The Mojácar Story

Mojácar is a beautiful town located on the coast in the Province of Almería in the south-east corner of Spain. It is small, relatively unknown and is home to several thousand northern European and Spanish settlers which, between them, make up about half of the population. The municipality is said to enjoy a micro-climate: not too hot in the summer nor too cold in the winter. The community is traditionally divided into el pueblo, the upper town; la fuente, the fountain (the lower reaches of the town) and la playa, the coast, where in fact around 80% of the population lives. Other quieter areas exist – such as las huertas (the orchards) and the small hamlets that form part of the 72 square kilometre municipality such as Sopalmo, Agua del Medio, Las Alparatas and so on. Behind the pueblo, there are mountains to climb and forgotten sites to see. The beach itself stretches for around 17 kilometres and has, as might be expected, everything from full-service well appointed Blue-flag beaches with bars and restaurants, life-guards and public showers, to quiet empty beaches where the only interruption comes from a curious seagull.

Mayor Jacinto Alarcón is remembered as the man who re-invented Mojácar. ‘It’s where the sun spends the winter’ he said in 1965 with satisfaction, as the first trickle of tourists began to visit the village. Some of these early visitors bought houses or land, at what today would be thought of as ludicrously cheap prices. They stayed and their culture and ideas were somehow assimilated into Mojácar.

The village grew slowly, as new houses were built. The beach, a little-used area reserved mainly for the tomato growers, finally became urbanised as well.

Some of the new settlers were artists. They were attracted by the remarkable village, built as it were to look like a scattering of sugar lumps on the final mountain of the Filabres chain, as it plunges from the interior of the province of Almería into the blue Mediterranean below. It is a harsh beauty: Jacinto had insisted that all the houses must be painted with whitewash and the dramatic tumble of flat-roofed white houses with narrow streets adorning a hill some 200 metres above sea-level, in the most arid surrounding, remains irresistible to artists, poets and writers.

History

The hills that today are adorned with the white cubist village have been inhabited for thousands of years. In nearby Cuevas del Almanzora, Major neolithic remains were discovered around a hundred years ago by a Belgian archaeologist called Louis Siret: Mojácar can probably claim a similar longevity. The nearby pyramid mountain of ‘old Mojácar’, a steep indefensible hill visible from the Mojácar viewpoint off the Plaza Nueva, may give a clue to Mojácar’s name. The hill appears to have had a religious significance, and it seems that the Roman name ‘Mons Sacra’, sacred mountain, was later transformed by the Moors who held Mojácar for many hundreds of years until the end of the XV Century into ‘Muxacra’, and from there, it changed again with Christian tongues into ‘Moxacar’ and eventually Mojácar.

Back in olden times, the sea was a potential enemy. Pirates could arrive on the beach at any moment, and villages were generally built away from the immediate coast, to make it easier for the defenders and correspondingly more difficult for the pirates – generally issuing from the Barbary Coast in North Africa (although even the Vikings managed to infiltrate the Mediterranean as far as Valencia back in the IX Century).

It was best to keep the settlement hidden, and Mojácar originally grew behind the hill it now crowns. In the event of an attack, the defenders had the option to flee inland. Watchtowers along the coast, ready with fire and pitch, would give first warning of any incursion. Some of these watchtowers and forts, carefully restored, can be seen today locally, including one of each along the Mojácar coast to the South.

The fall of Mojácar to the Christian Kings, los Reyes Católicos, in 1488 is remembered colourfully in a local festival that occurs on and around June 12th each year. Mojácar, an important local Moorish-held town, was on the route that Queen Isabela of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon were taking towards Granada, the final capital of the Moorish empire in Spain (which fell in 1492, the same year that Columbus discovered America). The story has it that the interview for the surrender of Mojácar (to avoid a siege and probable slaughter by the overwhelming Christian forces) was held at the Fuente (the Fountain) between Captain Garcilaso for the Christians and the Muslim leader Alavez who was asked for the surrender of his town. According to legend, this is his reply:

‘We are as Spanish as you. We have been here for seven hundred years and now you tell us to leave. We have never raised arms against the Christians; I think we should be treated like brothers, not like enemies and we should be allowed to continue to work our land. But know this: before we surrender like cowards, we will die like Spaniards’. Brave words!

