Medio Ambiente Fails Again: Cabo de Gata

The Cabo de Gata is a beautiful and untouched area outside the city of Almería. You may have to pass through some plastic farms to get there, but once in the tiny villages of Pozo de los Frailes or San José, the charm kicks in with a vengeance. Small restaurants and bijou hotels, a port in San José, a mixture of fishermen, retired Spaniards and odd-looking hippies in old vee dubs and on bicycles. The surrounding hills are free from any intensive farming and, apart from the odd decorative windmill, are simply green rolling hills. The whole area is carefully protected by the agency of the Medio Ambiente.
Just through San José, there is a untarred road that leads to the fine and untouched beaches of Los Genoveses and Monsul, the former chosen as the top beach of Spain 2015 by Antena3 (here).
Unfortunately for the region (part of the larger Parque Natural de Cabo de Gata - Nijar), one of the many things the environmentalists fail to do is look after the chumbo cactus, the nopal, the prickly pear. They say that it is an invasive plant (ratified by Royal Decree Nov 2011) and, as such, it is not within their remit to care for its protection. The picture here is a glimpse of a large plantation of the cactus, taken just behind the prizewinning Playa de los Genoveses. The bug in question is the tiny cochineal fly, which lifts off in its millions at night, to uncomfortable effect. The infection, the sticky white stuff, is carried by birds. It is slowly wending its way westwards towards Granada and Málaga.  The plants do not recover although the roots seem to be OK: fresh shoots are soon consumed by the pest.
The Medio Ambiente also has a large park just outside Almería City, 14 hectares of land with an exhaustive collection of local trees, shrubs and plants, with walkways and ponds, called El Boticario. The park was built with European funds and the Medio Ambiente has been trying to offload it to the diputación (County Council), or the Town Hall of Almería, ever since completion in 2005. There are no takers.
The result, the park is dying. The cactus (hello, I thought they were 'invasive') are infected, as are a number of other plants. Nothing appears to have been watered or pruned. The smaller flora has long since dried up and died. (A return visit to the Boticario: Spanish Shilling, June this year, here).
There is a push to change the law regarding the status of the prickly pear, whose infection has damaged much of the hills and plains of Murcia and Almería, and we can only hope that it proves successful. Soon. 

The Ascent of Old Mojácar

Mojácar Could Have Been a Contender...

There’s not much acknowledgment of history in Mojácar as a rule, so we’ll gloss over the first few thousand years of the town and arrive, breathless, in the times of the Mayor Jacinto Alarcón, in the early sixties.

That perhaps modest wave of artists, the Indalianos, mainly from Almería (a city surprisingly wealthy in culture - you can see some of their work today in the Doña Pakyta Museum in downtown Almería) had been and gone: weekending in Mojácar, drinking and painting. They had introduced, or at least, promoted, the local stick figure, which they called after themselves – the Indalo.  Mayor Jacinto, in charge of a moribund village, had been glad to receive them, and he allowed them to stay in a few tumbledown houses. He instructed the artists, the poets and the writers – go and tell people about our town. By about 1962 Mayor Jacinto had an even better idea – to give away ruins or land to those who would fix them up (bringing sorely needed wealth into the community).  Many came, and the town, with less than 600 inhabitants in 1960, began to slowly revive. A small hostelry, the Hotel Indalo, opened in the Plaza Nueva, and, with its bar and first-floor restaurant, it thrived. Some mojaqueros, living in Lyon, Barcelona, Frankfurt or Madrid, heard of the new growth in the pueblo, and they returned.

The foreigners came. They found the village to be a thing of beauty, and above all, cheap. A house in 1966 would cost five hundred or a thousand pounds. A glass of beer, a few pesetas. They brought with them the habits of the swinging sixties: the Beatles, free love and a stick of hashish. The mojaqueros learned of these things as they began to find lots of work in the construction industry. The unexpected introduction of the Almería airport (Franco never liked the province) and the Mayor’s skills at Court bringing us a Parador Hotel in 1964 helped immeasurably. Mojácar was on its way.

Mayor Jacinto was strict, insisting that houses should be traditionally built – with small windows, flat roofs and whitewash. No high-risers and everyone to have a view. The rules were broken by the first hotels, the Mojácar, the Moresco and on the unexploited beach (land at one peseta for ten metres, no takers), the Hotel Indalo. The tour operator Horizon had discovered Mojácar and made it its flagship resort (before going spectacularly bust).

