The Bunny Sentinel

There's a ménagerie of animals chez nous, including a number of birdies, a rather useful egg-producing chicken, pairs of dogs, cats and horses and, finally, a rabbit called Bungus. Bungus is getting on in age, being in bunny years up there with Methuselah, numbering eight hundred, eighty and eight. About ten in real life. He lives in a cage with every mod con, including a view. Rabbits here can't touch the floor, or straw, we know from long and bitter experience, as they will catch myxomatosis and die in some agony. So, Bungus lives in the nearest thing to a bubble, in this case, a cage on a table outside.
His teeth have gone from his years of crunching bunny food and he now likes to gum a little lettuce in the afternoons and to snack rather heavily on bread in the mornings. Bread from that fine bakery Mr Bimbo. He gets two slices. This produces a certain amount of waste, with helps explain our ant problem.
Bungus came from Pamplona. We were there, many years ago, and we needed a hospital companion to help out when I was unable to offer my bedside presence between several horrible operations being suffered by my wife. 'I don't mind their attentions,' she said, 'as long as I can have something furry to hold'. Oddly, a teddy bear wouldn't do. The hospital agreed to a conejo, as long as it stayed in its cage.
We cleaned his cage yesterday, filling a garbage bag with junk, and replaced the flooring with a number of newspapers carefully collected the day before. Bungus is a conservative rabbit, and doesn't like change so it took a while before he allowed us to reach in and tickle him.
Now, he's watching the gate, chewing quietly on a favourite nut. He'll thump his back leg if he needs anything.

Mojácar Costa

We were just driving out of our track to turn onto the road towards the village. A car stopped in front of us broadside on and an old man got out. He looked like he came from the North.

-Disculpe, ¿Dónde está la playa?. As usual, when a Spaniard asks someone who is evidently a foreigner - I'm tall, blond and burnt red, he follows up his question with a surprised nod. I've talked to an extranjero!

Well, I answered, it's down there, back the way you came. But the only other turn, he said, takes you up to the village.
No, go down to the gasolinera and turn towards the beach there at the roundabout. There's a sign that says 'Carboneras'. 

He looked like he didn't believe me. Well, this is Mojácar I said. 

The turnoff to the beach at the gas station is headed up by a roundabout, and the beach itself is behind a last hill, so it is easy enough for a visitor to get confused. There's no sign. 

Our local businessmen meet sometimes for a red-prawn and pink wine lunch at the Parador, those that can tear themselves away from their their markets selling Chinese nick-knacks and provocatively decorated tee shirts, and they argue contentedly about their small-holdings. The main business of the pueblo, putting a family member into the town hall and ushering in a rubber-stamp absolute majority, was concluded shortly before the last elections. Now, they worry about smaller things - who is going on the trip to Andorra (we are twinned with a city there for no discernible reason beyond allowing up easy access to our 'offshore' bank accounts by coach); how to keep the rents high when no one can afford to pay them; how to avoid paying local taxes and how to get so-and-so's son into the football team. A few uneasy jokes are made about dominoes - the noise of them irritates the mayoress, who is trying to ban noisy and drunken nights on our beaches. Small things. 

'Mojácar Tourism, the promotion of', is left to others. If they want to promote our hotels, built on a stretch of land running towards Garrucha, and away from all our commerce, well, that's fine. No one goes there, there's nothing except cheap package, full-board tourists, either foreign or national, wandering in a daze between their remarkably ugly hotels - tourist factories - and an abandoned beach in front. There's a camel ride for the adventurous.

One thing about life that both the local and the foreign population know, package tourism is a waste of space, and we have some space to waste. Up on the Garrucha Road.

Our own beaches, sign-lit at the roundabout with the 'Carboneras' sign, are much more fun. There is a number of eccentric beach-bars which have flourished since Mojácar's days of Bohemia in the sixties and seventies (frustratingly still run mainly by forasteros) and a collection of good restaurants, bars, ice cream places and an excellent Government-run Parador. The restaurants, despite the tourist department's insistence on the contrary, do not prepare ajo colorao, migas, pelotas and other rare and obscure eighteenth-century fare, for the twin reasons that there is no demand for them and, the preparation for these dishes is rarely taught in international cooking schools. But then, we aren't going to promote the forasteros and their businesses here, even if most of the budget comes from outside. 

So, an idea which will cost nothing, but might improve visitor rates. The Mojácar beach is treated by the local government as just another area, a bit like 'La Fuente' or 'El Casco Viejo' or 'Las Huertas'. It is, in fact, rather more. It holds about 90% of local business and, including the urbanisations stretching behind into the hills, has about 90% of our entire local population. 

Give it an identity. Call it 'Mojácar Costa' as if it existed as a resort. Put up a sign up outside the Gas Station.

