Shopping in the Sixties

Here's a little background on what life was like in our village in the early 60’s. We would buy our food fresh every day from a tin-shack market-stall. Maria, the lady that sold fruit and vegetables, was illiterate and couldn’t count so she had three rocks - one worth one peseta, one was a duro (five pesetas) and the third was for 25 pesetas; so anything you bought had to weigh the same as some combination of her rocks. She would load up her hand-scales with a likely-looking pebble and then put the merchandise in the other cup. If you wanted two bananas she would give you seven and round up the price because the two bananas didn’t weigh the same as any of her modest collection of weights.

In those far-off times, before cash registers, accountants and IVA, everything worked on the honour system and most people paid when their crops (or their pensions) came in. Failing that, they swapped something for something else. The old mayor told me he had once exchanged a house in the square (it later became a bar) for a goat.

Over in the main drinking establishment - a kind of club for the men who would sit comfortably at an empty table for hours as they smoked their Ducados - the foreigners were a breath of fresh air, at least from a business point of view. In Pedro's bar you could just keep eating your tapas and drinking your beer and wine and when you finished he would ask what you had had and charge accordingly. He kept a piece of chalk handy for the harder sums. A glass of brandy (you were allowed to call it coñac in those days) would cost five pesetas (around three cents of a euro).

Lurking just outside the door, La Muda, the deaf (and dumb) lady would sell cigarettes from her tray. You could buy a single smoke or even a whole pack. She also sold rough cigars from Murcia and Bazooka Joe bubble gum for her younger customers. 

The few foreigners who lived in our village, understandably confused by the local version of written Spanish, were relieved when Juana put a sign over her tiny grocery just by the church - a place which might properly have been called una tienda de comestibles - to read both Tienda and Foodings. Juana is there behind the counter, passing you the tins of peaches, bottles of Hero fruit juice, wine in returnable bottles at 14 pesetas a bottle, pickled fish and canned butter from Holland.

Juana was more on the ball than María, and we were expected to count our change.

The third place on our regular shopping excursion was the grandly named Super. Here you could pick things off the shelf and hand them to Isabel who would furiously bang the newly-fangled cash register. Cash was king, although bits of paper were often stored against later payment. Her previous accounting system for charges had recently been canceled for all time by her irate father. This earlier system was for each family to have a kind of family jam-jar and when one made a purchase a certain number of garbanzo beans were placed in one's jar. You can see how this could work.

When you came to pay Isabel would painstakingly count the beans and you would oblige her accordingly. One terrible night, a chicken somehow got loose from the next room which someone had forgotten to lock and it knocked over some of the jars and started in on the garbanzos. The story goes that no one panicked, Isabel (with her father standing behind her) just asked each customer how much they thought they owed and that was what they paid.

With the money, they bought the cash register and a booklet to explain how it worked.

The weekly market brought in a variety of fruit and vegetables, with one old lady selling her veggies out of a wheelbarrow; and now and again a truck would arrive in the main square, honk furiously and then throw open its rear door. It might sell shoes, or fish (or maybe even both - it was always worth coming out for a look).

Those of us who owned a car could always drive the ten kilometres to the local market town. Which we occasionally did. There was even a proper supermarket there, called Emilio's. One Englishman called Roger used to drive there most days, collect people's groceries, and put ten per cent on top.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't perfect. We missed our tea-bags terribly.

 ..

The photo is an old-fashioned ultramarinos in the Cruz de Martos, La Cañada de San Urbano, Almería 

Mojácar Could Have Been a Contender...

There’s not much acknowledgment of history in Mojácar (Almería) 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 modest phenomenon internationally. More foreign settlers arrived 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: the money was all foreign and it kept on arriving, ending up – sooner or later – in local pockets. As perhaps it should. Yet 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: 25,000 in the summer and just 6,000 in the winter. 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 neon lights, 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 a number of 'guetos' - as the Spanish call them - in urbanisations overlooking the beach, ridiculously British, yet 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 a local savings bank. 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 - the castle at the top of the town. 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, Preacher Jim, 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 versus just 20% of mojaqueros (more or less, depending on the vagaries of the town hall padrón), Mojácar is considered officially as a seasonal tourist town.

