The rural idyll

We all have our favourite words and expressions. One of my oft repeated phrases, when I'm saying where I live, in Spanish, to a Spaniard, is to say that I'm paleto and cateto. I thought these were two synonyms to describe country bumpkins. It turns out to be much more complex than that. And all I really wanted to say, with just a touch of humour, is that I live in the countryside.

As I write I'm sitting outside the front of our house. The birds are chirping and I can hear a tractor working somewhere up on the hillside. There are dogs barking, of course there are dogs barking!, thankfully in the distance. I can see three of our four cats in various shady spots. I can see roses and trees and lots of other greenery, including far too many weeds, and piles of fallen blossom from our neighbour's tree. Country life.

We country dwellers represent a small percentage of the total Spanish population. Exactly how small a percentage depends a bit on how you do your sums. Yecla isn't exactly a throbbing metropolis but it's not exactly thatched cottage either - is it rural or urban? Pinoso is less than an hour from a couple of cities of 200,000+ and the seventh largest city in Spain. On the other hand our nearest hospitals are half an hour distant. Even within Pinoso the access to services varies substantially from, say, a house in Bulevar to one in Lel. A figure that is definite is that 90% of the Spanish population lives in Madrid or on the coast.

Nonetheless we country folk can claim a different majority. Of the more than 8,000 municipalities here in Spain over 5,000 of them have fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. That means that nearby villages like Algueña or Salinas are a bit above average size for small municipalities and la Romana, with 2,300 inhabitants, is, well, big. About seven and a half million Spaniards, or about 16% of the population, live in rural towns - the definition being fewer than 30,000 inhabitants with a density of population below 100 people per square kilometre. That would include Jumilla but not Villena, Petrer or Yecla. Pinoso has a population of 8,478 and a density of 64 per km².

Lots of figures there but the principal point is that the population lives on the coast and in Madrid or in lots and lots of very small municipalities. 

Because we live in a small, rural, town our life is somewhat different to the majority of the population; the urban dwellers. Our lives are anachronistic because of lots of things. Examples might be that, generally, workers go home for the middy break, that lots of us have outside space, that the restaurants serve mainly Spanish cuisine, that agriculture is still an important part of the economy and that we see nothing strange in having to negotiate tractors as we drive home. It's also a place where it may be uncertain whether your house will have mains water and electric but you can be pretty sure that there won't be a traffic jam.

Of course Spanish cities aren't like that. There there are people delivering food on scooters, there are buses and taxis. Your house is probably a flat in a block and only the smallest blocks would house fewer people than a village like Culebrón. You'd expect to share the noise of other people living their lives - washing machines on spin, that click as the plug is pushed in, a bit of music or maybe the telly and, of course, those barking dogs. It's a life where if you don't have a designated parking space you will spend a few to several minutes of your day searching for one, where you will meet lots of other dog walkers, where the overflowing and disrespected rubbish bins, the stained pavements around lamp posts and graffiti are a part of the landscape and where youngsters play, and old people mutter, about the failings of the modern world in public spaces like playgrounds, parks and basketball courts.

Then again we're not really in "Deep Spain" either. The one where villages have a handful of inhabitants all of advanced years, the ones where there are adverts to attract young families with tasty offers of work or a business so long as they bring children to keep the village school open. The villages where, if you have a medical emergency, they will send a helicopter because, even in the countryside, in Spain at least, it's unacceptable to let people die because of the distance to the nearest hospital.

In the end it's all a bit of a trade off between peace and quiet and some space as against there being no arts centre or bar or shop, never mind shopping centre, or taxi or doctor or bank within striking distance of your front door. It's a choice that is conditioned by your mobility but it's not a place to forget the bread or the milk!