Mojácar’s fame grew abroad. The Indalo was often seen in London and Mojácar became a small phenomenon internationally. More foreigners came and a couple of local families began to take over the local economy. They became very wealthy. By 1990, they were multimillionaires –and friends of the mighty.

Everyone lived together more or less agreeably (as they still do today in Turre): the money was all foreign and it kept on arriving, ending – sooner or later – in local pockets. As perhaps it should. Mojácar itself, with the old mayor’s retirement in about 1978, began to change from a residential town to a tourist resort. A Corsican businessman knocked down the village carpentry in the square – a squat building connected by arches spanning the narrow streets on either side – and built a three story nick-nack shop called Sondra’s. The first ‘democratically elected mayor’ (the foreign population of course couldn’t vote) also allowed the rest of the main square to be demolished, including a beautiful theatre, and a furious scramble of more nick-nack shops appeared on the three levels of the ‘Multicentro’: tee shirts, beaded wrist bands, pottery from Nijar and junk jewelery from China. The old hotel, the Indalo, that decrepit but key building that commanded the square, was similarly demolished for even more ‘souvenir shops’.   On the beach, the Pueblo Indalo was built. The town had decided that tourism brought in more money than resident home-buying foreigners. Tourists spend heedlessly and then they go away; home-owners stay (and perhaps vote, or try and compete in jobs and businesses). Old Jacinto’s call for ‘Mojácar, where the Sun spends the Winter’ was, for some reason, ignored and the town became very seasonal. On the construction side (where the real money lay), small apartments, good for a couple of mildly uncomfortable weeks, were built rather than comfortable villas.

By 1985, as local homes were demolished and rebuilt to architects’ designs, the village had begun to change from ‘a beautiful Moorish clutter of cubist homes’ to a slightly ugly town with narrow streets and a wonderful view. The foreigners themselves continued to enjoy Mojácar (although its fame abroad was vanishing), and many chose to live in La Paratá (on a high mountain overlooking the beach, ridiculously British), or along the beach itself, still at apparently ludicrous prices. Mojácar was a fine place: there was no Sky television and the only news came from the World Service of the BBC – far off and, beyond the fluctuations in the daily rate of exchange, of little interest.  

The second mayor (third really, the age of ‘mociones de censura’ had begun) was Mayor Bartolo, a PSOE man who had worked in the Turre Caja de Ahorros. Bartolo was – one way or another – influenced towards the new president of the Junta de Andalucía, Manuel Chaves, and, inspired to make Mojácar a modern town, he brought back an architect called Nicolás Cermeño, by chance Chaves’ nephew, to rebuild the old Mojácar fountain – La Fuente.

It would be the beginning of the end of Mojácar and its easy cohabitation.

Remarkably, an open meeting was held in the Town Hall to discuss the plan for a new tourist fountain to take the place of the old public one. The mojaqueros were against the idea – one of them, José María (carpenter and undertaker), gave a famous speech about how he had seen enough marble to last a lifetime and he was against an austere gray marble fuente. We all agreed.

Work began a few days later.

The foreigners were aghast. An early copy of ‘The Entertainer’ (the English-language newspaper) has a picture of a local Brit holding a placard which reads ‘Ninety Thousand Pounds to Wash my Knickers?’ (the reference being that, in those days, the fuente was used by washerwomen as a laundry). A few days later, the foreigners made a demonstration in protest against the outrage. They were (unwisely) led by an American actor and long-term local resident called Charles Baxter (who lived openly with his Spanish boyfriend) together with Silvio Narizzano (whose sexual perversions in Hollywood and London were palpably well-known locally, as was his artist and playwright boyfriend Win Wells). I was warned by Antonio, a local friend, ‘to keep clear’. It was well that he told me, because the foreigners, amassed in the main square, were set upon by the mojaqueros and a fight developed. Eventually, the Guardia Civil arrested Silvio (later to be freed: ‘unshackle that man’, said the mayor standing outside the Town Hall. Silvio gave him a large bunch of roses and a kiss). Shortly after the event, Charles Baxter – the gray-haired dapper doyen of the foreigners – left Mojácar for good.

The mojaqueros had the last word – we don’t like the new fuente but it’s for us to complain – not you. The relationship with the foreigners was broken.

A few months later, Bartolo used the same architect to ‘remodel’ the Castillo. No one complained.

...