The Brief yet Exceedingly Independent Republic of Albox

At the end of the 19th century, Albox, a town in the wilds of Almería, was a place unknown to much of Spain, and therefore to the world. Until 1891, that is. The nearest railway station was a two-day hike and the outdated industry of wool and fabrics for farmers made it possible that many families managed to live frugally, if not well. Nevertheless, the population - close to 11,000 people - gave Albox a certain allure thereabouts and its wealthier citizens were able to spend time in one of the two casinos that the town boasted, or perhaps the odd evening enjoying a show in the theatre.

At the time the Mayor was José Antonio Mirón Jiménez. A man who was "Conservative and influential", according to Miguel Ángel Alonso, a local historian who has rescued one of the most picturesque events of the history of Albox and revives this peculiar story...

 

Local elections complied with the unwritten requirements of the time, that is, they were heavily controlled by the local poobah, whose motto would be: "For friends we have the favour and for enemies we have the law". A proposal which worked very well for Don José Antonio. The mayor (they used to call people like this 'El Cacique') ruled thanks to the vote of just the wealthiest - and worthiest -  residents. In particular, to a coterie of 54 persons, who thanks to the specialized voting system of the times were the only ones who decided through the noble institution of the ballot box who would occupy the Mayor's office.

 

The system nevertheless took a body blow when in 1890, a new national party called the Partido Liberal Fusionista revolutionised the political landscape by introducing universal suffrage to Spain. All men (sorry Ladies!) over 25 years could vote in the elections. Coinciding with the modification of the voting rules, a humble resident of the Albox neighborhood of Locaiba called Andrés Pio Fernández cheekily ran as a candidate for the elections of February 1891.

 

The conservative mayor never believed that his opponent could pose a threat. However, he was quite wrong and was soundly defeated. The people speak, although their voice is not always accepted with pleasure (nice quote from the historian which I couldn't resist).

 

But then, the morning after the election day a storm of people surged through the streets waving sticks, guns and swords. Yet, even more sinister than the weapons they were carrying were their banners: "Long Live the Federal Republic of Albox!". At the head of the mob was none other than the defeated former mayor José Antonio.

 

The indignant politician and his accomplices proclaimed a "universal declaration of independence and a brand-new country" which would have "nothing" to do "with Central Government in Madrid". They sent a letter to Madrid expressing this very sentiment. The experiment, based and inspired by recent events occurring in Cartagena (they declared independence from Spain on July 1st 1873 and entered into a five month war with Madrid) didn't last long in the case of Albox.

 

History doesn't say what went on in the new republic. Perhaps business boomed briefly in the two casinos and the theatre. It's possible that a new anthem was penned by the old mayor's wife. Certainly a few streets were renamed. They always are.

 

Maybe the local clink was full to bursting.

 

After two days "of terror", the provincial Governor realized that what looked like a joke had little humour about it, so he proceeded to send the Civil Guard troops to regain control. Twenty one rebels were detained, once the prison had been emptied of the earlier lot, although it is recalled that they were soon released.

 

It was the end of the first - and short-lived - Federal Republic of Albox.

 

Many, many years later, with Albox (now called All-box by its thousands of British inhabitants) once again returned to its habitual serenity, the question arises - can we try that again?

There's Always Spain

 Somebody was asking on Facebook – is it easy to move to Spain and get a job? I answered with that old chestnut: ‘the only way to make a small fortune here, is to start with a large one’ (cue laughter and approval from the usual suspects).

For Northern Europeans, their money here is good – after all, whose isn’t? One can buy something, a car, a box, a shirt or a meal – as long as they take it away with them shortly afterwards. A house though, and here’s the problem, it doesn’t move.

In the old days, when houses sold for pocket-change (I once foolishly failed to buy a large apartment in front of the Royal Palace in Madrid for the equivalent of 36,000€), the money was welcome enough, but now we have los nietos, the grandchildren, saying ‘Oh, why did abuelo sell that farm to the ingleses all those years ago for just a million pesetas?’

‘And they still don’t speak Spanish or help us with the olive-pickin’.

It’s probably a small gripe.

We open a bar, but only our fellow foreigners come and drink in it. A local story goes that Gordon – who had run La Sartén since God was a Boy – was feeling seedy and, one thing and another, he hadn’t been around for a few days to the nearby Gabila’s for his morning carajillo.