Villages and villages

We went up to Castellón for the weekend, the most northerly of the three provinces that make up the Valencian Community. The place we went was called Forcall and we lodged in an old palace. We were there to see a very odd festival where a couple of saints, Anthony and Peter, are harried by demons who try to burn them to death. My guess is that the roots of the festival are maybe older than Christianity! Whilst we were there we wandered around some of the nearby villages, mostly just over the order into Teruel, one of the provinces that makes up Aragón. If you want to see the snaps they're in this album which is just a part of the January 2022 photo album that you can access from the tabs across the home page, or here

Teruel is quite famous in Spain for being the back of beyond. At the last General Election for instance the province elected an "MP" as a member of the party "Teruel Exists". Teruel is always used as an example of España vacciada - emptied Spain. It's one of those staples of newspaper and radio articles, about how most of Spain is nowadays empty with nearly all the population living in Madrid or somewhere near the coast. The usually cited hotspots for this depopulation are the provinces of Teruel, Soria and Cuenca but, in trying to find some simple factual information for this blog post I came across a learned paper that said that Teruel, Zaragoza, Ciudad Real, Albacete, Sevilla and Asturias all had clusters of incredibly low population density similar to those in Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. You may notice that those countries are quite a long way North with a tendency to inhospitable climates. Even in the North of Spain, where it rains a lot, or up in the high Pyrenees, Spain isn't quite in the same class, climate wise. 

The villages we were wandering around have a particular feel to them but there are similar villages and small towns all over Spain. We have a friend who runs a casa rural in Teruel and one of the villages near her house is of the same character. Huge houses with enormous wooden doors, high rooves, impressive masonry, coats of arms on the façade mixed in with much more humble houses and, of course, a big, often colonnaded, Town Hall with the massive church alongside. I wondered where the money came from. These villages look as though, at one time, they were awash with money, nowadays they are often nearly empty with the carefully modernised weekend home next to a derelict barn. A not too exhaustive bit of Googling suggests that the answer is the obvious one and that the majority of the past wealth came from agriculture. Sometimes the hillside goats producing enough wool and milk to make the local land owners rich and, sometimes, the olive trees or cherries doing the same in more arable areas. After all Pinoso had an economy based largely on wine, esparto and salt before the marble became important and that wasn't all that long ago. It always strikes me as odd though that there are so many places in the boon docks that make peacock like shows of wealth. I was born in West Yorkshire and, there too, the Pennine hillsides produced wool. That wool made the hillside villages rich long before the Industrial Revolution moved the wealth production to the valleys. But none of those Pennine villages can compete in shows of ostentation with the similar sized villages in Huesca or Cantabria. 

Over the years we have heard explanations of why this or that village is how it is. We were in one village where everything revolved around pig keeping, down to the street design and house architecture and I remember some guide, on a Duero river cruise, telling us that villages on the border with Portugal became rich through contraband coffee (Portuguese links with Brazil). In Trujillo, in Extremadura, it was the loot brought back from the New World by some of the more well known Conquistadores that built the huge palaces and churches. It may be too that the style of architecture, and the fact that the villages have largely stood still through time, marks the difference.  Novelda made plenty of money out of both marble and saffron and that money built the big "Modernista" houses in the late 19th and early 20th Century but Novelda is too contemporary to be a good backdrop for an Edwardian TV drama whereas Mirambel would be perfect for a Mediaeval one.

There aren't any of these, one time rich, now impoverished villages around here but, of course we live in a part of Spain that has an out of character rural landscape. The normal pattern for most of Spain, away from the big cities, is that houses are grouped together in villages and towns rather than peppered across the landscape. It's easiest to see at night where, in provinces like  Salamanca or Cantabria or Ciudad Real, the landscape between villages is pitch black. It's nothing like the scattering of individual houses and hamlets, the patchwork of lights that you will see shining out from the fields and hillsides around here. I've heard that the difference is because of the old Moorish system of irrigation channels of this area made that dispersion possible but that doesn't sound like much of an explanation to me. In exactly the same way as I'm still not convinced that all the rural palaces and massive churches were built on the back of agricultural profits. After all there are hundreds of agricultural villages all over Spain that look like they've never been rich and simply look scruffy. What I do know is that if you haven't had the opportunity to travel outside the immediate area it's definitely worth taking a look.