Years after (in 2014), a local man called Francisco Haro, the son of the old owner of the Hotel Indalo, wrote an astonishing homage to the early foreigners who had brought Mojácar back from the brink of ruin, a fully-illustrated book called ‘Mojaqueros de Hecho’ (Honorary Mojaqueros). Tales of Fritz the mad artist, Charlie Braun, Bill Napier, Paul Beckett, Ulf Dietrich, Ric Davis, the Polansky brothers, Salvatore, Geri, Theresa and many more who brought wealth, fame and fun to the area. The book was completely ignored by the current Town Hall which has, at best, an uneasy relationship with the guiris. These days, and despite the 60% of foreign inhabitants (more or less, depending on the vagaries of the town hall padrón), Mojácar is considered officially as a seasonal tourist town.

Bullfighting on Horseback

Bullfighters on horseback, the Spanish rejoneadores. This was the offer on Saturday 30th August, the last day of a six-day bullfight festival in Almería. the top picture is of the alguaciles, who keep the Law. The second picture shows the three rejoneadores - Hermoso de Mendoza, Leonardo Hernández and the Frenchwoman Lea Vicens. One of the cuadrilla is in the third photo. The rest are pictures taken during the corrida.

Like most people who have lived here a long time (!), I have always been tolerant of bullfighting. I went to see one or two over my time, here and there, even including one with the 'Mojácar Bullfight Club' in a small town in Granada called Huescar a few years back. They managed to fill a bus with Englishmen for the rumble.
Later, as my conversational Spanish improved, I spent more time with Spanish friends. I would become accustomed to joining them sometimes in a bar over a whisky to watch the toros on the television. Among the group, an artist and a writer - both good friends of mine - would gossip with one eye on the corrida above, while occasionally shouting 'olé' or 'get tha fuck outta here' as necessary.
Since my wife died last year, I've been helped a lot by another Spanish friend, whose father was a famous bullfighter called Antonio Bienvenida. I've heard some of the stories.
These days, I move pretty much in a Spanish circle, my companion is Spanish and, like her friends, she goes sometimes to bullfights. I've been to three in the past year. I could claim that bullfighting is cruel and stay home and sulk, I suppose, but that would be silly.
In reality - notwithstanding the British view on Los Toros - no one goes to see them suffer. We go to see the skill, the art, the bravery and the excitement. No one, no one, likes to see an animal die. But it has to be part of the spectacle. The Spanish contrast the four years living on la dehesa (a huge open farm) and a brave death, versus nine months in a cage and a bolt through the forehead for a normal meat animal.
I can understand the point of view of a vegan - they are at least consistent - but a Briton who knows next to nothing about Spain, about her culture, her language, her history, her politics and her family-relationships, and yet likes his steak and chips - is hardly the right person to lecture me on the morality of la tauromaquia.

Senés, the slate village of Almería

Back in Senés - a small village in the hills behind Tabernas. The pueblo uses slate for its construction rather than brick or tiles. Senés has its Moors and Christians festival this weekend, and here's a few pictures.

August on a Half Shell

Driving home after a beer on the beach. I'd hoped for one in the pueblo, but there was no parking left: at 8.00pm. Why not build public parking Mrs Mayor, more parking means more cars means more customers. Who knows, even residents. 
There's a bar in the village, says they make their money from tourism. It's a pretty place, open all year long and run by residents - not those people who open for a couple of months during the high season then fuck off away for the rest of the year. Proper residents they are, with an interest in the village. I reckon I must have spent about 10,000€ in that bar over a lifetime of drinking. I'd like to see the tourist who could match that.
So, the beach. Lots of traffic but the bar I went to, on a side street, was pretty quiet. Some fellow was out last night with a shotgun (or a pellet gun, you know how we exaggerate) and he fired both barrels at a group of people waiting to get into (or out of) a discotheque at five in the morning. So, more police I expect. I drank my beer, ate a tapa and came home again. 
Our road is interesting: no street sign, no pavement, no pedestrians, hardly any houses (there are fourteen), but 59 street lamps, put up just days before the election. Thirteen of the home-owners are against the street lights, the last one on the line is, apparently, in favour of them - although he will have noticed the alarming increase in the moth population. 

Mojácar in August: tourism is in full flood and the cash-registers are ringing. Unemployment is down as summer jobs abound. There are warm queues outside each cash-point (most now charging two euros or more for non-account holders) and gangs of youths wandering up and down our one (one!) street and occasionally being sick in the flower beds. Many of the residents have given up the unequal struggle and either stay quietly at home, panting in the heat, or else they have left for a visit to their countries of birth. Festivals, smoke, noise, music, crowds and – above all – profit. 

September is still a month away...

