Two Winters

We enjoy two winters here in Almería, the proper one, which lasts for a few months and is usually passably survivable, and the tourist one, which lasts rather longer. The first is a spell of cold, with some rain and even occasionally some snow. The second is far longer.

It's the time when the town's businesses must rely on those who live there: the residents.

We will have had a couple of biblical events to keep us cheerful – a major flooding perhaps or a cliff collapse. A road is blocked and a pipe freezes. The imported foods pavilion is briefly out of tea-bags and the price of long-sleeved tee-shirts went up slightly and word reached us of a British cabin crew on strike.

I have spent most of our winter out in the garden cutting down trees and sawing up firewood for the evening’s entertainment, in front of the telly. The rest of Europe pretends that they are managing just fine, thank you, while well aware that we are doing a lot better down here. Perhaps, as a recent survey suggests, 44% of the people remaining in Britain will decide to take up their inclination to move ‘overseas’, and it could be that a few of those, attracted by our weather, will head in this direction, their cheque book and the phone number of a really good lawyer in their inside-pocket.

But our physical winter, three months of so-so weather, followed by nine months of sun, is inverted when it comes to ‘the season’. Excepting Christmas and Easter, and there are eight and a half million people on the roads during this week – the tourist season itself runs from mid-June until mid-September, coinciding neatly with the opening periods of the wealthier discothèques, beach-bars and hotels. So the nine months in the figurative winter of empty beaches and delightful walks in the hills and the three months of the tourist-summer (horrible, far too hot – a perfect time to go and visit someone elsewhere), leave us in reality with six months of perfect warm weather and splendidly quiet and peaceful life without queues, noise and people in the supermarkets wearing nothing more than sunburns and swimming trunks and shouting at the check-out staff.

This perfect period, divided as it is by the summer high-season into two, is due to start right after Easter. No more rain and too early for any traffic-jams. Three months, less these few days over Easter, when the tourists are still wherever tourists come from, working in some niner to fiver and thundering twice daily through the hyperborean night in uncomfortable passenger trains dreaming of some far-off break abroad where they can raise some hell. Don’t you miss it?

As we consider our good fortune to live here, at least during the major part of the year outside that brief and savage summer onslaught, we go about our unspoken business of turning our adopted pueblos into true communities. We paint our houses, trim the gardens, scoop up the dog-poop, rehearse for the summer comedy play and collect money for the cats home.

Meanwhile, the Spanish authorities, the politicians and the bankers, have all decided that tourism is the panacea to the country’s problems. Pack ‘em in tight and lock the doors. Sex, sea, sun and sangria. And then, keeping with that particular letter from the alphabet, when they've spent their savings, they can sod off back home. The recipe has worked well enough in the past twenty years and so it has to keep on going. Benidorm is a veritable wonder. A few towns across the country have actually increased their volume in the last season – well, in 2018 anyway, before the records were all burned. My own home-town of Mojácar, which miraculously decided not to attend the Fitur world tourist fair in Madrid back in January, has been singled out for criticism recently as having ‘obsolescent and mature’ hotels – which is bean-counter-speak for it’s time to demolish and rebuild several of our steamier tripperdromes. Who knows? Perhaps just knock them down and be done with it. To be fair (who, me?), Mojácar in fact has some modern establishments and it also has the Parador, a hotel which actually attracts wealthy people who spend money.

Spending money, you see, is the whole point of tourism, but don’t tell the government accountants who are much more interested in numbers rather than in results.

The average visitor to our province is here for five days.

The average resident is here all year long. And next year too.

See, so he spends more.

In fact, tourism is a shaky premise anyway, as a cheaper or brighter or jollier new place elsewhere, in Cyprus or the Dominican Republic or Croatia or Murcia, can leave your resort dead in the water from one season to the next. The beginning of a two-year long pandemic or a terror-bombing, or a hotel collapse, or even a tour company going bust can halt tourism overnight. They won't come, but we residents will remain (I mean, during a really terrible war, who is gonna buy the house anyway?).

