Confinement in Andalucía (For Brits Too)

 The new rules for Andalucía seem simple enough - from this Tuesday 10th November (00h) until Monday 23rd November (24h), the anti-Covid rules from the Government in Seville are as follows:

1. Andalucía is cordoned off.

2.Your municipality is cordoned off.

3. The curfew is 22h (10.00pm) until 07h (7.00am). 

4. All non-essential businesses: bars, shops, restaurants, shoe-shiners and candlestick makers, are closed to the public from 18h (6.00pm). 

5. Granada is closed down tight. 

The first thing that the British attempt to do (if we are to believe what we see on Facebook) is to try and find a way around these rules. How about if I just go to the border of my municipality and then slip across wearing a black hood? The supermarket in the town down the road has a kind of cheese I like, will I be able to get it still? What about if I'm in the bar when it closes but haven't finished my bottle of wine (and so on)? 

The next thing the Brits do is to say how stupid the rules are - why do they think you can't catch coronavirus in a bar before six in the evening, they ask. 

The rules are there to fulfil two purposes. The first (and most important) is to try and lower the rate of infection because the hospitals can't cope. The second is, (yes, of course) to show that the politicians are listening to the epidemiologists and other experts and are trying to head off a crisis they don't fully understand. The best we can do is to wear our face-masks and try and get through this, because it's better to protect our health before our wallets.

Now That's What I Call Closed

The banks here are merging, fusing, joining up, buying each other out and, in general, the number of different 'entities' is going down from 45 cajas de ahorro (savings banks) and a dozen banks just a decade ago to roughly, with the ink from the latest mergers still wet, just four or five today. 

They don't treat you well, either, these new banks. They are looking for the huge deals, not the pensioner with his fifty euros withdrawal. Since there is so little choice, they can charge you even for taking money out of your (non-interest-paying) current account. You probably won't even get to talk to the cashier, because there isn't one any more. In the last decade, over 110,000 jobs have been lost in the banking sector. Well, 'lost' as in 'fired'. The banks are keener than ever on the bottom line, and it don't read 'customer service'.

Dwelling on this and other changes in our lives, I went for my morning constitutional this morning down towards the local pueblo, an ugly town of 9,000 inhabitants which, while on the coast, has no hotels, no souvenir shops, no discotheques, no foreign urbanisations with their charity shops and Burns Night and, best of all, no tourists. There's a narrow high street with no room for parking yet a fulsome number of cars contrarily double-parked with their flashers going and the consequent lack of fluid movement, a couple of Moorish butchers, a few empty shop-fronts and a number of cafés that open at five or six in the morning and then close for lunch. This seems to be such an extended meal here that they won't open again until the following day. 

My walk took about half an hour, first through the campo and its interesting collection of broken beer-bottles and then down into the pueblo itself. I was desirous of making a small withdrawal from my bank - one of those that's still going -  and was wondering if there would be time for a coffee before my preferred bar closed for the day. Despite wearing a mask and emitting a gentle wheeze, I was feeling quite refreshed. 

But then, disaster. 

As the picture shows, the bank - she ain't no more Mister. As the Spanish say, that place is not just closed, it's desaparecido.  

The L&M Don't Stop Here Anymore

Never far from the news are the endless new rules, suggestions, fines and misery designed to either make driving less of a pleasure, or more of a bother.

The latest idea to cheer up the long-suffering motorist, this time from the chief prosecutor from Salamanca Juan José Pereña, who in our opinion needs to take a long vacation, is to oblige drivers over the age of seventy to display a large ‘M’ (for mature) in the back window of their vehicle.

Fifty years ago, they would have had an equally large ‘L’ sticky-taped to the same window. Now my stepson, recently ascended to the ranks of Spanish road-users, obliges the entire family to circulate in our elderly roadster with the ‘L’ prominently displayed and, while the sign will be removed long before we must place an ‘M’ in its place (in our case, in a couple of years), it seems a small progression in half a century for the average motorist: the modest climb from ‘L’ to ‘M’.

Perhaps other segments of society should also be invited to drive with a scarlet letter to warn other motorists of their presence. A ‘B’ for borracho might be useful, or a ‘G’ for an imported British car with the steering wheel on the right (G here is short for guiri).

In general, the man to watch is the traffic czar Pere Navarro from the DGT who has brought us many interesting rules over the years. He is an expert in traffic safety and is generally followed slavishly by legislators. It was he who came up with the orange psychedelic pyjama-top to be worn by irritated drivers standing on the side of the road next to their broken-down car, or otherwise kept in the boot along with the safety triangles (or in some cases – the law is generous on this point – tastefully draped over the back of the front seats in the cheaper models).  Pere Navarro it was who threatens us with four points if we take a call on the phone while driving (it’s all right for him, he’s got a chauffeur). Pere too, who now wants the alcohol driving-limit to be lowered (again!) – as if Spanish livers these days simply aren’t what they used to be.

One night back in the late sixties, my father was humming a tune while crossing the square to get to his vehicle for the drive home. Seeing the Guardia loitering, he mentally pulled up his trousers and slid into the seat of his unlocked car.