The Hatred is Strong in this One, Luke

Goodness, the fuss about a lion.
I have a Facebook account which serves me a regular dose of people's thoughts, opinions, photographs and convictions, strongly spiced with nobility, beauty, wonder, politics, racism, hatred and stupidity. Much, perhaps, like anyone else's Facebook page. I have taken to removing ('unfriending') some of the worst posters, who lean towards the negative over the positive. So, rather than talk about those people who post beauty, useful information, home-pictures, friends, music, jokes or funny videos, I should like to comment briefly on those others who like to post pictures of dead or suffering animals ('animal porn'), or find and support ignorant racist cant from Stormfront or Britain First, or who choose teasers which are solely designed to bring the reader to a separate page often dripping with viruses (known, apparently, as 'clickbait'), together with those with aggressive opinions (often from the vegans, or that unfunny comedian Ricky Gervais) or other posters who have an agenda - not to be against something, but to be against someone else being either indifferent or - worse still - in favour (bullfight pictures from the anti-taurinos - yawn!).
If you believe that shit, go and do something about it. Don't just post a picture of a baby seal being squished by a baseball bat just to ruin my morning trawl through the Facebook over breakfast; why not go and buy a fucking airplane ticket to Canada? And while you are at it, seated on the plane perhaps wondering how you are going to persuade a team of highly-unpleasant seal-killers, or dolphin-slayers, or dog-eaters, or bullfight-enthusiasts  or even some fucking Zulu with a huge cheque hidden in his jockstrap hauling along an idiot American hunter with a bow n' arrow (for Christ's sake), just consider that the rest of us are not impressed by your thirst for revenge, your call for vigilantism or your support for public lynching, all from your own home and in the knowledge that you will never be called out. These kind of posts don't make you strong, or clever, or (God forbid) attractive. They make you ugly.

Some Pictures from Delfos

Delfos is a art and antique gallery on the Mojácar/Turre road, a place where you can get a drink, enjoy some music and paintings in a peaceful setting. The locale is huge, an old cortijo expanded and converted with a remarkable selection of regularly updated exhibits. Mariano, who runs the Delfos, is a true mercader - make him an offer...
Here's the web-page: delfosmojacar.com
 

Old Tee-shirts

It's surely tee-shirt weather. It's so hot this month ('breaking records' hot) that I have been suffering from two or even three tee-shirt nights. A revolving fan, the window open once it's gone dark, a cold shower and a few beers for dinner - it's still so hot that the tee-shirts are wringing wet after an hour or two of tossing in the bed.
I have some favourite tees. Like many of us, they were collected as souvenirs from different visits, situations, experiences and, of course concerts. Wow, is that a genuine Rolling Stones 1984 Eel Pie Island concert they ask, adoringly. Heh heh, yes, I was there. It was like this see...
But the moths get at them and the sweat makes them rot. After a while, the neck gets baggy and you leave them, half forgotten, on the shelf in the bathroom and then a funny thing happens. The Tee-shirt Fairy takes them. 
I never knew how many of my favourite tee-shirts had disappeared over the years. Ohh, that green one with uh, the flying saucer and the cows. My old Entertainer one which, truth to admit, was a fraction small, showed a bit of my stomach if I stood up straight. Damn, and the one from Gibraltar I got into a fight about..
The Tee-shirt Fairy had taken them all.
Then one day, while looking under the sink to find a cloth to wipe up some mess before my wife found it, I happened on a huge clump of old, torn and unloved tee-shirts. That's where they go. You know, a few of them were savable...