Mojacar, the Foreigners and an Old Article

The photo comes from one of those hopeful Spanish magazines that circulated in the eighties, magazines in English but firmly controlled by Spanish writers and editors. After all, who knows more about the expats than the experts? The mag was called Mediterranean Magazine and was sold at 300 Ptas, a sort of journeyman's version of Lookout.
Issue Nº 2 appeared in June 1987 and it ran an article about Mojácar titled: 'Mojácar, from conflict to dialogue, by Juan de Dios Mellado. The beautiful town of Mojácar has gone through hard times. Several controversial issues led the foreign residents to openly confront the municipal authorities, but a dialogue has now been reached'.
Juan, by the way, remains an expert on tourism and is featured in an article in La Opinion de Málaga recently on the publication of his book, 'Los Años Dorados de la Costa del Sol'.
Juan Morales was the mayor in those days (champion of the first moción de censura in Mojácar's turbulent political history). On the foreigners' discontent with the Town Hall's plans he says: 'Maybe at first there were communication problems on our part', he admitted, 'but it wasn't our fault. A lot of these resident foreigners live off to themselves. When we've called them to meetings, they haven't bothered showing up'. The two issues of the time were the construction of a Paseo Marítimo (now half finished and looking remarkably good, but with the new powers of the ecologists, it's unlikelt that it will ever be completed) and the so-called ring-road through the urbanisations on the beach which was, at the time, planned to take heavier traffic, particularly Carboneras industrial trucks, through the area quickly to connect with the future motorway to Cartagena. This as we know, has been successfully stymied by the local residents now for over 25 years.
The article continues with a hopeful note: 'Juan Morales greets foreigners who have lived in Mojácar for years: 'It's possible that now, with the foreign property-owners association, we'll be able to hold regular meetings to deal with problems that might affect them directly', he says. 'Up until now, that hasn't been possible. They live isolated lives. Whereas it's not true that there's real conflict, it's also true that more dialogue and interchange will be good for us all''.
Here's a quote from me (as editor of The Entertainer): 'It's not easy to break down the lack of communication and the resistance to dialogue. Both sides are at fault. The Spanish administration doesn't believe in the role that residential tourism has to play, and the foreigners prefer to keep to themselves in what is little more than foreign ghettos'.
A year later, with Bartolome Flores in power, things hit a new low as the mayor was persuaded to demolish the old fountain and its surrounds (down at the foot of the village) for a new modern, marbled magnificence designed by a scion of the new Junta de Andalucía. I remember a sign held by an indignant Brit which caustically read '90,000 pounds to wash my knickers' (a reference to the old tradition of washing ones' clothes in the fuente). The following demonstration up in the Plaza Nueva turned into a riot, with an arrest and several broken heads. It also proved the downfall of Charles Baxter, hitherto fêted by the locals as a TV personality. A mojaquero said afterwards - it's not that we don't agree with the foreigners about the fuente, it's just that we don't think they have the right to say anything...'.

Have things changed much in a quarter century? In many Costa towns, there are Foreign Departments run by the Town Hall (employing real-life, gosh-for-goodness foreigners!) such as (and just on the Costa del Sol) in Estepona, Mijas, Marbella, Nerja, Fuengirola, Competa, Benalmádena, Coín, Frigiliana, Manilva, Monda, Benahavís... and many towns celebrate Foreigner, or Europe Day with a fiesta, after all that's where the money all came from! (Día de Europa, by the way, is this Thursday 9th May). Mojácar, though, remains defiant. There are now more forasteros than mojaqueros on the padrón, but the massive number of town hall employees shows a very different picture, where with the one exception of Leslie (lost and ignored in the Municipal Gallery), everyone else is locally born and often a visibly keen voter of the current corporation. There's not much integration or even participation allowed from the marginalised foreign inhabitants of Mojácar. There's no longer a 'Foreign Property-owners Association' (there's a very good one in Albox, the AUAN), but Mojácar does have a PSOE-controlled business association with some foreign participation and a German president and there are a couple of minor foreign-dominated political parties, the MPSM and the CE.

So, has anything changed in 25 years and will Mojácar be, for the first time ever, celebrating this Thursday's Día de Europa?. No, actually!

An Old Picture of Carboneras

 

I've been contributing some photographs of old-time Mojácar folk to a page on Facebook, pictures which have been in some boxes upstairs for many years and are of some interest, if only to see what we used to look like thirty years ago. The page is called Mojacar Golden Years if you are interested.

Today, in one particular box, I found this, an old watercolour from Paul Becket. It's a portrait of Carboneras painted in 1964. Paul was one of the first foreigners to settle in Mojácar, together with his wife Beatrice. They were our neighbours in the Huertas below the Pueblo.