In 1530 Emperor Charles V received such support for the house of Hapsburg from Mojácar that the city was awarded the coat of arms of a two-headed eagle. Later, Philip II added the slogan: La muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Mojácar, llave y amparo del Reino de Granada: 'The very noble and loyal city of Mojácar, key and guardian of the Kingdom of Granada'.

Mojácar was important locally during the following centuries and is recorded as reaching 10,000 inhabitants in the XVIII Century. Another source records a population of 6,000 people in 1870.

In 1911, a local census records that Mojácar had 4,979 people on the town hall register, 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.

 The pueblo maintained this number of inhabitants until round about 1920 when, slowly, the 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 local de-forestation (due to an unexpected lack of trees), a peculiar plague of locusts in 1901, the end of the local silver, copper and lead mines in the 1920s (run for 40 years in the surrounding hills mainly by the British) 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.

A local legend, impossible to prove or otherwise, says that Walt Disney was either born in Mojácar, or perhaps born in Chicago to a disgraced Mojácar girl, who fled the town for America around 1899, pregnant and afraid.

Modern History

By 1960, as the population fell away, there were only a few hundred people left; but one of them was the irrepressible Jacinto Alarcón, chosen by the provincial governor as mayor. At the same time, attracted by the light and the views, a school of Almerian artists called ‘Los Indalianos’ (named after a Spanish saint) were frequent visitors to the forgotten pueblo.

Happily, the mayor and the artists welcomed each other. The artists named the local totem after themselves – the Indalo: a figure of a stick-man that appears to hold a bow or a canopy over its head as protection. Used in Mojácar for centuries and previously known as ‘the little Mojácar man’, the totem to be one day known as the Indalo was painted over the lintels of houses for good luck. 

Jacinto began to give away houses and land to those who agreed to settle and to invest. A number of foreigners began to take up his offer and, at one point, a number of foreign ambassadors owned houses in Mojácar (giving rise to the street called ‘Calle de los Embajadores’). Jacinto also managed to contact the minister for tourism in Madrid to ask him to build a Parador government hotel in Mojácar, which to everyone’s surprise, was granted.

The beach, now known as Mojácar Playa, began to attract home-buyers. Houses and later urbanisations were built. A hotel chain came to Mojácar in 1975, bringing ‘package tourism’ with them. The town’s fortunes were guaranteed and Jacinto retired, giving way to the democratic mayors which followed Franco’s death.

Today, Mojácar has some eight thousand inhabitants, rising in the summer months to perhaps as many as twenty five thousand.

Gastronomy

Mojácar has never truly been famous for its fish and there is no port. Hobby fishing and, more importantly, the next-door port of Garrucha nevertheless supply Mojácar with a bounty of fresh fish and molluscs. The traditional Mojácar fare is based mainly around the pig, with many types of local sausage, and of course the many products of the fields and orchards. Try the Wednesday market in the parking area behind the pueblo for the freshest local produce. For eating out, a number of local bars will offer tapas, those small nibbles that come with a beer or a glass of wine.

There are local restaurants which serve delicious meals, whether simple salads and fish on the hot plate, or chicken, pork and mutton dishes, or of course paella: that famous Spanish rice-dish. There are other restaurants who favour ‘modern cuisine’, inspired by some of the World’s greatest chefs, where Spanish ingenuity in the kitchen is a byword.

Then, we have a plethora of fine foreign restaurants, each anxious for your patronage. We have food from Germany, Thailand, the Middle East, North Africa, Argentina, Mexico, China, France, Italy, Ireland, the UK, Holland and India. Everything from a simple pizza to the best of fine-dining.

Mojácar Today

With the arrival of the first foreigners in the sixties, Mojácar’s hidden life was lost. The village soon had a number of foreign bars and restaurants, and the silver Indalo medallion was better known in far-off London or New York than was the province of Almería itself. This helped to make Mojácar a cosmopolitan town and, as more restaurants, beach bars and hotels sprung up on the beach, the town became in short order an internationally-known resort. Today, there is a mixture of local and foreign citizens, with the multicultural junior school as perhaps a worthy symbol of this high level of integration.

Mojácar, indescribably beautiful, has been chosen to join the select group of ‘Pueblos más Bonitos de España’, the most beautiful towns of Spain (there are only six in all Andalucía).