Tourists, particularly the ones who ‘work hard for fifty weeks a year’ are not necessarily loyal to a particular destination. They want to let their hair down. Cheaply.

A report of typhus or man-eating jellyfish can empty out a resort in a jiffy. The brush-fire that scorched Mojácar a few years ago and burnt down a few houses was considered of little importance by the town hall. However, they were concerned of losing their tourists and actually obtained funds from the Andalusian government, not to rebuild, replant or repair, but to help promote their hotels. Please don't believe what is being said about us in The Express, they wailed, read the spanking full-page colour advert in the Voz de Almería!

The ministry of tourism, sports, business and dental floss is aware of this and is tossing obscene amounts of money at the job of promoting Andalucía, which involves the usual tactics and targets which have been used since Hannibal showed up with his elephants. There was a huge Andalucía pavilion at the Berlin Travel Show last month, and no doubt much business was made as exhibitors from one stand went and visited those from the one next door. Videos, key-rings, postcards, calendars, a couple of clog dancers, a small bowl of traditional food (who really eats garullos in real life?) and a hundred other time-wasters were all rolled out. The real business, of course, offering hotels with hundreds of beds, or chains of hotels with thousands of beds, for a slightly cheaper price than the competition, is all done elsewhere and at a different time.

The ‘experts’ try and promote new ideas. Forget the tired old sol y playa, they say (which accounts for 99% of all tourism – how many package-hotels are there in Jaén?); how about gastronomic tourism? (Pass the garullos, they smell delicious), or agro-tourism. I'm sorry - after fifty weeks of stuffing toothpaste into a tube, the head of the family wants to go and look around a tomato plantation under plastic?

But it’s not really convincing, despite the businesses that cater to the tourist trade; the hotels, discos, nick-nack shops and all doing their level best to try and increase not only the number of visitors – which is bad enough for the all-year long residents – but the length of the season as well. All it means is that it's harder to park, harder to shop and where the local village fiestas and concerts are aimed, no longer at the villagers themselves, but at the visitors with their swollen wallets. Hurry, Jim, there may be some room at the back.

It is said that every foreign home-owner (who puts a fortune into the community while yearning for peace, beauty, safety and other noble improvements) started out as a tourist. But, despite the efforts of the tourist board to the contrary, the best tourists are those who come under their own steam and search out the places, restaurants and shops which appeal to them. It’s not much use to local business when five hundred people are having a micro-waved lunch in the 20€ a day hotel down the road.

But let’s not worry about this small cloud on our horizon, as we now have three months when the weather is perfect, the roads are empty and the barman still remembers our name.

Spanish as She is Spoke

This thing about learning Spanish. It's hard to pick up a new language, especially if you plan to chat, gossip, converse or argue the issues of the day with someone sat on a bench wearing a beret and absently chewing on a bull's-pizzle a bit beyond 'Cor, it's hot today'. 

That was about the first thing I learned - a sort of Mediterranean version of the standard English comment 'it looks like rain again', with the massive positive - at least for me - that being too hot beats being too wet any day of the week.  

It's useful too, because your partner in conversation can shake his head, if he has the energy to, and reply, 'eyep' or the equivalent in our local version of castellano, which might be 'joder' or some other positive and considered answer.

Which doesn't get you very far in practicing your Teach yourself Spanish, Chapter Two, the verbs. 

Bloody verbs, grammar and future imperatives. There's not one person in a thousand who knows his way around the infinitives and the gerunds back home, and now we are faced with them here, along with the huge lists of vocab - and that's just to buy something in the market. 

'Leeks, Señora, I want leeks! Hold on, here it says... puerros! Did I pronounce that right?'

One lady I knew learned her Spanish entirely from a book. She was quite good, too, only her pronunciation let her down. 'Hooeyvos' for eggs. Or 'heggs', as a Spanish market-fellow helpfully told me the other day. 

All that effort and they try and answer in English!

Another lady, also a master of Spanish, got hers from a course in XVI Century plays, and would say to the barman something out of a Calderón de la Barca primer like 'Prithee, varlet, bring me a flagon of your finest grape'. Imagine explaining that to Antonio, who had only that very morning learnt not to put hot milk in our teas. 