Discover Mojácar (It's Just Around the Next Corner)

Mojácar wants tourists because it wants their money. To get these tourists, it's fashionable (while at the same time apparently considered to be useless) to make promotions here and there. Well, here anyway. While I have not actually counted them, I would say that there are around twenty 'Come to Mojácar' posters artfully posted somewhere around the municipality, as if we might believe in some way that the Tourist Department was doing a wonderful job of promotion elsewhere.
Sometimes the promotions are in Spanish; other times, in what passes for English, but isn't, they aren't.
Not content with the 'Dump on your Plate' school of promotion for those who can read English (known outside of Google translation as 'the poop in your soup group' - which has the advantage of avoiding having to invite foreign native-language speakers to participate in the feeding-frenzy), the sale of our small and increasingly irrelevant resort to the larger world has gone from the Domino Theory of Fame for All the Wrong Reasons (See The Times, The Independent, the BBC, and a number of Spanish national dailies enjoying a joke at Mojácar's plans to control noise down to a squeak), via the 'only souvenir ever brought home is a multa from the traffic police' (this in a tourist town with several hundred bars and restaurants, where drinking a glass of water is hardly an option), to a complete loss of plans or ideas for where this community might go. What are we promoting here? The chance to fill our street with a caravan of cars and buses, just to fill a few cash registers? Is that it?
Added to this, we have the freezing out of all forasteros, particularly foreigners, by the town hall - as if we are suddenly the problem rather than the solution.
A speaker in the plenary session earlier this week discussing the point about controlling the noise in Mojácar said that we live from tourism - both the relaxed and the party-time sorts ('turismo de descanso y turismo de ocio') - which rather obviously don't like to share the same apartment. This is the applied wisdom in our town, a resort with just one two-lane street running in parallel with the Mediterranean. Cheap hotels at either end and a clutch of bars and restaurants in the middle - controlled, generally speaking, by murderously high rents.
In our badly planned town, which enjoys probably the easiest winters in the whole of Europe, most of those hotels, bars and restaurants alike, are closed outside of the summer season.
There are of course three types of tourism - the relaxed restaurant and bed by midnight type, the noisy down to the disco and back for a party type and then the bleeding obvious make a fortune for the town long-term visitors or residents type, which generates most of the income here, known fatuously in Spanish as 'residential tourism' - the type that buys a house, a car, white goods, food and clothing. That pays municipal taxes. That appreciates and respects the town and the surroundings, that wants the best for Mojácar; that has an investment, an interest in the future of our community. That would like to participate, to integrate and... to help improve the reputation of this town. But we will never ever find the Town Hall spending anything on promoting that sort of tourism.
In the immortal words of John F. Kennedy, 'Ich bin ein cateto'. No hold on, it was his other remark I was thinking about: 'Don't ask what Mojácar can do for you, rather, ask what you can do for Mojácar'!

Internet Piracy

A note from Reuters begins with: 'Spain is working on a new anti-piracy law which will be robust enough to keep the country off a U.S. watch list of copyright violating countries, Education and Culture Minister José Ignacio Wert said'.
Education and Culture. So, downloading a film, a piece of music or a book is illegal according to the minister of education or culture, unless, of course, the owner is paid. A service has been provided, and even shared (if I invite a few friends around), although nothing has been consumed. 
So, in the case of a movie, who gets the money when I buy a ticket? Keeping it easy, let's say the producer, the director, the star, the cinema and the taxman. Not the extras, or the cleaners - they've already been paid (probably in black money at that). Now, where do the producer, the director and the star each put their twenty million dollars? I'm guessing that, as often as not, it will be placed in an offshore account, where the money is rather obviously not used to help the State.
But, no, it's me they are worried about. 
I have the choice of seeing a movie and paying, seeing a movie and not paying, or not seeing a movie. I could pay to see the film, but it's not available here where I live, neither in Spanish nor in its original language. Well, I can wait a year I suppose. Or I could grab a plane and fly to London and see it in the West End. Perhaps it will be on the TV in a couple of years time, courtesy of the Mars chocolate people. Perhaps I should buy a TV.
I hope that it's good.
So, if the copyright owner and the star and the producer aren't going to get my three euros (which is what, in the end, I'll have to pay the fellow on the street corner who has black-market copies for sale on DVD), what's the difference to them if I see the film or not? You see, if it's good, I could at least recommend it. If it's crap, at least I won't be writing to them and asking for my money back.
But all of this is of small account. The larger question is whether the Government, José Ignacio and all, are working to represent the interests of Spain and the Spaniards, of the dissemination in general of education and culture... or of Hollywood.