Fiestas and Attractions

There is always something going on in Mojácar. Concerts are organised both by the Culture Department in the Town Hall as well as by the many bars and beach-clubs. There are more of these during the high season, which stretches from Easter to late September. Other attractions include art exhibitions (there is a municipal art gallery and some other commercial ones). There are any number of sports activities, from aquatic sports to lawn bowls, golf, padel-tennis and bicycling: clubs and teachers/trainers are easily found. There are also walking clubs, gyms and yoga groups. There is, of course, any number of boutiques and shops to suit all tastes.

The festivals organised by the Town Hall include the Carnival week, a picnic called ‘la Vieja Remanona’ and the Romería de San Isidro. These take place in the first months of the year. Later come the Easter parades and the colourful and famous Moors and Christians celebrations in the second week of June. This festival sees the townsfolk divided into half a dozen different groups, known as cábilas, and they will dress up in astonishing period costumes and will party for three days straight. The summer continues with regular concerts in the Town Square and culminates with the town fiesta of Saint Agustín on and around the 28th of August. The final dates on the calendar are the Virgen del Rosario on and around the 7th of October and then the Christmas, New Year and Twelfth Night celebrations. 

How to Get There

Mojácar is 13 kilometres off the A7 motorway, leaving either at the Vera or Los Gallardos exits. The Almería airport is around 50 minutes and the Alicante airport is about three hours away. Other airports within the region include Murcia, Granada and Málaga.

With the Free Press, Someone is Always Paying

Our local free newspaper, The Euro Weekly News (Almería edition), lives from its advertisers. Evidently. It's not a pay-for newspaper with some responsibility to its readership.  Thus, its content can sometimes be somewhat partisan, taking the view, above all, of its clients.
Such an example is a recent one-sided report about Mojácar's plans for the beach-bars, which failed to mention the spirited opposition from the general public for the project to extend the beach-promenade at the cost of a number of popular and historic beach bars.
But then, the Town Hall is an enthusiastic advertiser both here and on the local radio (Spectrum). These media live from advertising, not from good-will  (check Actualidad Almanzora for better reportage - a medium, incidently, that the Mojácar town hall refuses to consider for either news or advertising).
At the same time, other stories at the Euro Weekly are pushed aside. There was no mention of FITUR in this week's paper (the Golden Indalo?), nor of the sad anniversary of Helen and Len Prior, now living in their garage in Vera for nine years (since January 9th 2008) nor indeed of the recent death of Alan Bishop, one of the founders of The Entertainer (the precursor of the EWN).
The free-sheet gives some useful club and commercial information - but is it enough for one's news-feed?

Sexist Toys

Spanish toys can be sexist - you know, little fire engines for boys and pink dolls for girls. This naturally can stymie their later intentions to mature naturally and easily into either hetero- or homo-sexuals.
You might think that the foregoing is ridiculous, but the 'Observatorio Andaluz de la Publicidad no Sexista del Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer' evidently doesn't - with its complaint (here) that an unacceptable number of children's adverts on the TV are offensive with a painfully exact 43.27% of ads being deemed 'sexist' and therefore inappropriate.
What, someone has been watching all the children's telly over the season  armed only with a red pen and a bottle of tequila?
According to the leader of this alarming group, 'these toys reflect in a very clear way the gender stereotypes that are inculcated on impressionable children and young people, without any consideration of the impact they might have on the conduct of the future adult'.
The next ludicrous campaign, to be seen in a few days, is to switch warlike toys (little plastic guns and the like), for peaceful non-sexist non generic toys or games in non-gender identified colours.
Go!


Anyhow, what's wrong about a tool-set for girls? A pink one, obviously.

Where the Sun Passes the Winter Season

You've seen those endless agony of pictures from the Tourist Office - wide empty beaches, narrow empty streets, the impossibly long empty promenade? Honestly, it's not as bad as that here. There may not be many people around in the winter (the village, frankly, is a mess), but the weather is warm and a few brave restaurants and bars have remained open for the residents.
So, how to promote Mojácar outside of the rather obvious sun, sea and cheap souvenir season?

Well, follow the advice of the old mayor Jacinto, who back in the sixties coined the phrase 'Mojácar, donde el sol pasa el invierno'.