‘What’s up’, asked El Gabila, in that slow Spanish which is reserved for foreigners after bumping into Gordon one day in the supermarket, ‘why haven’t you been to my bar in the last week?’

‘Well’, asked Gordon reasonably, ‘why haven’t you been to mine in the last twenty years?’

Our Facebook friends who want to move here from the UK might want to take note.

If they open a bar, they will compete with all the other guiris for the tourist trade, and if they stay open in the winter, then they can expect that the expats will drift in once the sun disappears (around half past five); but they won’t get the local trade – and nor indeed will the restaurants (although my mate Juan used to agree enthusiastically with me about ‘los fish y pips’ down at Mervyn’s).

So some of us turn to plumbing (no Spaniard would employ a British plumber – for two reasons – only the second being the paperwork), or they seek work as a mechanic, or a psychologist or a set designer. Maybe a crooner down at the campsite. How about an air traffic controller as somebody was asking today on Fb (after all, she points out, I speak pretty good Spanish)?

Of course, some of us do make a living: real estate or selling adverts or house-cleaning or putting in satellite systems, but our clients will all be fellow-foreigners.

The best way to live in Spain is with money coming in from abroad. Either a decent pension, or an income from business interests or, hey, even a monthly remittance from an angry parent… It’s all good.

Maybe one can swing one of those working-from-one’s-computer jobs from a nice place in Mallorca. These days, it all done on the phone…

If all fails, we must turn our talents to other ends. Ripping off gullible people is so easy (‘Ah yes, I speak the lingo, I’ll get you a deal’).

You see those stories every week in the local free press.

But we will have to prey on our own nationals, because Spaniards won’t fall for it.

Then, if things turn out badly, there’s always the panicky ‘midnight runner’.

‘How’s Bob, I haven’t seen him in a while… Say, isn't that his cat?’

Over the years, the times I’ve been caught here has always been by fellow Brits. On one occasion, it was for quite a lot.

But don’t let me put you off. Spain is a great place to live; it’s just not a great place to make money.

Our Romantic trip

 My late wife Barbara wrote this one in 2012.

At some moment of time in the late eighties, I was writing a special for our newspaper on romantic get-aways and I contacted the head of tourism for the small resort of Lanjarón in Granada. In those days, newspapers didn't buy agency copy and we had to either write our own stuff or ask the fellow upstairs to pen something.

Lanjarón is a beautiful village, high in the Alpujarras and famous for its natural spring water and hot springs and old Moorish baths. It had to be a great place to visit, I thought.

After speaking with the head of tourism over the phone, he kindly invited me and a guest to stay in his hotel and spend a weekend taking in all of the wonders of Lanjarón. It was late November and Lenox’ birthday so I thought it would be a wonderful surprise that would normally be out of my price range.

We had driven up to the city of Granada from the coast to make our way over the top of the Sierra Nevada on what turned out to be an alarming and stony track, with the snow either beginning to fall or already banked on the side on our route. The car was a rear-engined two-seater and we had no chains for the wheels if the going got any worse. We gingerly passed through little villages and hamlets at the very summit of the Alpurrajas. Arriving at last in the town made famous from its bottled water, we found the hotel to our surprise to be chained, locked and bolted. The neighbors said maybe the manager (and acknowledged expert on tourism) had gone into Granada to go shopping.

Or, who knows, maybe he had just bolted.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the town - there was just the one street - and finally decided to take a room, at our expense, in the only hotel that was open. It turned out to be a hotel for senior citizens where the Spanish Social Security system brought elderly people by the bus-load in a service called El Imserso.

We checked into our room and were told that dinner was at seven. Our room was large, freezing and filthy. The view from our bedroom window was of snow; not a beautiful snowy landscape but of packed snow up against the window. We went to the dining room around 7.15 only to find that, in a most un-Spanish way, they meant dinner was served at seven and not, as usually understood, that it started vaguely anytime after seven but best show up around nine.