Another Rubber-stamp Plennary Session in Mojácar

There was another pleno - town hall meeting - yesterday in Mojácar. There were originally six points, which were reduced to five after the temporary removal for another day on the chilling idea of the Mayoress to control all noise (taking this idea as literally as one might) from the daily grind of life in our eccentric community. While Mojácar should be a bit quieter than Butlin's, a place it increasingly resembles, it seems that there must be a balance. Indeed, the balance is very much ignored here, with rock-breaking machines now immersed in the second of the Mayoress' three big projects to transform the village and, more importantly, spend the six or seven million odd that the previous town hall got from selling a chunk of land from Macenas back to the promoters. Who since went bust.
The remaining points were to grant the taxi drivers an increase in their fares; to spend money on a taser for the local polis; to build an electric knob so that cars can't drive up to Rosmari's underground car-park which hasn't opened as yet, anyway - nine months after completion; to spend the councillors un-awarded Christmas bonus on children's scholarships and to support a dog shelter for the Micar Valley.
The main point of the meeting, presided of course by Rosmari and her absolute majority, was to begin on the third great project, being the evisceration of the Plaza Nueva and the remodelling of the viewpoint - the mirador - which is in a parlous state. The plan being to turn the first into another underground car-park and the second into another ayuntamiento.
The rubber-stamp councillors, missing from the photo above since they are seated to the right, were quick to shout 'aye' on every point, including this project to keep the town essentially under the rock-breakers (boom boom boom) for the best part of the entire legislation, noise and dust notwithstanding.
A new town hall, which we evidently don't need, should be built where the people who need it happen to live and located where they can easily gain access. Ninety percent of the population of Mojácar live on the playa.
The picture shows Angel Medina from Ciudadanos Europeos (left, next to Jessica Simpson), now back at his post in the opposition: The mayoress Rosmari Cano, can just be seen to the far right..

Residents

A recent article from Rafael Yus Ramos in El Observador talks about that Mecca for tourism – the Costa del Sol. But, he says, it's not a tourist destination so much as a place where foreign people live. What the Spanish authorities, lost for a better description of the vast numbers of us extranjeros, and both unwilling and incapable to treasure our input and value to the community, describe weakly as 'residential tourism' before quickly turning to other topics and ignoring us. 
We should almost feel flattered that they have decided to tax our properties elsewhere in the dreadful Asset Tax (for which they have no reason). Here's Rafael:
'...When you drive down the N-340 road which runs along the entire coastline of the Costa del Sol, what catches the eye are not hotels, but the huge number of homes built, many of them forming large residential communities on the outskirts of the original towns, with slightly odd workmanship on the homes. But, who lives there? They are just people who reside on the Costa del Sol: not native people that work there, but rather elderly Europeans, people who were seeking this place for its quietness, the gentle climate and the good health services available...'
Rafael prefers to describe his foreigners, not as residential tourists, but rather as immigrants.
So, he asks, 'are these residents 'tourists' in the genuine sense of the word? The product under offer, a house, is it a 'tourist product'? Finally, is this the best solution for the local economy?'
But there are few observers like Rafael, and the foreign residents (and the comparatively massive amount of money they brought with them) are mixed in and forgotten as a small and unimportant part of Spain's love affair with tourism.
My question – how much does Spain spend on promoting tourism? And how much does it spend on looking for foreigners to become residents by buying into the country? Has it ever dawned on anyone that a resident, here for 365 days, who has bought a house, a car, a washing machine and is keeping the local businesses open during the winter months - is worth rather more than a visitor who is here for five days and may as well choose Portugal next year.
Another article out last week on the subject of the foreign residents, comes from Valencia's Levante. This one is titled 'The Foreign Residents don't want to integrate' and deals with the Marina Alta, where foreign residents apparently practice 'auto-segregation'. - 'The difference lies in making a living. "Labour migrants" reach the Marina Alta impelled by necessity, while the "residential immigrants" arrive with their life already arranged. The first strive to integrate. But the second stay as tourists and "barely seek any relationship or services from the host society"'... 66% of the citizens of the municipality of Teulada-Moraira are foreigners, says the article sententiously.
There is a point which is being lost: when you sell a car, a tee-shirt, a souvenir or a plate of food, the buyer leaves with it and takes it somewhere else (if only in his stomach). But sell someone a house next door, and, hey presto, you have a new neighbour. Sell five hundred nearby houses to five hundred British families, then you can not be unduly surprised when the neighbourhood suddenly starts to change from a quiet Spanish area smelling gently of anchoas to a ghetto of sunburned Britons marching around wearing shorts, sandals and socks. And lastly, my friend from the Levante newspaper, remember this: We are all Europeans now.

Party Contributions

Following revelations of the Luis Bárcenas accounts which appeared in part in El País a few weeks ago, the Partido Popular has come in for a bit of friendly ribbing. Suggestions of 'brown envelope' money passing hands and, somewhere behind it all, some irregular party contributions from major businessmen involved in construction, makes it all sound a bit like we are living in New Jersey. No doubt we shall all settle down when the two investigating judges (currently and inexplicably at loggerheads) are able to show that it was all just a big misunderstanding.

