over in the UK and deportations became a reality, we could even be subject to the same treatment. Spain, they say, would never throw out the British because it makes too much money from our presence in those small towns in forgotten parts of the coast previously mentioned. Madrid is already inflicting the Modelo 720 on us (a declaration to the tax-authority of our world-wide ownings), declaring some/many of our homes in Andalucía to be 'illegal', supporting the Valencian 'Land Grabs', curtailing our pin-money rental plans and, in general, either ignoring us or treating us without much enthusiasm. We have no voice in Madrid and little anywhere else beyond Mijas and Calpe. Helen and Len Prior, whose home was demolished eight years ago in Vera, Almería, and who have lived ever since amongst the ruins of the villa, are our most famous members.
I don't think that the UK will vote for a 'Brexit', but the possible plight of two million Britons in Europe, and 750,000 in Spain, is certainly not going to influence the vote in any way whatsoever.

Mojácar's Broken Dream

Mojácar, as has been said before, could have been 'a player'. Here is an ambitious plan dating back to the early years of the 21st Century to build a bus station, offices, shops, apartments, a multi-story car park and a hotel in the street called Avenida de París which runs past the Pavana along under the three-story post office, library and police station that is (was) under the Mirador, the marble view-point from the town square which is now covered in tables and chairs from four local bars.  The same building, by the way, which has been condemned and is now to be torn down to build another town hall there.
The project came from a Lorca-based businessman and the Town Hall voted it down. It would ruin the view from the Mirador, they said.
Another disastrous mistake for Mojácar.

Sin Título

Maybe too much for Facebook... The truth is out there!

Sails and Sea Horses

A nice picture from Almería. The coast to the east towards Costacabana is 'unspoiled' - as a dreamer might call it - since there is little more than a pedestrian route and a road close to a narrow pebbly beach, covered nonchalantly with garbage. On the other side of the road, instead of expensive homes or fancy restaurants, there are tumbled down plastic farms: invernaderos. Who plans these things in the Almería Town Hall (or is it the ghastly will of the Junta de Andalucía)?
Still, ignore all that - Almería is pretty and ideal for great photographs - even from a mobile phone...

El Palacio de los Chavarrí, 1956

A young man called Zach Allen spent a few months in 1956 staying in a palace between Garrucha and Mojácar. This was the Palacio de los Chavarrí, now repaired, rebuilt and turned into a hotel called Fergus.
In those days, when there was almost no one living in Mojácar - they talk of just 600 citizens - Zach must have stood out as being very foreign indeed. His hosts were the Garrigues-Walker family - the father was Antonio Garrigues Diaz-Cañabate, later to become Spanish ambassador to both Washington and the Holy See. This was their summer house, they lived in Madrid.
Below his lodgings, women worked the tomato plantations. No one bathed on the beach; there were no tourists, no restaurants. Nothing.
Zach had his camera and here is his picture of the place where he stayed.

Some Friends

There's nothing like a barbeque with some Spanish friends, a few horses, some wine and a guitar.

The Almería Baths

The hammam, the Arab bath-house, is the perfect place to take your weary body - and there are a couple of them in the city of Almería. The best one is under a small hotel in the town hall square. It's called Aire de Almería. Here's their gallery.  The baths, in a high-roofed cavern, are quiet and the lights are dim. Music plays faintly. Incense wafts around healthily. I had gone with my companion to take the waters. We had remembered to bring our bathing costumes (mine is a minuscule red Speedo I've had at least thirty years) and enough money to get in upstairs (40€ each for ninety minutes splash plus a 15 minute massage). In the changing rooms, we put on slippers and an albornoz, a dressing gown. A hostess took us downstairs. I happen to be extremly shortsighted (I wear bottle-bottom contact lenses) and also, increasingly deaf. Downstairs, I could see nothing, and I could hear less. Over the distant mumble of the hostess I couldn't help but notice that there were a lot of sharp marble corners.

The attractions include a large warm bath (as in the photo, only a lot darker), a (very) hot bath, a freezing cold bath (yaraarrggh, I whispered as I fell in it), a large hydro-bubble bath, a saloon to sip complementary mint tea (if you can see the tea-pot) and a very hot sandalwood-smelling steam room. All perfect, and all confusingly empty - at least I thought it was, until I sometimes bumped into a fellow bather. Disculpe!  After a while a mysterious girl in black notices a coloured band on your wrist and takes you off for an aromatic massage. Very nice.
From time to time, it's good to have a treat, and a visit to the Arab baths hits the spot. And then, just outside, why, there's a bar to re-hydrate.
In all, I haven't felt so clean since shortly after that time my granny made me an ill-advised curry when I was seven.