Every course was a type of purée. The soup, vegetable, meat and pudding had all been put through a blender. Who, we wondered, needs teeth with a meal like that? After this rather disappointing dinner we went out to find a bar and something proper to eat but along the main and indeed practically only street, everything was firmly shut; so we returned to the hotel bar. The only beverage on the shelf behind the bar was an elderly bottle of Cointreau, so Lenox ordered one and, to his gratification, was given a huge water glass full of this sticky orange-flavoured liqueur. I asked for a Coke and the bar-tender had to leave the building only to return ten minutes later with a can of Coke held firmly in his gloved hands: he must have got it out of a friend’s refrigerator.

Some of the other guests were gloomily playing dominoes in the lounge while others were watching the TV. We decided to retire to our icy room and go to bed.

We were wearing every piece of clothing we had packed while all of the blankets and towels were spread on the bed and yet we were still freezing. Lenox suggested adding the rug on the floor but it was covered with heavy clumps of what appeared to be human hair.

After an unsatisfying breakfast of puréed toast and with our hitherto benevolent opinion about Lanjarón firmly in retreat, we decided to leave the town, as even the hot springs and baths were closed for the season. We drove down the mountains towards the coast looking for somewhere beautiful and interesting. To our surprise, we came across a place called Orgiva – looking like the Santa Cruz Mountains of California wrenched directly from the 60s, with long-haired hippies wearing outsize velvet caps, a reek of patchouli oil, Tarot-readings in the market, and a few painted VW buses. The whole lot of them: all apparently moved in a woozy bulk to the Alpujarras of Granada.

We broke our trip briefly in another notable village, Yegen, where Gerald Brennan had lived for many years. The entire place appeared to us to have chosen in its origins to be built entirely in the shade. White houses grey. Our conclusion? Don’t visit it in November.

We continued eastwards, still in search of a nice hotel to roost in for a break - after all, I could always write about somewhere else. We coasted into Trevélez and came across a restaurant apparently famous for its trout so we pulled in to the carpark only to find three bus loads of German tourists parked in mathematical precision in front of us. That would be a lot of trouts for one day, we thought, so we gave up.

It was getting dark, but the only rooms we could find in Trevélez – tourism in the eighties evidently still not being a strong point from Lanjarón onwards – was above a gas station, so we decided to give up and go home. When we regained the coast we changed our plans, deciding not to let our romantic weekend be completely ruined so we went to a giant hotel located on the beach in Aguadulce, Almería. A least the bar would have something crunchy. The hotel was full of English and German tourists all looking to be entertained around the clock and, by chance, it was “Dress in Drag Night”. So nice to see the two nations coinciding for once – if only in complete idiocy.

I had never been so happy the following morning as to return to the beauty and comfort of Mojácar, and until now, all these years afterwards, I have never written that article I had promised Lenox and his readers about Lanjarón.

Old Rural Properties

 Things to think about when buying a farm in Spain:

On any old farm the property was measured in ‘fanegas’ – a sort of rule-of-thumb measurement - and every village had a different size ‘fanega’ so the size of one ‘fanega’ here was, likely as not, different from that there. Now things are measured in hectares or square meters so it is standardized but the old properties aren’t. This makes it complicated when trying to read an old property deed.

Another thing is your boundary. Years ago a farmer might have traded a donkey for an olive tree on their land, the donkey will have long passed on but the olive tree now – at least in theory - belongs to someone else. It depends, of course, on whether somebody wrote it down. We ourselves, for example, have a reasonably clear and evident spread of land, plus, according to an old neighbour, an extra five or ten square metres, not existing on any document, about half a kilometer away.

One’s land usually stops at the top of a ‘barranco’, a level of once-arable land supported usually by stones (the dictionary isn’t very helpful), and not at the bottom. If you are lucky enough to have an ‘era’, that is, a round threshing place, you should find out if it is yours or for communal use. Or better still, see if anyone thereabouts still owns a donkey.

Rights of way and animal paths are another problem. For example, there's a piece of land behind ours that gives the owners the right to pass over our land to get to theirs so we cannot fence it off. It is just for the land-owners in this case and not the public but it is evidently something of a nuisance. The water or electric company also may have a special right of way so if you fence the land you must put in a gate wide enough for a vehicle and give them a key. An animal path, called a ‘vía pecuaria’ (or, in Andalucía, ‘una vereda de carne’), is for public use and may go right through the middle of your garden. They may not be used much any more but you may not fence or build or barricade it in any way. No, not even the mayor can. It is not just open to shepherds or farmers with land on the other side but it is in fact a public footpath.