Mojácar was an Artists Town

Mojácar was 'discovered' by artists. Until the 1950s, there was little to be said about the town. It had fallen into obscurity and there were few people left. The population was numbered in the hundreds and the rest had gone away, either in search of work, or through political problems following the Civil War. A film crew descended on the village in 1953 and shot part of 'Sierra Maldita' (short video here. Mojácar appears from Minute 3). There was no road to the village in those days, and the crew parked in the river-bed below and mounted the hill on donkeys.
The village was in ruins. Those who left would disassemble their homes, selling the iron rejas, the beams, lintels and woodwork. There would have been no chance to sell the house, no takers. An abandoned home in those days was a ruin open to the elements.
The artists came during that decade, a group from Almería who called themselves 'Los Indalianos', after the Almerian Saint Indalecio. They found a local totem here, the little Mojácar man, an inspiration to any self-respecting artist, and so named it after themselves, and that's how 'El Indalo' was born. They painted portraits of the local people, paintings of the town and the sierras, and were inspired by the light, the landscape and, I think, the poverty.Their art can be seen in the Doña Pakyta museum in Almería (where the Rambla and the Paseo meet) and is well worth the visit. The Mojácar Town Hall owns no examples of the Indalianos, and has no interest in the subject. Indeed, in the museum in Almería, there is no mention of Mojácar and the 'Indalo' is credited as a totem from Vélez Blanco (yet, in the enormously detailed 27 volume Espasa Calpe encyclopedia of 1920 - there's a set at La Voz de Almería - there's no mention of 'Indalo').
Then came the foreign artists and their companions. Apart from Jacinto Alarcón, mayor during the final Franco years who gave land or ruins to those foreigners who agreed to repair of fix them, little notice was taken of these settlers who brought in the money that began to make the local people wealthy.
Today, we have a remarkably ugly 'municipal art gallery' which shows exhibitions in a desultory way. No one goes. The artists themselves have largely chosen more welcoming villages in the sierras, as these days, Mojácar prefers tourists.

Mojácar Earthquake

Mojácar and Vera were largely destroyed in an earthquake which occurred on the night of November 9th 1518. Articles in Spanish here and here tell the story.
There had been a series of worrisome trembles that year ever since mid-June, but nothing to match the final convulsion.
Briefly, with the eternal threat of the Barbary Pirates (I wrote about them here), and all the local defenses demolished by the ferocity of the earthquake - we are on a major fault line, the same one that finished off the Minoan Civilization in Crete in 1450BC - the area was suddenly and abruptly in a bad way. It was, after all, just thirty years after the towns had been liberated by the Reyes Católicos.
It was a Tuesday, and the earthquake arrived around about midnight. Vera was totally destroyed (the hill behind the current location of the city 'Cerro del Espíritu Santo' was the old town) and Mojácar was badly hit. There's an eye-witness account from the then mayor of Mojácar - Iñigo Guevara - who described the collapsed castle in these terms: 'I saw it all fallen in, until the very foundations were visible. There is almost nothing left of the fortress which is so flattened that it appears to have been destroyed by all the artillery of the world'. A report from the time says that almost a third of the eighty homes which made up Mojácar had collapsed. Another report says that the clergy were frightened to give Mass in the church due to its state. It says in the original:  "En la dicha villa de Moxacar no se dize misa a causa que los clerigos no osan entrar a dezir misa a la yglesia porque esta para caerse a causa del terremoto que agora hizo”. A little over a dozen people died in Mojácar as a result of the earthquake. In Vera, the death-toll reached 150. The survivors of the catastrophe  fired an arrow into the sky to chose the site of the new town (Wiki).

Vera in the Middle Ages

The Pirates? 1,500 Moors showed up outside the defenceless village of Mojácar on October 7th 1522. Some of them might even have been born there. No doubt it was time to head for the hills...

Back at El Boticario

Trawling back to last September here on Spanish Shilling, I wrote about the Parque El Boticario outside Almería City in the Los Llanos de La Cañada (near the Riding Club). This is a 14Ha park designed by the Conserjería del Medio Ambiente, stocked with all the different flora of the province ('1.300 árboles, 2.000 arbustos y 75.000 plantas'), with a duck-pond, 'Moorish gardens', children's park and other wonders. The whole thing, built with European funds, was hastily offered on completion to either the Diputación or the City of Almería. Both declined the kind offer.
So Medio Ambiente (a bloated and largely useless organisation - how could it be otherwise?) was left with the job of maintenance, gardening and watering. They naturally dropped the ball. The park last September was dry and in a sorry state - some of those senior's exercise machines which every village and town feels obliged to buy and leave dotted around, were rusted out. Some overflowing dustbins from a Sunday party. Some dead trees and bushes, some infected plants (chumbo, palm trees and olive, indifferently attended.
A second visit a couple of weeks ago, after a few spring rains (a few), and the Boticario looked a little better. There's a large bar/restaurant, evidently rented out privately, on the edge of the park. Perhaps it pays for a gardener or two.
The park is open - except on Mondays - and it's a nice and of course quiet place to visit, but don't expect to see the maintenance and respect it deserves... 
Later:  I returned a third time later in June, and walked around the higher part of the park, where the shrubs are ever drier. Then, on leaving the park out of the gate - just in front I found the Bar Álamo (it means a poplar tree). Great air-conditioning, and the owner is an accomplished artist with some of her pictures up on the walls.