When we do learn Spanish - the type for conversation rather than the one for ordering half a kilo of rice - we will need something to talk about. Which is where knowing about Spanish culture comes in.  An example would be the vice versa experience of the other day, when the man at the gas station told me that he once lived in Dartmouth 'just over the bridge'. Ahh, I said wisely. 

I have no idea where Dartmouth is, although Google says there's one in Canada with a floating pontoon.

Knowledge of the Spanish culture - having something to talk about - means knowing the geography, history, politics, literature, music, gastronomy, bullfighting, TV shows and the latest sports results. There's no point in interrupting a talkfest to announce 'I bought a kilo of leeks yesterday in the market'. There may be a couple of seconds pause as everyone digests this in companionable silence, before the conversation about putting in solar electricity on Paco's roof will resume once again.

To learn these things - throw your English-language TV, books and newspapers out of the sitting-room window (after all, they talk about where you are from, now about where you are now) and read and watch Spanish stuff. Armed with what you've learned, be like a parrot. Repeat. 

A Brit asked me the other day while I was enjoying a noisy beer in Antonio's - there was a football match going on the TV - how to say 'Kill the Ref!' in Spanish. I told him the magic words which he then shouted out at the top of his lungs. We both drank free than evening until the bar closed. 

A hobby is a good idea. Join the local railway club, or historians society, or painters' nook. You already have something of interest shared by all the group - if it's only where to buy a decent tube of umber. 

Speaking Spanish can sometimes feel frustrating, when the addressee refuses to understand you. This may be because you don't look like a local person, so logic dictates that you therefore must be a foreigner, who - as everyone knows - speaks foreign. Which, tragically, he spreads his hands in apology, he doesn't.

There are ways around this of course, you can try wearing a beret and ordering a bull's-pizzle from Amazon. Or you could consider calling them on the phone. I always wanted to grow a pencil-thin moustache to look the part, but my hair is too blond and patchy. 'Shut your eyes' I tell 'em, 'you'll see'. 

In short, it may not be easy, but it's worth it.

The Invisible Tribe

 

In the past I have often pointed out the difference (and benefit) to Spanish society between foreign settlers and foreign tourists. While the settlers are cordially ignored by the authorities (except during the tax season), foreign tourism receives enormous media attention, massive investment, endless promotions both at home and abroad, heavy institutional advertising and even a dedicated government ministry along with its regional equivalents. In several communities and resorts, the councillor for tourism is the second most visible politician in the government.

But then, as Spain basks in the huge amount of money brought here by tourism (forgetting that a sizable chunk of this stays in the country of origin to pay agencies, airlines, insurers and so on), along comes something to put the cork in – maybe a pandemic like the one that has assailed the industry for the last two years.

If visitor numbers had dropped by 75% in 2021 over 2019 (the last halcyon year for tourism) the number of foreign residents either stayed the same (they couldn’t sell-up and leave, what with one thing or another) or even rose in numbers.

That’s of course not including those few who dared the odds and actually took out Spanish nationality.

There are currently over six million foreigners resident in Spain at the present time – up from 4,850,000 recorded at the beginning of 2019. That’s ten per cent of everyone. Some of them are retired, some of them are living from income from abroad, some of them working and some of them studying. Some of them here illegally. Some without documents. Some of them sending their money home to their families, as they should.

While many of the six million are immigrant workers, the largest collectives being Romanian, Moroccan and Colombian, the fourth largest group of foreigners currently living in Spain are the British at precisely 282,124 souls.

Maybe. That's the figure from the padrón - those who are registered in the town halls across Spain. Other painstakingly accurate figures for the Brits are quite different. The Government claims 407,628 Brits living in Spain. Statista reckons on 313,975 and the ABC newspaper goes with 290,372.

All good for December 31st 2021.

Why are the figures so different (and so painfully acquired)? We imagine teams of dedicated beancounters adding up numbers each time they go to the market, the expat bar or the dog pound. And then, to show they weren't making it up, they arrive at those ridiculously exact figures before locking their desks are rushing out for a coffee.