This Year: Next Year

An interesting year indeed. In Spain, we managed most of the year without a government, and then got the one we expected all along. Along the way, the PSOE collapsed into third place obscurity. In the UK, the appalling Brexit was voted by a small majority and in the USA, an eccentric anti-establishment candidate took the presidency. How does all of this have an impact on foreign residents and investors in Spain? Will the housing market be further affected and could tourist figures stagnate? Could the British living in Spain find themselves excluded from EU privileges? Perhaps more worrying still – could the USA go, in some unexpected way, rogue? We must wait for next year to find out: January 20th is Inauguration Day in the USA for President Trump (or his replacement) and the end of March seems to be the final date for the UK’s decision on leaving the EU. 

Sometimes, living in the land of the Lotus-Eaters, we hope that none of those earth-changing events happening elsewhere will affect us. Maybe the pound will go up or down a few cents, but we shall soldier on, enjoying (as is our right) a glass of wine on our terrace as the sun gently sets behind the mountains that, in some way, have protected us from the real world for so long.

Maybe things will stay sweet. Maybe if we don't know what's going on, then those things we don't know about won't threaten our way of life here. 

Maybe. 

Mojácar Village: Quiet (Noisily speaking)

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Here is the view from below of what was (and will, by Easter, again be) the mirador, the viewpoint from Mojácar village. They are trying to get people to visit the pueblo this winter: Good Luck with that.

Horsing Around

The Old House in Norfolk

About the last thing I expected to be doing last Thursday was to be sitting in a bar in Villaricos with a visiting British couple, reminiscing with the husband: without doubt the only person in the entire world who would be familiar with my old childhood bedroom.
You see, it was his, too.
I was born in a large crumbling mansion in Norfolk in 1953 and spent the first thirteen years of my life, when not at a British prep school being beaten for neglecting my Latin, living a carefree if lonely life in the house and grounds of the family pile.
Both were extremely large. The house had thirteen bedrooms - not all in a comfortable shape, since eleven of them were empty - and it sat in a park of fifty acres, which it shared with a number of cows. The nearest building that wasn't, in some way, beholden to the 'Hall', was at the edge of a village about two miles away. The local policeman would regularly fall off his bike into the ditch rather than see my parents driving home in an erratic fashion from the nearest public house at some time after 'Last Call'.  In return, he got a crate of whisky for Christmas. In fact, now that I think of it, perhaps this explained more his lack of balance on the bicycle rather than his passion for noblesse oblige.
I had no siblings, and hardly any playmates. The house was far away from any neighbours and surrounded by a large park. In Norfolk in those days, besides the dearth of other local children, the fact was that they, as well as being within a comfortable radius, also had to be deemed appropriate to mix with a young gentleman like myself. 
This whittled the final list down, I think, to six.
School, while providing more children of an age and accent similar to me, was not a solution, since I preferred books, hated football, and was known to all as 'a solitary type'.
When I reached thirteen, and was on the cusp of being sent to a public school (even worse than a prep school, since the bigger boys at 18 were, in fact, grown ups), my parents sold the house in 1966 and sensibly moved to Spain, a place where there was no class system, and where the policemen preferred brandy...
On a flying visit back to England, they auctioned the furnishings with the help of the local vicar (during, I have to say, a drunken stupor: some odd bits being later sent in a large box to Spain, including a three-legged chair, an empty crate of whisky bottles and a broken bicycle pump) and left word to sell the roost, which eventually went to a family of whom I know nothing beyond the name - Leggett.
Many years later, when my father was gone to His Reward, I briefly toured Norfolk with my new wife, Barbara. We had come for a memorial service in the tiny Saxon church which stood on land we had owned. My father had given the church to, well, The Church, and in return, the diocese had agreed to allow a memorial plaque to be affixed in the nave, 'when the time came'.
We drove through those narrow Norfolk lanes that summer day in 1987, and where the old house had stood for several centuries, all that we could find left was a large pile of rubble. The Leggetts, it appeared, had been obliged to sell the park and the house to an avaricious gravel company who later mined the entire area, the Saxon church by now resting on a tiny island, apparently providing much of the gravel that lies under the M27. The preservation order on the house being no match for an unattended digger with the motor left foolishly running...
Here comes one of those odd things that happen to make life interesting.
The son of the Leggetts, a boy who spent ten years in the same house as me, who slept in the same bedroom as I did, now lives forty years on in France.  Like any expatriate of sound intelligence, he has a poor view of the Brexit nonsense and, while posting something scathing the other day on Facebook somewhere, found a post of mine nestling just above his own.
I duly got a message (the wonders of the Modern Age): 'Are you the one who...?'
For once, being called Lenox was a help.
My bunk-mate was coming to Spain and would be staying in Villaricos, the beach where the Americans mislaid a few nuclear bombs back in 1966, around the same time that my parents were settling into Spanish life.
Villaricos is about ten kilometres from Mojácar, where I live.
And so, last Thursday, we met over a few beers and a remarkable number of fresh sardines.
And we talked about the old house where we were both brought up...