The Bug in the Computer

This fine looking but rather creepy picture was made by an AI, an Artificial Intelligence. A computer. I understand that it was told to go and make something artsy and this is what it came up with. The story is here.
We have been warned about these things - computers which are so clever that they can upgrade themselves without our interference, making them cleverer still. Those who enjoy Terminator will be familiar with these things, and the premise - or perhaps promise - that they will one day decide that the World doesn't need Humans any longer.
Cue the sinister music.
While I am not the one to write the story, in my version there would be a saviour. Small and fairy-like, in their tens of billions, those minuscule flies from the chumbo, the prickly pear, that have assailed Almería this year. They swarm and fill our eyes, noses and mouths. They go straight through the mosquito netting. They swat into a tiny red blob of cochineal. They are in our drinks, our food,they are clouding milk-white around the lights and, most destructively of all, they fly into the fans and the insides of our computers.
Short-circuiting them.
Would the AI stand a chance against the tiny creatures that have defeated our scurvy ecologistas? Not likely! 

Barbara Napier. It's Been a Year.

Barbara died a year ago, and I miss her.
She was a brave woman and a kind one. She suffered from a disfiguring disease called Wegener's Granulomatosis, and from 2002 until her death on June 4th 2014, she was not only in terrible pain, but was forced to undergo the most humiliating and terrible punishment, together with at least thirty major operations. These were either paid by the insurance we had, or later, when money was tight, by the Spanish National Health (which is very good, and our thanks to them).
Barbara was born in San José, California on July 7 1953 (she wrote about her early life - and her poisonous siblings - on her blog here) and she arrived in Spain in around 1980, staying originally with her parents who were living in Mojácar, but soon, in her own house on land next to the family estate.
She must have been amazing when she was young. Here's what a friend of Barbara called Sharon wrote:
'I just wanted to share a special memory I have of Barbara with you. My parents lived on Trinity Ct. near Foothill Elementary School and Barbara lived miles away from me in another part of Saratoga. One Saturday she called and said she was going to come see me. About an hour later the doorbell rings and Barbara is at the front door and her horse was out on the street. It must have been Jiggs. She got back on him and we stood out there and chit-chatted for a while until she decided it was time to ride him home. Of course for her to ride to my house and back home she had to ride on Highway 9 for several miles. I always wished I could have seen the expressions on the faces of drivers as she rode her horse home on a major highway. She was one of a kind and fearless. I feel honored to have known her'.
Barbara soon learned Spanish, by mixing with the local farmers and showing her interest in animals. She would go out riding with Don Diego, the doctor, as he did his 'rounds' of the far-off isolated cortijos up in the hills. One old lady complemented her on her idioma - 'you ain't from around here', she said, 'not sounding like that... you're probably from Los Gallardos!'. Barbara was immensely pleased.
Barbara ran a donkey-taxi on Mojácar beach her first year here to make ends meet (it was really a mule) and had a job working as secretary for the mayor - Paco Marullo. Later, after we met and married, she started a charity here called 'Animo' to help disabled kids using equine assisted therapy. Put 'em on a horse and let 'em go, in my (very ignorant) words. Many children came through our stables, and many more volunteers helped, until the money ran dry thanks to a newspaper I ran (rather badly). Barbara traveled to various meetings, in Germany, Austria, France and England, and held a congress here with guest-speakers from the various world bodies, including the FRDA and other major players in the field. The head of the ONCE told us once that he heard about Barbara's work while in Australia. Spain being Spain, Barbara's efforts were totally ignored in this country, but 'hey'.
You can read about her charity and her love of animals on her blog Animo.
Later, she tried to set this dream up a second time, if on a smaller scale, but with not much enthusiasm from the Spanish once again, apart from the brilliant support of Loli Berenguer from the Centro Ecuestre Albero in Almería, and a luke-warm support from the University. The Mojácar Town Hall, of course, never took the slightest interest in any of this, not even when Barbara organised competitions of donkey baseball during several years.

Portrait of me, Barbara and Daniel at my art gallery in Bédar. Photo by Michael Sucker.

Barbara with Padre Ángel from Mensajeros de la Paz. On the right is Dra. María Rose.

Barbara loved kids, and the house was always full of them. Many - and I exaggerate only slightly - stayed for several years. A hard day at the newspaper and a warm welcome from the children, or an important lesson of relativity from the disabled kids over at the stables.
We have three children of our own, Jessica, Amber and Daniel and four grand-children. They all live in the USA (jobs for foreigners - even bilingual ones -  are scarce in Spain).
Barbara was my soul mate, and now she's gone.