There are other official government sites available, but the browser found a ‘potential security threat and did not continue to www.mites.gob.es’. So, we shall remain blissfully ignorant of the information to be found on that no doubt highly useful page.

Then we have headline from  a silly English-language newspaper from last October which claimed that British expats are said to be leaving Spain "in droves"; while, conversely: the property site Idealista was posting the opposite: ‘The Brits bought 7,560 homes in the second half of 2021 – the largest group of foreign buyers’, they said.

With all the confusion, the authorities will understandably react according to the figures to hand (once they’ve successfully looked up the phrase ‘in droves’ in the dictionary), without worrying if they are correct; or maybe just go out for another coffee instead. Of course, looking out of the window in an office in Madrid, one won't see many Northern European residents. They tend to live in a wash of small pueblos along the coast and on the islands. Even then you probably won't notice them - or confuse them with tourists - unless you happen to be trying to sell something to the director of the local medical centre.

In all, nearly 64,000 homes were bought by foreigners between July and December last year. And that’s good money brought here almost exclusively from outside Spain. 

So we come back to our original doubt - why does Spain chase the foreign tourist and ignore the foreign resident?

Rather than try and figure out the number of foreign residents who are retired or live from funds from abroad (including a clutch of wealthy Americans, some rich Venezuelans, a few idle Chinese and a sprinkle of superannuated New Zealanders), but not Tommy who works at the campsite, we can only choose a wildly inaccurate number – say 500,000 – to contrast with the tourists, whose statistics thanks to the enormous machine dedicated to surveying them we know down to the last digit.

Figures suggest that the average age of this sub-group of half a million – that’s to say, those who live comfortably in Spain without employment – is around 61 years old, against tourists who are (I’m diving through the INE records) maybe 20 years younger.

Then of course, residents often take trips within Spain – not to all-inclusive hotels on the beach, full of fellow-Brits or Europeans, but to more expensive destinations, such as the Parador hotel chain or to fancy restaurants, or to areas away from the sol y playa; which makes them, in the eyes of the Spanish authorities (if only briefly), tourists.

So, if the money spent by just the wealthier foreign settlers – 500,000 multiplied by a year’s worth of living – is contrasted by the amount spent by the tourists, then the residents are clearly a group to treasure. At 20,000€ a year (my guess, and we shall ignore the major investment of buying both a 250,000€ house and a car) that’s 10,000,000,000€ per year spent by the higher end of the resident foreigners in Spain. The average visitor, here for five days rather than 365, is going to be worth a lot less.

But you won’t find any official agency or policy that promotes foreign home-buyers investing in Spain!

Tourists, then, are described as anyone foreign who comes to Spain (even if they are taking an onwards flight to somewhere else and never even leave the airport), plus all the people on all the cruise ships – regardless of if they disembark for a two-hour stroll around Málaga harbour or not – plus all the people who hop over to Spain every weekend (add ’em all together José), but not the ones who drove across the frontier or who slept in the guest room last night or on the sofa.

Then we have those non-EU citizens (now including a large number of Brits) who own homes here are but aren’t allowed to stay for more than 90 in any 180 day period. What are they exactly – residents, home-owners, tourists? No one knows or seems to care – except of course for the affronted local businesses.

Following the pandemic, we now have a terrible war and next up perhaps, a tourist bombing, or an earthquake, or something poisonous in the water. Maybe Portugal will drop its prices or Greece will give free ouzo to visitors. Tourists are just fine, they leave money and go away with a sunburn and a hangover. But they are finicky, and without any obligation or an emotional link to return.

But the residents will stay. They have an investment in Spain: their property.

Why can’t the authorities see this? There is so much more opportunity in this field.

The Día de la Vieja

Halfway through Lent, a peculiar festival is celebrated here and there known as the Día de la Vieja or the day of La Vieja Remolona. It is actually a fiesta from Aragón but for some reason a granny has been substituted from a grandad (the Aragonese version) and it is celebrated in the pueblos of the east of Almería - always on a Thursday. This year it fell on March 24th.