Forget What I Just Said (No One's Listening Anyway)

(Goodness - this blog is ten years old)

I was trying to build up my Facebook page for Business over Tapas (my hard and useful news for property owners in Spain), so, seduced by that young and guileless look sported by Mr Zuckerberg in his publicity photos, I put myself down for a 25€ punch to get a few extra followers for my site.
It worked a treat - about 100 people joined up within the week, enthusiastic to hear about what's really going on in this country we call home. Only - on closer inspection, they were all Spanish. I had filled out this questionnaire, listing my main attractions as: 'News about Spain', 'Spanish Property', 'Spanish Investment', 'News Magazine' and 'Tourism'. Note: all English phrases and, in all, a pretty good spread, I think?
And a hundred enthusiastic people came back, swelling my readership considerably... only, just who exactly did Facebook approach with its advertising - British residents living in Spain? Or was it Spaniards?
Well, fair enough - who is interested in our little collective of British residents in Spain? Certainly no one who operates on a country or even a continental scale.
Take the TV people, for example. You want to watch English-language TV, then you should be based in an English speaking country. There's no accommodation for those who speak English, but don't live in the UK or Ireland. Learn the local language, conform. It'll make it easier. So, while many Britons watch Sky in Spain, they are all breaking copyright law. But, there's no legal way around it (not that any of us care).
Or the issue of the 'Brexit'. No one in the UK even considers that we émigrés should have the right to vote in a British referendum (even if it is patently going to affect us more than anyone else). We abandoned the Homeland. All two million of us (across the EU). Those in favour of staying within Europe talk pompously of 'exports' in the British press, but never of 'expats'.
The European Government doesn't recognise us either. We are over 20 million Europeans living in another European country. Do we have any representation? Of course not. Without our own politicians, spokespeople, culture, stars, writers and intellectuals, we will never have any voice; or service; or accommodation (Ask the Priors, who will celebrate their eighth year living in a garage in two weeks time).
In Spain, there's now a political party that represents animals and vegetarianism (I'm not kidding). It's called PACMA and it got about 120,000 votes in the recent General Election. People are more concerned about fur coats than they are about jobs (22% unemployment), or corruption (huge). Or the fact that over four million foreigners live in Spain, and are (with EU approval) not allowed the vote. About two-thirds of them are European. So what?
In geo-politics and in big business, there is no profit in the details.

Christmas Explained

The Christmas season is here, with all the gooey trimmings. I thought I'd write a piece to anticipate the freebie versions for later this week...
The freebies, as you may see, are fond of the word 'festive' which will creep into any article about Christmas, as will numerous references to 'El Gordo' (that's the name - by the way - of the first prize, not the name of the Christmas lottery drawn on 22nd December). There will be an article about the revolting cagoners - small nativity figures from Catalonia, increasingly models of easy-to-recognise public persons (particularly politicians) - portrayed taking a poop.
Christmas used to be the Three Kings (wait, there'll be an opportunity next week to write about them). Los Reyes Magos, of course, brought presents for January 6th: twelfth night, usually the day before school begins. There will be a public show, camels and three fellows dressed as the reyes (one in black-paint), on the evening of the 5th.
Now, commercialism, the Corte Inglés and Spain's millions of children have gleefully adopted Santa Claus (Papá Noel) as their own. More presents. I'll have the Play Station, thanks Dad. Spanish fathers, by the way, don't dress up as Santa. But, it'll come...
Later on in January, some earnest Spanish left wing groups will try and collect toys considered bellicose - plastic guns and catapults, to make a great point of destroying them publicly to make some really stupid point or other. They will receive massive coverage in the local Spanish dailies.
A nice point over the festive season (there, I said it) is to leave cakes and a bottle of booze, plastic cups at the ready, in the banks (useful before you ask to see your balance) and, until recently, in the petrol stations. Pity that's gone the way of all flesh... 
The Christmas lights will be tastefully ignored by most foreign diarists (the garish illumination will remain until someone finally takes them down, hopefully before February), and the ghastly high piping children's voices amplified out of all decency while belting out interminable villancicos (Christmas songs) until long into the New Year will be brushed over.
The Christmas Eve mass (the past midnight Misa de Gallo)  may earn a mention and economists (if not newspaper owners) will want to point out that workers get their Christmas bonus, an extra month's wages, at this time. The families won't be eating turkey - rather gambas and ham or cordero followed by those dry and inedible polverones (they collapse into a powdery lump in your mouth) and plenty of wine.
Don't forget the Spanish day of trickery falls on December 28th, it's called the Day of the Innocents.
On New Year's Eve, probably gathered in an expensive restaurant with live music, open bar and paper hats (called un cotillón), you are meant to eat twelve grapes for good luck (I hate grapes) during the twelve campanadas - carillons at midnight, and then dance until dawn.
But the big news for Christmas this year isn't Santa, or the elves, or the marzipan or the bottle of cheap champers (cava) made by the Catalonians; the big news is the elections. On December 20th. This Sunday. There will be change.