Get your property surveyed because the piece you were shown might not actually be the piece you are buying, you might be buying the side of a cliff.

Many years ago, A trick sometimes played on one foreigner by another was to get a ‘papel del Estado’ – a fancy-looking watermarked paper dripping with seals and everything on it from the ‘estanco’ – the government paper, stamp, seal and cigarette shop - for twenty-five pesetas and merrily write your contract on that. If you didn’t know any better it looks pretty damn official. With more awareness, and a nodding understanding of the function of a notary and a lawyer, that has pretty much gone out of fashion but at one time, people ended up paying a lot of money for a paper they could have gotten at the ‘estanco’ and then finding out they didn’t own a house.

Check who has been paying the taxes for the last ten or so years because they might own the land now. Most old farm-houses or ‘cortijos’ have been inherited by a number of family relatives sometime along the way, so you need written consent from ALL members of the family in order to buy. Lot of times, there’s someone in Argentina, another in Barcelona, another dead (with six still-unlocated children) or in prison and there is often one ‘clever’ family member that holds out and winds up still owning a room in the house. It may not seem like a problem if it is an old ruin but once you have remodeled and are living in your new mansion they can put pigs in their room or try and sell it to you for a vast amount of money now that the property is worth something.

Does your farm come with ‘tandas’ or hours of irrigation water - from springs or the town fountain? If it does you need to know how many hours and what days your land has (it’s usually out of a cycle of ten days), then you go to the spring and change the water-ways to go to your farm and irrigate or fill a ‘deposito’ for later use. This can mean a very early start, depending on the timetable. Many farms have three or more springs that they are entitled to but it is a lot of work to walk down the water channels and move the gates so that the water reaches you.

Another thing to find out is if your land is protected archeologically, meaning you can’t under normal circumstances build at all. Indeed, we now have student archeologists, with the proud support of our town hall, merrily digging up a mountain just behind our house where there could conceivably be Moorish, or Roman, or Phoenician or even Martian ruins. It's all very exciting.

The land is registered with the ‘registro’ and also with the ‘catastro’. These two offices are mutually exclusive. The first is the Property Registry - think old bits of curling parchment and lilac ink – and the second is the Tax Register. Often, the property is different in one from the other: the vital one – often as we have seen rather lost in the old pine-tree and the large rock which boundaries with Paco el Loco’s land – is the true record of ownership. An ‘escritura’ or the rather shorter ‘nota simple’ are the receipts of the ownership: copying the salient points from the Register.

A ‘Fanega de tierra’ – after looking it up – has the following distinctions. ‘In Andalucía, equivalent to 6,440 square metres. In Castilla y León, it measures 2,000 square metres. In Madrid it goes up to 3,330m2 and in Albacete, it’s between 5,000 and 6,000m2 of cultivated land, depending'.

 

It's All a Blur

So what are the rules about blurring out faces in press photographs and TV news and documentaries? Are we protecting the innocent, or maybe the guilty? I’m confused. Is it the perpetuators, the criminals and the revolutionaries we shouldn’t see, or the police who catch them, or the innocent parties that happen to be in the picture? When ex-President Aznar flipped the bird the other day at some students who said he was a monster, we were treated in the Spanish press to Aznar, his raised second finger and the students, but not the surprised fellow with the computer-generated re-touch standing next to the truculent politician.

In England, they would have edited the offending digit.

When they remove the prisoners’ faces in those tedious documentaries about life behind bars in Alabama, I can’t help wondering (as I search for the TV control) why they don’t want us to see them. We might recognise them if we saw them again?

This would be a bad thing?

Sometimes – for our benefit and viewing pleasure – children’s faces will be blurred, if we are talking about children, or perhaps we see them modestly just from the waist down, or then again, the children just appear in the photograph, or video, because we were talking about something else. They are children, nothing more, except on news shows when they become victims or, just sometimes, future prisoners in Wandsworth. Conversely, why could we see Jon Venables as a child, but not as an adult?