Another Garden Plague

Joining the list of local plant-pests, a list that includes mortal plagues on the chumbo cactus (cochineal bug), the palm tree (palm weevil), and lesser plagues on the olives (olive psylla), pine trees (processionary caterpillars), bougainvillea (ant-bourne infections), eucalyptus (gall wasp) and so on, we are now host to the 'agave snout weevil' (here).
This insect, similar in looks to the palm weevil (picudo rojo in Spanish) is about half the size of its more colourful cousin, and it attacks several different types of agave.
The normal green acacia, the one that abruptly produces the dramatic century flower that towers over the rest of the plant, and then dies, grows in abundance near to Retamar in Almería and this has upset our friends the ecologists. These city-dwelling absolutionists are against what they term as 'invasive plants' (the conquistadores brought them back in their luggage) and they have vowed, at least until the funding dries up, to exterminate the above-mentioned plantation. If they succeed, there will be nothing left but the Almerian pre-desert scrub which seems to soothe their souls.
Whether or not they introduced the picudo negro into the plantation will perhaps never be known. The insect comes from Mexico, and its large, fat, white grub is the thing that is at the bottom of every decent bottle of tequila or mescal. Powdered, with salt, you lick it off your finger with a shot of José Cuervo Gold.
Inevitably, the picudo negro has found other things it likes to eat, including ornamental agave, the type that features in many local gardens. It kills the plant as sure as the picudo rojo killed the palm trees.
They may be in the yukka as well...

Later: the bottom picture after I started removing the dying agave: inside were several palm weevils as well (picudo rojo)! You can see both types, rojo and negro, in this picture.

The British are Nuestros Amigos

Around a quarter of all town halls in Almería sent a clear message this Friday: 'We want our Britons to stay'. These town halls, collected together in a union, have little or no tourism: and much of their recent wealth stems from foreign, mainly British, settlers.

The Spanish authorities in general spend heavily on tourism, with a ministry and a large budget. They however allow nothing for 'residential tourism', as the phenomenon of foreign property owners is described. Small obscure interior towns often have no normal tourism, and are therefore much more understanding and indeed welcoming of foreign settlers than their coastal colleagues

The Mancomunidad del Almanzora is a union of 21 towns in Northern Almería. On Friday in a full plenary session, they agreed to give every support to the British residents to protect them, as they can, from the potential ravages of Brexit.

From the left: The president of the Mancomunidad, the mayor of Zurgena and councillor Jim Simpson. Three local mayors are on the right of the photo.

The institutional photograph after the plenary session. Andrew Mortimer is on the far right next to Jim Simpson. I'm in the back somewhere...

Specific points raised included health services, the right to work and to vote.

The meeting was held in the Town Hall of Zurgena and the subject was presented by local councillor Jim Simpson. Experts called to argue the case were Lenox Napier and Andrew Mortimer.

The President of the Mancomunidad, Antonio García, speaking for his fellow mayors, said he would take on the subject as his own.

There are an estimated 12,000 Britons living within the area covered by the union.

The Mancomunidad is now set to send out a notice to other town halls and councils suggesting they should join in the statement.

Jim, Andy and myself work for a group that seeks to give rights and protection to all ex-pats living in Europe - find out more at Europats here. 