The Spanish Bomb

The ABC newspaper ran an interesting story on Sunday about Spain's atomic bomb program. This was following an obsession of Francisco Franco to build a bomba and, perhaps, toss it at somebody. One of the reasons that Franco wanted the bomb, says José Lesta, who has just written a book called 'Claves ocultas del poder mundial', was to join the select club of the veto-wielding powers in the United Nations. Furthermore, having this technology at hand would have made Spain, and Franco, a geo-strategic power in Europe. Lastly, says the author, the availability of an atomic bomb would have given Franco enormous clout over his eternal enemy Morocco, especially since, in the Spanish Sahara, he had a perfect location for atomic tests.
By order of the Caudillo himself, in 1951, a select group of scientists and military leaders under General Juan Vigón opened a secret project, now known as the 'Junta de Energía Nuclear', whose job was to provide the country with a nuclear arsenal. Soon, following Vigón's death in 1955, an even more obsessive commander took over the project, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (better known as Franco's chosen successor, until he was assassinated by ETA in 1973). The Americans unconsciously participated by donating money towards Spain's nuclear energy program and with their help, Franco and Carrero Blanco opened in Madrid the 'Centro Nacional de Energía Nuclear Juan Vigón'.
Spain had all the ingredients to make a bomb, and it had the science. All it needed was one final explosive key element, plutonium. The French were willing to help, and a joint Franco/Spanish project, at Vandellós I was opened: Spain's first nuclear power station was a reality. The USA was not a supporter of this development and asked both France and Spain to sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which De Gaulle and Franco both declined to do. 
In the 1960s, Spain had the technology, the scientists and the wherewithal to make a bomb. She could produce around 200 kilos of military-grade plutonium. Spain is Europe's second largest producer of uranium and, with the accidental loss of four USAF nuclear bombs in Palomares, Almería in January 1966, the final ingredient fell into Spanish hands - the trigger device. 
The Americans were once again unhappy with developments, and Henry Kissinger flew over to Spain to meet with General Franco, the future king Juan Carlos de Borbón, and, in a long and acrimonious discussion,  with Carrero Blanco. It was the 19th December1973. 
What was said has never been disclosed, but, less than 24 hours later, Carrero Blanco was dead, blown up  and across the roofs of Madrid in his armour-plated Dodge. With the Admiral's passing, and the evidence of American disapproval, the project for Spain's atomic bomb languished. 
Eventually, Felipe Gonzalez signed the non-proliferation treaty in 1987 and Spain's dream of an atomic bomb was at an end. 

OK, the bit about the CIA blowing up Carrero Blanco seems rather unlikely... 

Juan Guirado Remembered

I live in a town in southern Spain, famous for its stark white cubist beauty. Famous, that is, among artists. The town is Mojácar, ruthlessly clasping the final hill in a fall from the high Spanish mountains behind, overlooking a bland and unexceptional beach. The town has narrow streets, far too narrow for modern transport, just wide enough for a donkey and its load. The colours are harsh and primary under the strong sun: blue, white and brown. At night, before the terrible sulphur lights were installed to smash the mystery and romance of the darkness, the shades and shadows from the moonlight and the odd light-bulb would cloak the town in an ambiguous romance. No wonder that many outsiders came, their senses alert for poetry, story, magic and mystery. And so on a corner or a roof, an artist finds his angle, his view or his inspiration and pulls out his crayons or his brushes.

Mojácar has changed since the artists arrived... and ultimately left again. Romantic arches, old buildings and emblematic corners have been torn down in favour of ugly shops, souvenir stalls and neon-lit pizza houses. The old fountain was pointlessly remodelled twenty years ago, a small number of indifferently built homes were recently razed, and a small, expensive and ultimately useless underground car-park covered by a granite plaza were built in their stead. High and greedy rents keep away the dilettantes. Mojácar, like her artists, has suffered.

Juan Guirado was never just another artist, even among the tradition of those who were inspired by Mojácar – this cubist Moorish town that has always been so unappreciated by the local population. Like the town itself, he was unique

My first memory of Juan takes place in a nearby village, when the artist, myself and a young local journalist were, for some reason, standing around near some seminal event – the opening of a new and relentlessly modern looking plaza, I think. A local politician came over and said hello. He took my hand and then reached hold of my elderly companion. Juan's mouth dropped open in apparent shock and he ran to a nearby spigot to wash his hands in a pantomime of horror. Well, we laughed. Juan Guirado didn't like politicians, bankers, priests or lawyers, or 'catetos' – village thick-heads. He would arch his fingers into a grasping and ugly pose, peel back his lips, and show us how they were chasing after your vote, your money or your soul. Some of his paintings would show this same bunch of predators, looming and squirming under his palette.

We called him 'El Maestro'. He had a rich and rewarding life. Not a wealthy one, but a busy one. The type of life that looks like it must have been a lot of fun to have led. He had spent several years in Australia, painting (of course) and working odd jobs in the 'bush'. He had forgotten most of his English, but had a few phrases that would sometimes pop out of his mouth, invective in a heavy Australian accent. The Maestro was a man who painted a lot, or drew pictures, always with some story or message hidden within the lines. This became evident in a series of cartoons that appeared in El Indálico, a local monthly newspaper, where a cartoon of two vultures evidently feeding over the flesh of Mojácar would enter into Faustian dialogue.

