We're in the province of Alicante one of the three that make up the Valencian Community. Benidorm is in Alicante to help you locate yourself. Alicante City, our provincial capital, is about 50 minutes away. Our municipality, Pinoso, is well inland, the last town in Alicante before crossing over the border into the Region of Murcia. Pinoso is nothing like Benidorm.
If you turn left on the main road that runs close to our house you can reach Pinoso town centre in about five minutes, ten minutes and you'll be in the Region of Murcia. Turn right instead and, within fifteen minutes you'll be in Monóvar town centre. Ten more minutes in the distance from Monóvar you can see Elda/Petrer. Elda and Petrer are two different towns but, in places, one side of the street is in Petrer and the other in Elda. In Petrer or Elda there is a hospital, a hypermarket, cinemas, train station, fast food joints, castles and the Madrid Alicante motorway.
Pinoso is our local town. It's where we go to get cash from the bank machine, see a doctor, stock up on food, get a beer or go to a restaurant. There is a good sports centre, there are gyms and a library and a cultural centre and a theatre and a cemetery and a market hall and so on. It's a remarkably long so on given that, size wise, Pinoso is really no more than a village. It's to do with money. Although there's a lot of worry at the moment about the tumbling income from the marble quarry Pinoso has, within it's boundary, a huge marble quarry which has produced shedloads of cash for ages. I seem to remember that when building was booming the quarry was producing more than 6 million euros a year for the town coffers via a local extraction fee. Income was about 4½ million in 2018. A couple of months ago when I went to hear the sob story about how the town is on its uppers the predictions for income this year were only around 2 million. Goodness knows how Covid will affect that. Very soon, unless they start to cut services, local taxes will have to increase drastically.
Outside the town centre Pinoso has a municipal area that takes in a fair bit of countryside. The countryside is peppered with vineyards, olive and almond trees; arable land. Pinoso's geographical limits stretch to the border of three municipalities in Murcia and, in our direction, to the municipality of Monóvar. Within Pinoso's boundaries there are lots of small villages. Those villages are called pedanias. By name they are: El Rodriguillo, Cases del Pi, La Caballusa, Casas de Ibáñez, Paredón, Lel, Ubeda, Culebrón, Encebras and Tres Fuentes. There are also a number of other clusters of houses, which are called parajes on the Pinoso Town Hall website. Those very small settlements, sometime little other than a wide spot in the road, are El Faldar, El Sequé, Venta del Terrós and Monte Cabezo. There must be some legal difference between peadanias and parejes because I'd guess that El Faldar probably has more houses than Cases del Pi.
Most of the pedanias have a mix of dirt and tarmac roads in the village centre. Individual houses are scattered around the outskirts of the pedanias. Quite a lot of these villages have restaurants cum bars, they all have a chapel and a social centre though neither is usually open. I don't think any of them have shops though Paredón has a British run restaurant, caravan park type complex which offers other services and that may include some British food products. We once went looking for a bakery in Casas Ibáñez which we didn't find but which people assure me exists. I'm sure that, in the past, the pedanias had bakeries and grocers but now everyone has an Audi Q7 instead.
We live in Culebrón which you probably surmised from the blog title. I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at how many people live in Culebrón. The official number is around 100 and I can quickly count at least twenty, maybe 25 households that stay here all year round so that's probably about right. In summer there will be a lot more because people think that the countryside is cooler than the town. The main road down to Elda/Petrer used to snake through the houses in the village but a little before we moved to Spain a new road was built which divided the village into two distinct and unequal halves. The bit we're in has fewer of the limited services that Culebrón offers - like tarmac, street lighting, drains, basketball court, recycling bins, the social centre- than the other half. On our side of the road there's a farm, a bunch of houses, lots of crops and some dirt tracks.
Most of the houses on our side of the road are in terraces, maybe only three houses but terraces none the less. So we have neighbours but we also have, what, by British standards would be, a big garden. The house is house like. It has a double pitched roof, mains electric and mains water though we are not connected to the drains. There is no mains gas but our Wi-Fi is an acceptable 20Mb.
The house itself is probably a couple of hundred years old though as there was no proper land registry in the area till 1987 nobody really knows. At one time it was two tiny terraced houses but they'd been knocked into one by the time we bought it. When we had to change the roof a few years ago the house got a bit of an exterior facelift so it doesn't look particularly old. The walls are thick which keeps the house cool in the summer and freezing in the winter. Nowadays though with pellet burners and gas heaters and hot/cold air-con we can keep the living areas warm when we're in them. It's still a bit nippy, read bloody freezing, first thing in the morning.
It's absolutely true that Alicante has a brilliant climate, it's no lie that we get 300 sunny days a year but when the sun goes down, when you're inside or when you're in the shade it can be very cold. Sit inside an unheated building when it's sunny, clear and 18ºC outside and, after a while your fingers, hands, nose and ears will go numb. The buildings have almost no insulation, we have tiled floors and there are no curtains at the windows. Add in that we're at 600 metres (nearly 2,000 feet) which means we get lower temperatures than someone on the coast. As I read just the other day where I live it's summer by day and winter by night.
So there you go Ana. A bit of English for you to read!