Even though it is not an official holiday, if you don’t go to school or to work then no one seems to mind.

The history of La Vieja goes back a long time to when the children needed a break from the rigours of Lent, getting a  day off. The whole family trudges up the mountain and has a picnic which includes special breads and pastries made for the occasion. They enjoy twisted breads with hard boiled egg inside and chicherones (pork rind) which I think are as bad as they sound, but on this special day they sell like hot cakes. The children in the villages from our corner of Almería make a paper doll on a cross and, after the picnic lunch in the campo is over, throw rocks at it.

The head is full of candy resembling the Mexican piñata. Any reason to have a fiesta, hey?

The historians think that some Franciscan monks moved into Eastern Almería following the reconquest in the late fifteenth century to clean the place up, introduce their own traditions and put a crucifix over every hearth. Perhaps they came from Zaragoza.

Like many other innocent children's festivals today, there's a expurgated story behind (you should see what they've done to the carnavales, dropping the disguises as an excuse for anonymous sex, frolic and bacchanalia in favour of a kiddies dress-up; or consider the sinister Ring-a-Ring-of-Rosies song in reference to the Great London Plague of 1665). Thus the Día de La Vieja sounds like there is a creepy version lurking in our unwritten history - perhaps where they took those too old and feeble to work out to the campo for lunch, only to be, ah, left there. Perhaps that's just me being cynical. 

There's another even odder version from Madrid. Up until the late seventeen hundreds, a seven-legged granny (sic) would be hanged by a rope in the Plaza Mayor as the cuaresma - the forty days of Lent - began. She had been made from straw on Ash Wednesday and she was revered as the Queen of Lent. Each week, one of her seven limbs was cut off, to record for the citizens how many weeks of fasting remained. It is told that halfway through Lent, on a particular Thursday, the youths of Madrid, tired of the endless gloom, would celebrate with a botellón while running throgh the streeets looking for any old woman to beat with sticks. '¡Muera la vieja!', they would shout. 

Around here, following after every merrie holiday comes El Día de la Resaca (hang-over day, groan), like La Vieja it is not an official holiday but you don’t get in trouble for not showing up for work or school. Well, I may be a bit out of date on that one, but it has always served around here as an excuse for absence from one's post...

The old folk (the surviving ones) recall that around fifty years ago, the children would go door to door asking for food for the Vieja picnic and if they did not get any they would play a nasty trick on the home-owner.

Here’s a song the kids in Aragón sing, threatening those neighbours who won’t give them sweets with a stone through their window (come to think of it, the original ‘trick or treat’):

O viejo remolón
Que no quié comer pan,
Sólo chulleta y huevos
Y chocolate si le dan

The lazy old grand-dad won’t eat any bread; only meat and eggs, and chocolate if you give him any.

Time to bash his head in with a handy rock, perhaps?

I Saw a Welcoming Light

Whether it's part of a business trip or maybe a leisurely visit-and-souvenir hunt, one's new hotel room can be an adventure in itself. 

We've just come back from a rare trip away - indeed, the first time I've been out of Andalucía in three and a half years. Alicia and I had gone to Sitges, just down from Barcelona. Alicia to go on a course - a new-fangled way of communicating with a horse (a sugar lump is considered so infra dig these days) - while I had the pleasure of a couple of days wandering around the resort.

The hotel was distinctly odd, at least for a rube like myself who hasn't slept in any bed than my own for a long time. To begin with, there was no reception, no nothing and nobody there. On arrival, you are meant to tap in a number on a box at the door and your memory card falls out, which fixes both the front door and your room upstairs, at least, until your pre-paid stay runs out of credit.

I've notched up many a hotel-stay in my lifetime, in several continents. The odder ones remain with me now. A hotel in Almeria with springs, springs! in the pillows. Another, I think in Alicante, where a spring suddenly broke out of the mattress below me while I had my late wife bouncing about above me. Transfixed, as it were, by a half inch of iron dug into my left cheek, I felt it was no time to call a halt to what we were doing. She told me later that she was mightily impressed by my shrieks. I still have the scar.