Juan drank too much: brandies, beer and wine, and didn't look after himself very well. He smoked Ducados, holding the cigarette between his thumb and his first finger like soldiers do. He didn't drive and travelled by bus or sometimes transported by a friend.

In his studio – I knew two of them, the first in Mojácar the next in Vera – there would be piles of paintings. Piles. The current one would be on an easel and a home-made frame was at hand to put on top for effect. He sometimes did portraits – strong and forceful pictures. Following another passion of his, he painted bullfighters in their suits of lights. There were landscapes, harsh views of Mediterranean ramblas or orchards. But, above all, there were his special views of chaos, produced in a singular and fascinating technique, scraping the colour into the canvas. Magnificent.

Mojácar has been the home to many artists, although they have sold few paintings there. The Indalo, the stick-man that birthed a group of artists called Los indalianos in the 1950s, artists that kicked the town into the attention of the European bohemians, attracting investors, painters and a patina of culture while making it in passing the richest per-capita town in Andalucía, is now a provincial logo for cucumbers.

For el Maestro, that was a terrible thing to see.

Iberia on strike

You see, they can spell it right when they want to...

Where Else is Safe

Helen and Len Prior have just received (or rather, will one day receive) a small payout from the Government as an apology for bulldozing down their home in January 2008. Half of the settlement, naturally, to go to their lawyers and procurators. As is only fair. The balance, 15,000€, not much in the great scheme of things. No doubt, the public boycott of Spain as a retirement destination will continue with the same enthusiasm as before. (Note to Self: I'll have to check with the Daily Mail about this).
Has Spain lost a staggering amount of foreign divisas, billions in lost sales to Northern Europeans, losses too from the regular transfers of pensions that the retirees bring to their moribund pueblos in the sticks? Has one small demolition in Vera, crassly mishandled yet largely unknown to the greater Spanish public, managed to divert the Brits, Norwegians, Germans, Swedes and Irish from buying a home in Spain? In short: is Spain's loss  France, Cyprus or Portugal's gain?
Certainly, the statistic of 300,000 homes, declared a posteriori as 'ilegal' (once the cheques had cleared) by the Junta de Andalucía (who, we are asked to believe, didn't notice them during the process of being built), has helped make Spain a pariah in the buying-a-home-abroad stakes.
So - sick of the cold, the prices, their family, the price of gin and the underlying threat of violence - where do the retired go to live, to enjoy a glass of wine from their terrace as the sun quietly sinks behind the dusty hills? I thought to check up on numbers of Britons (as a start) living in Cyprus, France, Portugal and Italy. So far, it appears that there are 60,000 in Cyprus (which sounds, from my brief research, ghastly) and another 200,000 in France (the British in France don't live in compounds or single-nationality  urbanisations as many of us do and, as I remember, they don't mingle or speak to each other at all if they can help it - even in their fractured French). I'm still working on the other shangri-las since a 'moderator' put the kibosh on my question on an ex-pat forum 'How Many Brits live in Your Country?' for some reason. Probably works for the Spanish tourist board...
The Guardian has been working on a similar idea, I discover. 'Where Do People Live?' it asked recently.  The survey included Poland and dropped Portugal and Cyprus. It gives the current official number of Britons living in Spain: 390,000 - a calculation made from the number of Brits who have inscribed themselves on the town hall registries (el padrón), which, as we all know, is pretty incomplete. No doubt Brits in other countries are more responsible... the Guardian puts the numbers in France at 150,000 and 29,000 in Italy. Germany enjoys the company of 104,000 Britons apparently. I'm sorry, Poland? 764 persons.
My research into France has so far thrown up a web-site called 'Don't Move to France' which is self-explanatory, if a little surprising, and there are several sites about Cyprus that are worth reading. So, as I wait for more information, I reflect that perhaps Spain isn't so bad a place to buy a home after all, as long as potential buyers do their homework.

