Papers, Por Favor

Many of us 'old-timers' here in Spain had a residence card (a very useful document - similar to a Spanish id card). These were taken away along with our 'residencia' in around 2009 and, in substitution, we were given a letter from the police (i.e. the Ministry of the Interior) to carry around at all times with our passport as proof of identity. Silly and impractical. The letter itself states that 'as an EU citizen, the bearer has the right of abode in Spain'. However, in the calamitous event of a Brexit, we would no longer be 'EU Citizens', and therefore the letter would no longer be valid. Non-EU citizens can be 'resident' in Spain, and no doubt we could try to obtain a new 'residencia'. This could be easy, or hard, depending on the Ministry of the Interior, which would be influenced by two considerations.
1, which party or coalition will eventually take control of Parliament in Madrid and
2, how will London treat its no-longer-EU migrants and students.

The Fall of Mojácar

The Fall of Granada: King Boabdil gives the keys of the City to Isabel and Fernando

If we explained to a Briton, for instance, the full story which is merrily celebrated as the Moors and Christians festival in June, which is based loosely on something more than a Christian army clutching a bottle of rum making its way up to the Town Square, then there might be a few surprised looks.
Muslim and Christian Spain spent a few centuries in wars between each other, but it wasn't necessarily Moors against Christians, because in those times, Moors fought against Moors, Christians and Muslims united against Moors and vice versa - because these weren't wars of religion but rather of political struggles in which all were fighting to conquer new territories and to increase their power.
The 'Catholic Kings' - Isabel and Fernando - were set on conquering new lands from the Moors, and looking to take the main prize: the city of Granada. To do this, they planned to take the coastal land in order that the Nazari kingdom of Granada could not be helped by the Muslim armies from the various states of North Africa and thus to edge ever closer to the city of the Alhambra Palace.
And so let us put ourselves in the historical moment of the last years of Muslim era in Mojácar, or Moxacar as it was known then. Things were developing well; In 1486, the Catholic Kings had occupied the lower plains of Granada: Loja, Illora, Moclín, Montefrío and Colomera. The following year, they took Vélez Málaga and Málaga itself.
The Christian forces turned their attention in 1488 to the province of Almeria, with attacks from the border area with Murcia - principally from the frontier town of Puerto Lumbreras. The following towns, with the dates not always certain, would fall to the Christians: Vera and Cabrera were taken on June 6th, 1488, then a few days later - between the 10th and 13th June according to sources, Mojacar, Cantoria and Huércal; between 10th and 20th June, Vélez Rubio and Vélez Blanco both fell to the superior forces; while Nijar [Nixar] and Huéscar [Huisca] were collected a few days later. With these achievements the maritime border was closed, which prevented possible aid from Africa. The following year, 1489, the unstoppable armies were still moving towards Granada, having subdued a large number of towns, which in geographical order from east to west were: Baza (December 4th 1488),  Serón [Soreo] (December 18th, 1489), Purchena, Gor, and finally Almería [al-Miraya] which surrendered on December 23rd, 1489.

The Christian troops were based at their headquarters installed in the Real de Antas, ('Real' means 'Royal') and on June 10, 1488, leaders, headmen and alcaides from the whole region flocked to surrender to the Catholic Kings, yet the commander of Moxacar was not among them. This alerted the Christians since Mojácar's strategic situation together with its considerable number of inhabitants was one of the significant towns of the region. the Catholic Kings sent, as a measure of prudence, an embassy led by Captain Garcilaso to Moxacar with an invitation to surrender. Today, there's a memorial cut into marble at the Mojácar fountain to recall the visit.
On June 12th 1488, the town of Mojácar with its forces surrendered and in exchange Isabel and Fernando granted the town the title of Ciudad - city. It is recorded that the Moors were immediately expelled from Mojácar. They were allowed to go to Africa or to settle in the hills behind Turre: in Teresa and Cabrera, where they founded 'Mudéjar' communities. Mojácar was repopulated with a hundred Christian families from the kingdom of Murcia. These people - principally from Lorca - are the ancestors of most of today's Mojaqueros. The coexistence between the Christians of Mojácar and the Muslims of Turre, Teresa and Cabrera was not easy. The loyalty of this colony was shown in the 'War of Las Alpujarras', when Aben Humeya attempted to re-establish once again Arab power in Spain. After the defeat of the Moriscos came the final expulsion of the Moors - although we do not know if some of them were baptized and remained in the area as converts.
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'.
The story has it that the interview for the surrender of Mojácar was held at the Fuente, between Captain Garcilaso for the Christians and the Muslim leader Alavez who was asked for the surrender of the town.
According to legend, this is his reply:
    I'm as Spanish as you, my people have over seven hundred years of living in Spain and now you tell us to leave. I 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 I surrender like a coward, I will die like a Spaniard.
True or not - with this agreement Mojácar left behind forever her Muslim past, although the Christians did not take long to break their word to respect the property, culture and customs of the conquered and this soon led to the War of the Alpujarras, but that is another story .......

 This article is a translation of a piece called La Toma de Mojácar por los Cristianos written for QHM by Eduardo Sánchez Cervantes.

Córdoba Riders

Córdoba is a splendid city. I went there in a bus with a group of friends this past weekend to visit the old riding school, the Caballerizas Reales de Córdoba, built apparently in 1570. Most of our crew from Almería were students from the Albero Centro Ecuestre anxious for their special lesson at the hands of the expert instructors at the school. Following a long morning on horseback (heels down, back straight etc), we were treated to an exhibition in their indoor ring.
Me? I was just along there for the ride.

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.