American Art

I have just spent a few weeks in Midwest America, based in Oklahoma, but here in this entry, visiting Arkansas. In a town called Bentonville, where lives the family that started Walmart, is an astonishing museum of American art. In, as a New Yorker or Angelino might say, the middle of nowhere.
The Crystal Bridges Museum is set in a beautiful location, spanning a lake. The surrounding grounds are peaceful, treed and full of sculpture, the inside - a revelation.
The collection goes from early American history to the latest in modern art. Of the twenty or so American artists I have heard of, all (except Fritz Mooney, obviously) are represented in the museum. Maybe not their best known work - but they are there.
The visit took me about 90 minutes, and starts with two portraits of George Washington. The art is well exhibited throughout and I came away highly content.
The museum was funded in its entirety by Alice Walton, a member of the family that owns Walmart. Entrance is free.
Sometimes, the wealthy put something back into the community - Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and others. Not so often in Spain though...

How The Politicians Will Affect Us In the Next Twelve Months

For some reason, the Government has decided to hold its General Elections on Sunday December 20th, which is nice for those many thousands of people who must man the polling stations. Besides the regional nationalist parties and the small United Left (the Izquierda Unida is a coalition of all sorts of far left and ecologist groups, including the Izquierda Republicana, the Partido Comunista de España, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario and other similar groups), we have the four main parties running.
These are the Partido Popular (the last government was run by this party in an absolute majority: Mariano Rajoy was the President); the PSOE (Pedro Sánchez, who by the way has an apartment in Mojácar Pueblo); newcomers the Ciudadanos (the leader is a Catalonian called Albert Rivera) and the Podemos (the pony-tailed leftist Pablo Iglesias leads this anti-establishment group).
The likely outcome - a coalition of two parties. Perhaps the PP with Ciudadanos (if the PP accepts a full inquiry and condemnation of corruption). Assuming the IU voters went with Podemos (one can dream), then the four main parties are in fact running neck and neck according to most surveys. The older voters apparently prefer their usual political choices: PP or PSOE; most other people, sick of the endemic corruption (Bárcenas, Rato, Chaves and Griñán, without going any further), like the two new groups, the conservative Ciudadanos or the left-wing Podemos.
Thanks to Government-fueled complications, the enormous number of Spaniards - around two million - who are resident abroad (they are almost all working in their adopted countries) have found that it is almost impossible to vote in these elections (just 7.5% will vote, according to estimates), and, with the election in the Christmas holidays, perhaps even less - as you must vote in your own circumscription - hard to do when it's 'London' and you are visiting Dad in Murcia. Few of this number, needless to say, will be sympathetic to the Partido Popular.
So, what will happen? The Central European Bank and the mainstream opinion in Brussels favour more austerity, more Rajoy (perhaps a soupçon less corruption). The other parties want to loosen things up a bit, drop some of the last government's worst excesses and try and turn Spain into a new direction.
In reality, forces from outside will continue to play a major part - with the hugely complicated Catalonia situation causing concern, the influence of the Troika on the economy and the possibility of incidents rising from terror attacks (one good thump, and Spain's main industry - tourism - could dry up overnight).
For the 750,000 Britons living in Spain (who of course, like the rest of the four million migrants here, can neither vote nor expect any benign attention from the politicians), there is another bumpy time ahead: the British vote on whether that country (and its unwilling expat passport holders) will stay in Europe. If a 'Brexit' occurs, we shall have a whole number of problems: residence, visas, work permits, health insurance, schooling, and - if Britain proves in a post-Brexit society to be sufficiently anti-foreign - perhaps even deportation.
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El Parque Desastroso de los del Medio Ambiente

I occasionally publish something in Spanish - at El Indálico, Actualidad Almanzora or, as here, La Opinión de Almería. This is about the Boticario Park just outside the City of Almería:

El Parque Desastroso de los del Medio Ambiente
Lenox Napier
Un mojaquero británico