The Cuevas Art Museum

At the top of Cuevas del Almanzora, in the old (and beautiful) part of the city located in the desert region of northern Almería, there's a XVI century castle. The castle houses a collection of modern Spanish art which was put together by a man called Antonio Manuel Campoy, who lived there for a period in the mid 20th century. The art is collected in half a dozen rooms, and includes paintings by most Spanish artists of the first half of the nineteen hundreds, including Tapies, Miró, Solana, Barceló and Picasso. There are also paintings from two famous artists from the Almerian Indaliano movement: Cantón Checa and Jesús de Perceval. Fascinating. The two euro ticket also gets you into the facing gallery with two collections of Goya prints - 'Los Disparates’ and ‘La Tauromaquia’, plus a modern art gallery and a museum dedicated to the local discoveries of the archaeologist Luís Siret.
Antonio Manuel Campoy was originally from Cuevas and was an acknowledged 'man of letters'. He died in Madrid in January 1993. 

Opening times are 10,00h to 13.00h and 17.00h to 20.00h Tuesday to Saturday, plus Sunday mornings. The museum does not allow cameras (Stock photo above).

The German Visit to Garrucha

This fine looking pocket battleship, the Admiral Scheer, has been in Spanish Shilling before, with a report of her shelling Almería City in 1937, in a revenge attack for the ambush on the German sister ship Deutschland by Republican forces in Mallorca.
A few weeks earlier, the Admiral Scheer has startled the good people of Garrucha by dropping anchor offshore and sending a skiff into the harbour. From the surrounding hills, the local people, all supporters of the Republic and scared already of the progress of the Civil War, watched as the skiff berthed on the sand. A group of militia from the Revolutionary Committee, armed with pistols and sticks, warily approached the boat.
The Commander of the pocket battleship was Otto Ciliax, and his mission was to collect any German nationals that might be resident in Garrucha. After a merry Heil Hitler, his agents were escorted by the militia to meet the German consul (Garrucha was a mining head and had three consuls at that time: British, Dutch and German) Federico Moldenhauer was also the local pharmacist, and he told the Germans that he was perfectly safe and would stay in Garrucha, and that, by the way, here was a crate of wine as a gift for the Kapitan.
To this day, the Moldenhauer family resides in Garrucha, and the pharmacy is run these days by a descendent. 

From an original story by José Berruezo here.

We Hold These Truths To Be Self Evident

It seems like it only took a few minutes before the British ex-pats in Spain started to react in horror to the result of the referendum held in the UK in late June – look at that, they said: the bloody British electorate have ditched us.

We may not be Falkland Islanders, but we had still expected a slight bit of concern from our fellow-Brits trapped over there in the xenophobic atmosphere of 21st Century UK. After all, we did put in our time there alongside them at one point (before a sensible and well-planned exit to a far better place to live). We still have our British accents, our British pride and our British passports - although it looks like, in the not too distant future, only our accents will remain.

How could they have been so stupid?

Well, they were and we are stuck here in Spain (or Germany, or France etc) without a lifeline. We can hardly sell up and go ‘back’. Firstly, the high price of a home over in the UK would have us all ending up living in protected housing in Anglesey. Secondly, who on earth would want to live in a society that appears to be inspired by the early days of Nazi Germany?

They’ll have people wearing triangles on their jackets within a year.

So, over in Europe, we British ex-pats are in shock. Will the new British Prime Minister start laying new rules on the Europeans living in the United Kingdom? Work permits perhaps, or special new registration, or visas or quotas, or even, in certain cases (penury would be an obvious example), deportation? We worry because the European authorities, with their affronted electorate’s insistence, would do the same to us.

We have learned that we are little more than pawns in the politics of ‘Brexit’.

But remember this London: you really don’t want one and a half million indignant ex-pats all being sent back to your tender care. Imagine the reaction of your home-grown Nazi groups and their critical posts on Facebook!

Over in Europe, the ex-pats have formed a number of protest groups. Let us work together with the local governments, say some, or let us ask for a sense of reason from the British authorities, or let us search for protection from the ‘Brexit’ from the European leaders in Brussels.

Coverage of the ex-pats and their concerns has never rated column-inches in the highly partisan British media, but in Spain for example a group called ‘Europats’ has already featured in articles in El Mundo and Almería Hoy (here and here). Another, ‘Brexpats in Spain’, is introduced in La Vanguardia (here).

A full list of ex-pat groups against the Brexit can be found here.

From another age, from another fall-out with those who no longer wanted to be British, a quote: “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I Am Not A Virginian, But An American!”― Patrick Henry.

Friends, I am a European.