A leisurely time when women wore picture hats

I've read a few books by a Spanish author called Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867 -1928). A couple of the books were about life in Valencia, about the new bourgeoisie, the sort of people who didn't make their money by the sweat of their brow but by playing with money. The sort who despite being in debt need a new carriage to keep up appearances, the sort who would go on to be politicians if only they would stop impregnating the scullery maids. I found the picture the books conjured up of Spanish life at the tail end of the 19th Century fascinating.

We went to Valencia to catch up with one of Maggie's nieces who was in the city for a European Arts Project. Maggie had booked a hotel that was about 3km from the Cathedral, near to the City of Arts and Sciences. It was in a district full of the sort of buildings that conjured up the characters from the Blasco Ibáñez books.  Big impressive buildings with lots of decoration, ample windows, high ceilings and fancy facades. The streets were lined with trees and there were lots of shaded little squares. Just around the corner was the old course of the River Turia. For the Blasco Ibáñez characters the circuit round and round from one side of the river to the other offered the perfect opportunity to show off those new carriages, flaunt that Parisian dress and even to allow appropriate, chaperoned, conversations between young men and women.

Valencia city centre is another showcase for those big turn of the Twentieth Century buildings that are so typical of the centres of many Spanish cities. We don't have anything similar in Culebrón or even in Pinoso. In fact there were quite a few noticeable differences between the Spain that I live in and the one that we visited for a few hours.

Somebody complained about some of the generalisations that I often make on this blog. They told me that I shouldn't draw conclusions about Spain from Pinoso or Cieza or Fortuna, which they referred to, as España profunda, Deep Spain. I took issue with my reader on the grounds that nowhere is particularly isolated nowadays. If you can watch Akshay Kumar and Nimrat Kaur in Bollywood's Airlift as easily as you can watch Kit Harrington in Game of Thrones on your mobile phone, if you can follow the progress of some round the world cyclist as they cross Uzbekistan via their Facebook page and if the drones overflying Afghanistan are controlled from Lincolnshire then it stands to reason that nowhere offers a safe haven from modernity. Even those who want to live in a cave will still find the world chasing them down through old technologies like television and radio. That said there are major differences of course. Living without running water in Havana or being enslaved in Nouakchott, Mauritania bears little comparison to living in Chelsea or the swanky bits of Mumbai. Conversely Pinoso and Valencia are hardly worlds apart.

So we were in Valencia and I thought these houses are nice, I liked the dappled light effect from the sun shining through the trees. I liked the variety and the choice of cakes in the tea shoppy sort of bar we went to. In the central market the stalls were perfectly ordinary but they were selling in an innovative way - micro brewery beers here, oriental vegetables there - a little twist on my everyday. I know a mango smoothie is hardly a hold the front page moment but we are a bit short of smoothie stalls in Pinoso even if you can buy the product in the supermarket. There were hire bikes, the segway groups, the guides showing people around the Old Exchange and the good sounding tour from someone explaining the War of Succession in Estuary English to a bunch of Dutch and French people. All something for we yokels to gawp at. The bars were a bit trendier, the shops were a lot more diverse, there were buses and taxis to take you where you needed to go. On the other hand I was quite sure there was some skulduggery with the addition on our first bill in that tea shoppy bar, the noise of those buses and taxis and bikes and cars pounding down those sun dappled avenues was extremely unpleasant and the interminable hunt for a parking space amongst those leafy squares was exasperating to say the least. The crowds of tourists following the raised umbrella kept bumping into me and spoiling the snaps. There were a lot of people who approached us with outstretched hands or hoped that we would pay to hear them play the bandoneón. It was great, it was interesting, we were surrounded by galleries and great architecture. There were expensive cars and things happening and tourist information and people from all over the world and there were business people doing their thing with suits and posh skirts but it was even better when the motorway quietened down and the countryside opened up and we saw Almansa castle in the distance and the dusty little towns and countryside of Deep Spain spread out before us.