Uno de los éxitos de la Consejería del  Medio Ambiente –y la verdad, no tienen muchos reclamos en Almería– es el Parque Botánico del Boticario, ubicado en los Llanos de las Cañadas, en la capital. El parque fue pensado como un escaparate de todos la flora almeriense puesta en un lugar, una estancia de catorce hectáreas. Un grupo de jardineros, unos visionarios y un nutrido grupo de contables, abogados y, sobre todo, políticos se pusieron mano a la obra en los primeros años del siglo actual para conseguir fondos europeos para  realizar en 2005, como dice ‘Almeriapedia’, “…una extensión de 14 hectáreas en las que se ha intentado recrear los distintos paisajes de la provincia y que cuentan con más de 1.300 árboles, 2.000 arbustos y 75.000 plantas”.

La verdad es que es una maravilla. Trabajaron bien los planificadores y el parque nació dividido en varias zonas –un Jardín árabe (“una recreación del Jardín del Paraíso”, como dice la misma fuente); un parque forestal, con muchos ejemplares de árboles autóctono; zonas húmedas; un parque botánico; bancos,  alamedas… y hasta unas cuantas maquinas tipo “biopark” para los mayores. A su lado, hay un restaurante privado, un parque infantil, un tipo que alquila cochecitos de pedal y un amplio sitio para dejar el coche.

Lo malo es que un parque así necesita mucha agua, mucho cuidado y un ejército de jardineros. En una palabra, mucha pasta. Por esta sensible razón, la Consejería intentó (y volvemos a la fuente antes citada) “…ceder al Ayuntamiento de Almería, pero sin embargo, ni Junta de Andalucía ni Ayuntamiento de Almería se han puesto de acuerdo para concretar dicha cesión”.

Así están las cosas. A consecuencia de esta negación, los del parque tuvieron que sufrir algunas economías: por esto existen los contables. La evidencia de varias visitas mías a lo largo de este año me enseña que no hay ningún jardinero (quizás uno sale por los noches, de esto no se sabe). No hay agua; hasta la recreación del Jardín del Paraíso está media seca, sin plantas, y con sus acequias llenos de fango y basura.

Los árboles están más o menos bien, entre algunos secos o mal cuidados. Los prolíficos chumbos (y nosotros pensando que el nopal fue “una planta invasora”), cubiertos en enfermedad, mosca blanca y muertos. A lo largo de todo el parque, en cuanto de “las 75.000 plantas”, sencillamente no queda ni una. La zona húmeda tiene un escondite para contemplar a los pájaros, pero el agua está muy sucia y, de pajaritos, no hay ni una. En el verano, durante otra visita mía, tampoco había agua: lo que hay actualmente viene de la lluvia. Quizás la cosa más chocante es el estado de las maquinas absurdas para los mayores: están oxidadas, destruidas o sencillamente ausentes.

¿Un desastre entonces? No, al contrario, es una maravilla. Catorce hectáreas de alamedas arboladas, muy poca gente, una tranquilidad espléndida y un muy buen bar a la salida, llamado El Álamo.

Portrait of Seville

Picture by Alfredo Piris. The artist was in Mojácar for a time in 1983. The picture is the view, he told me, from his lodgings in Seville. It looks to me like he couldn't afford the Hotel Alfonso XII.
I was studying at The International School in Spain in 1970, normally in Ronda, but while it was being repaired, in Seville at the British Institute. The school was fun - you could smoke in the classroom, there were girls (I'd been used to the monastic curriculum of a British Public School), American kids... and I lived somewhere in the city, and commuted to my studies (such as they were) on a motorbike. The headmaster was a writer on Spain called Alistair Boyd, who lived in Ronda.

Toy Story

Well, look at that. A small boy playing with what might be considered by an old-fashioned and irredeemably sexist parent as girl's toys. Boys and girls are all one now and it's our job as parents to make this plain. The picture is just one page in the new toy catalogue from Toy Planet (see it here) as approved by Spain's loveys and the Ideal newspaper here, the other pages are similar: girls with footballs, boys with frilly dolls. The company pitches itself as a purveyor of 'non-sexist' toys (or perhaps reverse-sexist) and it should do well. Besides the anodyne toys now favoured by Spanish parents (especially those who evidently don't want grand-children), there is also a popular drive these days to destroy aggressive war toys. These ghastly things, plastic machine guns (pink for a boy) and so on are routinely handed in after Twelfth Night and burnt in a municipal bonfire or, as in the picture below, mercilessly and overwhelmingly crushed:

So remember, a feather duster for the boys and an electric train set for the girls. Who knows - maybe a few of the braver kids will swap their gifts once the light are out...