Something wasn’t right.

He wound down the window and called the two agents over. ‘Someone’s stolen the steering wheel’, he said.

‘That’s because you are sitting in the back’, returned the taller one, who knew him well.

My father, with as much aplomb as he could, climbed out of the back seat and edged past the two cops into the front.

‘Buenas noches’ said the Guardia Civil, ‘drive safely’.

Times change, there are more cars on the road, and we shouldn’t drive drunk. But if we are going to drive, then let us get on with it. The problems don’t come from old coots driving along at a low speed peering blackly through the windscreen, simply because they don’t. Mature drivers drive well, and are careful. They’ve had fifty years of experience.

As to this suggestion of an ‘M’ in the window, the Minister of the Interior, a sensible fellow called Fernando Grande-Marlaska, quickly said ‘forget it’.

Back in 1963, The Times visited Mojácar

 

 

Aerial photo of Mojácar from 1961

Someone found an old press clipping from The Times, dated July 20th 1963. The article is called 'Beyond Spain's Tourist Villa Belt' and has this to say about Mojácar:

...This is Mojácar, of Moorish origin, whose flat-roofed whitewashed houses had fallen into a state of almost derelict disrepair and depopulation, but has been "rescued" by an influx of foreigners whose villa-building (of necessity in the local style) has provided work. Above the tiny plaza, cobbled lanes so narrow that one can almost touch both sides form a maze through houses, some solid, some just heaps of rubble - which is sorted over and used again for building. Two newly built hotels mark Mojácar's bid for a running in the tourist stakes...'.

When the Mojaqueros left the village in search of a better life, moving away to Barcelona, Lyon, Marseilles, Frankfurt and, above all, to Argentina, they sold what little they had to pay for the trip. They couldn't sell their homes because there was no demand for them, so they simply dismantled them - selling the beams, the doors, the rejas and the tiles for whatever small price they would make. Mojácar's population had plummeted to around 600 souls - half of whom lived in Sopalmo, Las Alparatas or the rich fields and orchards below the fuente. 

The old mayor Jacinto liked to say that in the late fifties there was so many piles of rubble strewn about the abandoned village that no one was even sure where the streets went.  But then the forasteros (outsiders) with their full purses came and things improved. Later, many Mojaqueros returned too...

A Rattling Good Yarn

Last Saturday I dropped by my old house, where my daughter now lives, to load up on books. She’s fixing up the place a treat while putting my books away in boxes. I have always enjoyed reading and have worked my way through many thousands of books over my life (mostly what my old English-teacher would have described as ‘tripe’).  Right now, I’m at the side of Attila in Costain’s ‘The Darkness and the Dawn’ (1959) riding comfortably on my boney steed into battle against the Romans.

What with the wonders of the Internet – preparing and writing Business over Tapas, entertaining myself with YouTube and posting pithy poppycock on Facebook – I don’t have the same amount of time as before to spend on the couch with a book.

Plus there are the real-life horses that I look after, that need watering, feeding, exercising and so on.

For the leisure hours, there’s the TV as well, but I hardly ever watch it beyond checking the headlines on Wednesday evening. I can’t keep up with the films for very long – maybe they don’t make them for people like me: old, deaf and cynical.  Oh, and the good thing about books? No commercial interruptions!

There’s one good bookshop in our city – I live on the edge of Almería – and I go there for a treat once or twice a year, blowing and wheezing gently through my face mask as I negotiate the stairs into the basement. It' called El Picasso and it has an odd collection of books in English: some Shakespeare and Dickens plus a few slightly peculiar classics - like Dana’s ‘Two Years before the Mast’, mixed up with some science fiction, Steven King and several trilogies with the first or second part inevitably missing, probably sold to someone on a brief visit to our fair city.

When not sorting through their selection, with most of the spines of the books upside-down (the Spanish print theirs the other way round from us) meaning one has to crick one’s head to the left rather than the right… until one comes to a book which has been replaced on the shelf by a previous customer, thus making one look slightly eccentric, nodding this way and that at the truncated trilogies.

The average book is priced on the far side of ten euros, so I prefer to visit a charity shop when on a visit to Mojácar. There I can find four or even six books for a euro, which ain’t bad. Indeed, there’s currently a large plastic bag full of them on the floor by my window.

But why bother, when there are all those boxes of books at the old house?

Tourism is ¡Agggh! dead

I have always maintained that Mojácar should concentrate on being a residential town. With a pandemic, or a natural disaster or a recession or better tourist offers from Cyprus, the tourist market is always potentially unsure. But with (what the Spanish are pleased to call) Residential Tourism, we are here all year, spend far more than a tourist does (a hundred times more than one tourist) and we respect and repair our community, rather than being sick in the flower-bed. There's no ministry or agency or promotion or advertising for this industry of encouraging foreigners to buy a 200,000€ house and an expensive car, but the Spanish in their wisdom put all their eggs in the tourist basket.

Which is broken.