Are we protecting them from these sex-lunatics we hear about, who will commit foul crimes upon themselves if left to contemplate this photo (but not that one)? So why are we occasionally covering or distorting their faces and why is it the other way round on the American shows? Or is it?

Lawyers, in a word. Don’t get me started.

I imagine fortunes were lost with the arrival of the face-mask. Not just for facial recognition technology, which was certainly put back by several years, but also those who have the job of blurring out people's mugs. There's probably a button, anyway. What is a member of the legal profession to do? You can't sue when you can's see Sue!

It gets worse, the producers now blur out bits of the decoration they don’t like. The fellow’s tee-shirt on the Discovery Channel might have a brand-name written on it, or his cap, for Goodness sake (better not swear!). And what did that footballer just do? Heavens-to-Betsy! Blur it out!

This explains the fuss with Justin Timberlake revealing one of the boobies from that Jackson girl during the Super Bowl a mere twenty years ago now (some things can never be forgotten!). We had already contemplated the horror that day before the producers could hit the Red Button.

Indeed, thanks to that, ah 'accident', now live entertainment has something called the ‘one minute delay’.

And, as I think further, why do we suppress the sound of swearing in Anglo shows, with a LOUD BLEEP to make sure that the viewers will know that the censors and defenders of public morals are ever vigilant. Now they even put a blurry bit over the mouth so we can appreciate the censor’s zeal – unless you, the viewer, happens to be one of those rare people who can read lips closely enough to have the sound turned off (with the added advantage of not being pestered by those irritating BLEEPs), yet is somehow stirred to violence, wrath and the Old Testament by the prospect of a naughty word.

If not, let me tell you all about subtitles.

Of course, beyond a previous agreement with the Eye on Spain editor, I must abide by the Anglo rules of printing swear-words in my article with an absurd substitution of asterisks with just the first letter appearing before to give clever adults a guide as to what I might mean, yet confuse those children who look forward to my weekly output and would read them all in one go if only the adults ‘ud let them.

Those same kids are expected to be in bed by 10.00pm as something called a ‘watershed’ is passed at this time. I am sure that they have watched enough ‘grown-ups’ telly’ long before they blossom into discovering the superior diversions of booze, sex and the other manifold attractions of young adulthood. In Spain, at least, the government control on our viewing is considerably more relaxed – and they don’t usually wait until 10.00pm before switching on ‘the better stuff’. In fact here, even some of the adverts are downright risqué. Unfortunately, the European parliament, again concerned about public decency, has managed to hold in check quite a bit of Spain and Italy’s more lusty output on the ‘little screen’, no doubt to keep those sweet little kids pure – those that bother to stay in and watch the box. Telly, come to think of it, is now no longer used at all by the eight to eighteen demographic, which prefers the endless attractions of the Internet where, despite the best efforts of Mrs Whitehouse’s continental successor, we can still pretty much find anything we want and, with a clever doodabby called the vpn, pretend that we live in some other country entirely, where downloading something of interest isn't a sin. 

Spain has nevertheless picked up a few ideas from the Anglos and will now blur things it doesn’t approve of. Policeman’s faces are often pixelated here and on occasion can sometimes be covered by a sinister looking black balaclava – particularly in the Basque Country – as if the local population would tear them apart if they only knew who it was that was marching their handcuffed second-cousins from their homes during a dawn raid.

We also have the 'Protection of Data' act which basically means each company in Spain has to send an annual cheque to some agency that has the authority to sue - as far as I can see - those who don't pixelate where they should.

So, as the blurry figures from the TV – and, who knows, maybe YouTube – together with the silly expurgated BLEEPs, flicker and echo through the household, what about Hollywood? Have you ever seen a movie with a swear-word and a blurred mouth? No, you haven’t.

You won’t on Spanish TV either – here, they are not afraid of their language. All those expressive four (five and eight) letter words which pepper the idiom are given their full value, not hidden behind those silly asterisks. Honestly, the children don’t mind. Indeed, the Leader of the opposition Pablo Casado just last month asked the President of Spain during a parliamentary session what the heck he thought he was doing. Only, he didn't say 'heck'.

And, whether we can join the dots or not I don’t really know, but there is a lot less crime and disrespect here in Spain than you will find in Britain

Perhaps because the populace isn’t treated entirely like an idiot.