Creep

It must be strange to wear a message written in a foreign language or - even worse - a foreign script - when you have no apparent idea of what it says. Those silly enough to allow tattoo artists to work on their bodies must be near the top of the list - as some decorative piece of Arabic or Chinese is lovingly stamped into their bosom, ass or arm, which may - or may not - say 'Love Brother Love'. Are you going to trust a tattoo artist with your future - especially when you're drunk?
Young girls are particularly attracted to outfits with improper invitations written on them (I saw one over the weekend that said 'Take Me Now' - imagine explaining to the judge the following morning, No m'lud, the invitation was definitely there).
The model in my picture has the best - or is it worst - example of what not to wear. I saw her in H&M yesterday. Blimey, my Dear. 

Apparently, they are used to make the Earth spin...

I looked up the Almerian town of Fiñana on Wiki. It has a population of just over two thousand, a castle, a fortress, a hermitage, an ethnological museum and the local people apparently thrive on eating gachas and chunks of zaramandoña (no idea).
But wait, I have a feeling they've forgotten some small detail which should be mentioned...

Bicycle Lanes: The Movie

There seems to be a cycling mania going on.
Yesterday, driving around Mojácar was almost impossible with little gaggles of tourists en bicicleta peddling inexpertly around the beach. Later in the autumn and winter, we shall have the pelotones of professional racing cyclists in giant groups scooting along in front of us (peddle faster, dammit!) as we drive to Turre or Los Gallardos on important business. Meanwhile, the local Town Halls are building more and more cycle paths (at the expense of pavements and vital parking spaces), which - as far as I can see - few cyclists use, preferring the street.
The planners at Almeria City Hall, and I quote my other blog The Entertainer Online, '...are allowing skates, skateboards and oddly, wheelchairs, on their bicycle lanes which now infest (70kms built so far) the city'. The idea is to give preference to pedestrians and bicycles over motorised traffic within City Limits.The idea in Mojácar, I suspect, is to promote tourism as our main source of income despite any inconvenience to those who live there. Luckily, it's too hard a pull for any but the toughest cyclist to make it up to the top of the hill (...and arrive in Souvenir Heaven).

Hotel Algarrobico. A Decision?

The issue of the Hotel Algarrobico was due to be resolved this past September. But, as usual and to nobody's surprise, it wasn't. It's an ugly building, erected on the coast (there wouldn't be much point on erecting it in the interior, now would there?). The hotel is twenty stories tall and has - or will have, or would have 411 rooms. It would, if ever opened, bring employment to Carboneras, the unattractive town nearby, famous for its dirty power station (far more ugly than the hotel) and its impossibly grand sports stadium which the town hall can't afford to open.
The hotel is just part of a larger projected urbanisation, with shops and restaurants and bars and souvenir shops, all aimed at amusing the tourists who would fill the Algarrobico from the day it was opened, back presumably in about 2008, if it hadn't have been stopped by an inconsiderate politician in far-off Madrid called Cristina Narbona, at the time, PSOE Minister for the Environment.
The hotel was almost finished when the order came through in 2006. The surrounding rock-face had been cut and shaped into space available for the satellite commercial centre and the main building was at the stage of putting in the interior work: 94% finished, says Spanish RTVE here. The builder, Azata del Sol, said and says that it had all the correct paperwork, the ecologists (such as Ecologistas en Acción, Greenpeace and the eccentric Salvemos Mojácar), who managed to halt the wretched thing, say that it is in a national park and can't be built.
As with the 300,000 'illegal homes' in Andalucía, nothing was said until the eleventh hour.
Now, years later, there is still no answer - or rather, there are too many court decisions, some for and some against. Whichever side wins, the Public will lose. If it's Azata, then they will claim massive damages to repair the site, ravaged by time and various attacks from vandals, ecologists and souvenir hunters. Furthermore, after all the excitement, would people want to stay there anyway? Maybe Azata doesn't want to win any more - so just pay them off their investment, plus lawyers, interest, loss of earnings and what have you. If the environmentalists win, then the entire site would need to be demolished and the whole area replaced, somehow, with an innocuous chunk of coastal cliff. How much would that cost? The price of a hospital or two, without doubt.
And, in a region with 35% unemployment, and little chance of alternative income beyond tourism, what about the job losses?
So, whoever gives the order can expect a short future in politics. Best just to change the subject, pass the buck, shrug and let the stupid thing continue to rot.