Goodbye Pete, Hello Cal

This is a narrow street in Mojácar called - at least for thirty years or so - Callejón de Pedro Barato, now clearly renamed as the more prosaic Calle La Cal. It was christened 'Pedro Barato' by Cheap Pete, an American who lived here during the seventies and built El Palacio, the building in the picture to the right, which Pete opened as a restaurant.
It's a fact of life here in Mojácar, a town whose every vestige and sign of wealth comes from the legions of foreigners who have settled here since the sixties, when the town was little more than a mass of attractive rubble, that the swollen guiri population (now over sixty percent) must be treated as forgotten second-class citizens, whose only function is to pay their taxes. Unlike many towns in similar circumstances on the Costa del Sol or Costa Blanca, there is no 'Foreign Department' in the Mojácar Town Hall, much less one staffed by foreigners. In fact, although there are over 150 funcionarios in the Town Hall in a town of around 8,000 inhabitants, none of them are British.
The politics of the town is to look for cheap brief-stay tourism (there isn't any at this time of year), trying to pack badly designed and ugly hotels located on the far end of the beach, hotels that bring no business to the larger community. At the same time, ignoring residential tourism, which brings in large amounts of money all year long - as more enlightened towns like Marbella, Mijas, Fuengirola, Altea and so on are perfectly well aware.
The foreigners in Mojácar are getting squeezed and many wish to leave. It's understandably hard to sell their homes as there is no demand (because the town businesses are only concerned with tourism, and are generally shut during the winter, leaving the town with little or no social cohesion). At the same time, massive and eagerly raised rents on properties held by sly locals are keeping many shops, bars and restaurants closed... sometimes all year round.
One day though, we shall all be gone and, like Cheap Pete before us, we shall be removed from the history books and forgotten.

It's Not What You Said (It's The Way That You Said It)

 The Almería Better Business Bureau (which takes a few euros out of your taxes if you are self-employed) is - and one can only suppose this - meant to drum up business. One of its jobs is to provide a poster which compliments the well-feared 'complaints book'. Two or three complaints from the public and you can be up for a nasty fine. For years, the poster (forget the syntax and wonderful translation) had a spelling mistake, which was the word 'establishement'. As all long-time foreigners know, Spanish institutions never employ or ask a native-speaker to check their prose, and far less these days with the google-translator, although I suspect that, in this case, they've kept it artesanal.
So, it was nice to see that they finally fixed the problem. Oh, wait.

How Do You Stop This Thing?

We had our first holiday in quite a long time, two weeks in the American Midwest over Christmas and the New Year. Unlike most everything else - from the cars to the portions of food - the horses there are smaller, which I think is just as well.
Leaving the sanctity of the office in our home in Southern Spain, where I spend so many hours fiddling about on the home computer, writing up stories that attract my attention, translating texts, preparing and finessing a new weekly summary of Spanish finance politics and housing issues for foreign property owners (Business over Tapas) and otherwise misusing my time with the keyboard, it was good to change gears and, thanks to the kindness of my American hosts, drive an automatic for a change.
I suppose as we get older we get stuck in our various ruts: comfortable with our own opinions, thoughts and prejudices.
There was the story that Old Tuborg once told me.  'I lived all my life in Ceylon. They filmed the Bridge over the River Kwai on my land and I wouldn't let them blow it up until they'd paid me the money for building the damn thing for them. The people there are nice, but odd. Every day I would have a boiled egg for breakfast. Then one day, my servant bought me a fried egg and put it in front of me. For forty years, I said to him, you have brought me a boiled egg every morning at 8.00. Why have you now suddenly brought me a fried egg? I thought you liked them, he said. I had to let him go after that'.
Living in Spain is fun and sometimes challenging. It's worth spending as much time as you can mixing in with Spanish culture, language, history, food, people, society and places.
That means, for me, getting off my backside and making every day different from the last. I never liked boiled eggs anyway.

So, Who Were the Girls?

Here's a picture from a thread on Facebook called Mojácar Golden Years - my Dad, me and two friends, taken in The Indalo bar in Mojácar Pueblo back in around the mid-seventies. The Indalo wasn't the prettiest bar in the world, but it served the main square and, as we can see, had an inside for those cold coffee mornings.
Of course, they knocked it down eventually and made some crap souvenir shops instead.

Raven

Good times ol' buddy.

The Russians Are Coming

The cliché of all bona fide estate agents, 'the green shoots of recovery', is beginning to resound again along the costas as properties are being snapped up by foreigners. Paying usually in cash, the buyers have been doing their homework on the Internet and they are buying cheap discounted apartments by the hundreds. An estate agent in Benhavís (near Marbella) says that sales have increased in the past year by a satisfying 220%, precisely because 'prices have fallen by up to 70% from 2006 levels'.

This time, it's the Russians who are buying. To not put too fine a point on it, the Spanish Hacienda is hardly bothered by where the cash comes from, as long as it's coming. One or two bed-roomed apartments in the resort towns and estates of the Spanish coast are in demand, usually those going for under 100,000€ .

Other nationalities too. The British are still shy, having seen too many 'Paradise Lost' TV shows and read too many articles about Len and Helen Prior, now cresting their fifth anniversary in Vera among the ruins of their home. But the Belgians, the Germans and the Scandinavians are all waking up to the perennial offer of good weather and cheap real estate that Spain is once again able to offer.

These homes being sold by the agents are doing the major banks little good however. The typical toxic promotions now held by the new 'Spanish Bad Bank', the Sareb, were built as apartment blocks in and around the country's major cities. The Spanish, thanks to the extreme crisis, can not afford to buy them, while the foreigners simply don't want them. Barrios on the edge of a bus line in Madrid or Seville will never be the haunts of Europeans or Russians, who would be as out of their depth in an all-Spanish environment as if they moved to Glasgow.