Another time, in a far-off place in Central America, where the rooms in those days were only one dollar a night, I was having some fun with a local lady who made a rather poor living out of entertaining gentlemen. The wooden flophouse we were in was just a line of rooms with no reception and, down at the far end of the passageway, a shower. I seem to remember the whole place was painted entirely in green. And it was very hot. We were even hotter after a strenuous couple of hours and decided to cool ourselves off with a refreshing ducha. With just one small towel between us, thoughtfully provided by the management at no extra price, we made our way to the facility only to discover that there was no water. As we returned to our quarters, we found that the door had closed and locked itself, leaving us in the hallway, naked except for that one towel. An hour passed before I had persuaded the girl that I might be able to push her through the empty transom window at the top of the door - she wasn't too happy about how she would land safely on the other side - and it was thus that we were discovered by the morning cleaners as they opened the front door - me wearing nothing more than a sheepish grin and my hands raised and supporting the rear-half of the woman that was sticking out of the gap above the door. The towel on the floor. A perfect cameo and a good opportunity to practice my very best 'Buenos días'.

A hostel in Fuengirola - we used to run a Brit newspaper down there - furnished me with an itchy allergic reaction, and a very large and dead bed-bug trapped between my fingers as I woke up. Another, in a fine hotel in Melilla, had one of those wrappers around the lavatory describing its sanitary excellence - and an impressively large turd floating in the pan when I opened up the lid. No, I have no idea. Still another, in Lanjarón, was so chilly, we had to put the curtain on top of the blanket and spend the night fully clothed. 

One time, sleeping in a train along with my father coming from Romania to Hungary during the latter days of Ceaușescu, the cabin was so cold, at -2C, that we were obliged to even keep our boots on in the bunk. The carriage, in solidarity with the dictator's wishes, was honoring the electricity cut in the capital city (even though, on  a train, the heat is free). The engineers generously turned on the radiators as we crossed the border. Even some East German students we had got to know on the journey let out a ragged cheer.

Later on the same train, the Hungarian border guards told us we were not allowed to export Romanian brandy into Hungary and that we must consume our bottle before we arrived that morning in Budapest. Which, well: which we did, By Jingo. (The two guards helped).

My son flew over from Texas to visit a couple of years ago and we took him and his wife up to Córdoba. A friend of Alicia's had recommended some place in the narrow streets of the antique Moorish quarter, where unfortunately, an all-night Flamenco party was being held just on the other side of our wooden shutters. I think my daughter-in-law was impressed, even if the rest of us weren't. Give them their due, those gypsies, they played a lot of songs I hadn't heard before. 

Recently in Antequerra, late at night as Alicia and I were on the way home from Seville, we found a hotel in a back street and checked in. The room we were showed to had seven single beds in it. Although nobody else was sharing that night (just as well, I think), we had to bounce on all seven (none were the same as the others except in their stragginess), until we found two that more or less suited us. Cheap, though, I'll give it that.

The joint in Sitges, where we spent last weekend, is located in the old part of town, which always means the same thing: nowhere nearby to park. It's cold up there right now, at least for someone who lives in Almería. Lugging our cases through the rainy streets, looking for our lodgings, and tapping in the correct number in the small box to get a card to grant us entrance. Isn't modern life grand?

The next morning, as I explored the town, Alicia went off to meet her new friends. But alas, as I returned to the hostel to retrieve my wallet to buy myself some lunch, I discovered that my card didn't work in the street-door.  The neighbour,  a friendly sort who works in the tattoo trade, didn't know where I might find a staffer, and so I tried to Google the hostel for a phone number. The best I could find was their email, to which I sent a rude letter, tapped out on my mobile phone. They still to this day (checks Gmail) haven't answered. That evening, cold and disheveled, I was picked up by Alicia and her friends, one of whom told me that putting a mobile phone next to a hotel card in the same pocket could easily wipe the card.

Well fancy that. You learn something new every day.