Indeed, attracting retired people, with their pensions, plus ‘digital workers’, who can earn their bread from working at home (check out teletrabajo on Google), plus the workers who must attend them, plus the all-year business for supermarkets, banks, restaurants and bars, plus the taxes they bring, are all more useful today to smaller towns than ever before.

Plan the town around its residents, not its customers. The festivals and attractions should be designed to appeal to those who live there (and have space for them to attend). Don't worry about the half a dozen money-crazed businessmen who want to turn the beach into a holiday camp, or the hoteliers (based in Barcelona) who want hordes of cheap all-you-can-eat tourism, or the souvenir shops, who only open during the summer months (when was the last time you bought a souvenir?).

Think of the residents, and make them proud of their pueblo.

Building Opportunities

The empty spaces in Andalucía, the bits between the concrete, are under threat: a resource that it is apparently now the time to cash in on. 

From the national press we read that the President of Andalucía has approved an urban reform that allows one to build anywhere where it is not expressly prohibited.  This of course is the reverse of the old rule that prevented building on rural undeveloped land and on specially protected land unless it was expressly included in an urban plan. In all, 21 laws and six decrees have been amended with the consternation of the opposition parties within the regional parliament. Already, three appeals to the Constitutional Court have been brought, and eighty organizations have filed a joint complaint with the Public Ombudsman, while, say the newspapers, the decree has sparked outrage from environmentalists everywhere.

It is nevertheless the case that the laws needed amending (we remember the ‘300,000 illegal houses across Andalucía’), but perhaps this U-turn is a trifle more than we had bargained for. Will the ghastly Hotel Algarrobico in Carboneras be legalised (and can it be repaired after a dozen years of abandon)?

What news of the hitherto cancelled Ronda Los Merinos golf project or the Valdevaqueros Tarifa project?

The law in question is called the LISTA, which breaks down as the Law of the Sustainability of the Territory of Andalucía. It is designed to replace the LOUA, which, as Maura Hillen, the ex-president of the home owners’ group AUAN recalls, was ‘…a set of regulations that, for the last 18 years, has placed a stranglehold on development in Andalucía with its urban-centric philosophy and a torturous planning approvals process that failed to differentiate between a village in the Valle of Almanzora and the city of Seville’.

The LOUA had ruled that homes could not be built on rural ground, unless they were to be used for farming purposes. Furthermore, municipalities could grow by not more than 4% in every eight years. This meant that a village of fifty houses could only build two more every eight years. And, by chance, the mayor’s brother was a builder.

So, you see, when the foreigner turned up with a suitcase of cash, we went ahead and built an extra house, well, converted it from an old corral really, just down past the cemetery and not far from Paco’s Bar.

For Goodness sake, of course they built. There’s not much money in goats these days…

The small villages were (and still are) dying, and an injection of new residents, especially those who were retired and would bring business to the local bar, shop and town hall exchequer, could only be a good thing. If there were issues, the village might need the help of a good (if crooked) lawyer, but not an environmentalist – a city creature with a romantic and wildly inaccurate view of the lives of the country-folk.

When Helen and Len Prior had their home bulldozed flat in 2008 outside Vera in Almería (the other homes in that immediate neighbourhood survived unscathed), it was neither in a particular beauty-spot, nor was it in a flood-plain. It was at least five kilometres from the beach as the crow flies and it wasn’t on the route of the AVE or a motorway. It also wasn’t in a Natural Park, of which, at 2.8 million hectares, 30.5% of the entire region, Andalucía is suitably blessed.

Where it was odd of the Junta de Andalucía to knock-down that particular house (which, one recalls, was owned by a foreigner),  a nearby urbanisation on the beach called Puerto Rey, which has several apartments owned by ex-ministers from earlier democratic governments of Spain, regularly floods with some inundations as much as three metres deep. A British woman called Diane Dudas drowned in Puerto Rey in 2012 in such a flood. Yet, the urbanisation has never been put at risk by meddlesome busybodies from Seville…

The ecologists (who never seem to mind about the 75,000 hectares of plastic farms – real figures – that do little to improve the Almerian landscape and subsoil) do have a point about layering the whole of the Mediterranean coast in concrete. The poor villages of the interior might need to survive with some help from outside, but the wealthy coastal resorts are looking at expanding into their remaining fields, salt-flats and coves for an entirely different reason:  profit.

The media talks of new schemes going ahead, with one headline saying ‘The Andalusian coast heats up with new urban projects’. These include, ‘hotels, golf courses and urbanisations from Chiclana to the Cabo de Gata, and not forgetting Marbella’.  The same paper, ‘El Mundo’, admits in another leader that ‘The Andalusian government is relying on construction to alleviate the huge losses in tourist income due to the pandemic’.

Making a profit is an underlying philosophy of conservatism, so it comes as no surprise that the Junta de Andalucía, reborn last year (after four decades of corrupt socialism) as a jewel in the PP’s crown, would want to put a resource to good use. Will the profits be re-ploughed into the local economy or find their way offshore? Well, that’s the subject for another day.