Other foreigners are putting up their hands for apartments as well; but this time, they like the City. In Alicante, for example, Algerians are snapping up second homes. It's just a twelve hour ferry to Oran. A notary in Alicante is on record as saying that some 25% of all house registrations under his pen have come from Algerians, while a local agency called Tecnocasa claims that well over half of its sales since July have gone to Algerians.

However, it's the Russians who are buying the most. According to Masa International, Spain is seen in Moscow as the fashionable place to have a holiday home: in fact, there are now 250 agencies in that city who specialise in Spanish sales. While the Spanish have never quite understood why foreigners like 'to stick together', crafting Spanish towns and resorts as far as possible into mono-cultural conurbations, like the Germans with Mallorca or the British with their Fuengirola or Mojácar, it's clear that the Russians prefer the Costa Dorada. The agency Europa Dom in Tarragona claims that 75% of all their sales are to Russian buyers.

All of this said, with green shoots in the newspapers and Russian language menus in the restaurants, the vast majority of homes bought in Spain this year are far removed from the Coast and have been acquired by Spaniards.

Bethune: Canadian Hero

'He gave all he could, all he had, to the betterment of the people of the world'.
 The Canadian doctor Henry Norman Bethune, acknowledged in a leading article in La Voz de Almería (Nov 4th) called 'El canadiense que salvó vidas durante la huida desde Málaga a Almería en 1937' - The Canadian who saved lives during the retreat from Málaga to Almería in 1937.
Norman Bethune is best known for 'his service in war time medical units during the Spanish Civil War and with the Communist Eighth Route Army (Ba Lu Jun) during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He developed the first mobile blood-transfusion service in Spain in 1936. A Communist, he wrote that wars were motivated by profits, not principles' (Wiki)

'After the capture of Malaga by the military rebels, terrified by the news and the speeches that General Queipo broadcast from Radio Sevilla; on February 7, 1937 a large convoy consisting of about eighty or a hundred thousand people flee in the only way possible: towards the capital of Almería. Consisting mostly of the wounded, women, children and the elderly, the panicked column is pursued by Moorish and Italian troops and bombed without mercy by German aircraft. From the sea, the fascist navy zeroed in like as if were target practice. The walking column was slaughtered without the smallest glimpse of humanity' (Historian Milagros Soler).

The Doctor from the International Brigades, who had developed a new kind of live-saving mobile blood-transfusion unit, was a popular and useful addition to the Republicans, and he is remembered in particular for helping to succour many people along the 350kms track between the two cities.

'We had spent an hour in Almeria', he writes in a book recently released in Spanish called 'Las Heridas’, 'long enough to obtain a bite of hard-to-find food. The small seaport had been bombed by air and blocked from the sea. One could feel the hunger in the streets. A kid took us to a bar, but it was completely saturated with soldiers, all eating the same mixture of thick smoky sludge. When we left again, the streets were full of people. The news about the fall of Málaga was spreading'. 

Together with a photographer, Hazen Sise, Bethune set out in his truck towards Málaga. Before he had gone very far, he began to encounter refugees.  'In place of what should have been the road, I could see twenty miles of human beings gathered as one. It was all thick with refugees, thousands and thousands, tight, falling against each other... It wasn't a defeat, it was a collapse'.

The Doctor emptied his truck of medical material and told his friend to drive as many people as he could - forty children and two women in the first load - to Almería 'and to stop for no one'. For four day and nights, Sise transported as many refugees as he could as Bethune tirelessly treated the wounded on the side of the road. 

Almería itself, with no wheeled transport left to help, was being bombarded by Franco's forces. 'Finally the attack passed', Bethune says in his book, 'but the dying and the dead remained'.

One of his most well-known poems was published in the 1937 July issue of a Canadian magazine:
And the same pallid moon tonight,
Which rides so quietly, clear and high,
The mirror of our pale and troubled gaze
Raised to a cool Canadian sky.
Above the shattered Spanish troops
Last night rose low and wild and red,
Reflecting back from her illumined shield
The blood bespattered faces of the dead.
To that pale disc we raise our clenched fists,
And to those nameless dead our vows renew,
“Comrades, who fought for freedom and the future world,
Who died for us, we will remember you.”

 On February 7, 2006, the city of Málaga opened the Walk of Canadians in his memory. This avenue pays tribute to the solidarity action of Dr. Norman Bethune and his colleagues who helped the population of Málaga during the Civil War. During the ceremony, a commemorative plaque was unveiled with the inscription: "Walk of Canadians - In memory of aid from the people of Canada at the hands of Norman Bethune, provided to the refugees of Málaga in February 1937". The ceremony also conducted a planting of an olive tree and a maple tree representative of Spain and Canada, symbols of friendship between the two peoples. (Wiki)

An hour-long film of his life is here .

Story by Amber Napier