Shellibrating local wildlife

Dog walking is increasingly a struggle. One of our dogs, a neurotic, part podenco (Spanish greyhound-type sighthound), part mastin (calm, giant Spanish agricultural beast), has developed a thing about stagnant ponds. While we’ve had a good amount of rain here in recent weeks, isolated pools of water in the Alpujarras are not a common sight. But for a mutt that got the sighthound, but not the sensible livestock defender bit of the genes, oh, they are everywhere.

The dog emerges from her long sojourns covered in stinking black slime. We try alternative walks, but murky waters are still found. We’re puzzled by the attraction. Perhaps it is ducks, or frogs.

And then the begrimed, evil-smelling creature appears from across an apparently dry, grassy field. It’s agitated: white-tipped tail thrashing, long legs digging, and something in its mouth. Lizards? Grasshoppers? It is the season for all sorts of critters to be lurking in clumps of grass and small bushes. The other dog joins it, doesn’t understand the urgency, runs back to me, and stares, vacantly.

And then the hunting-one decides to run with her find. It’s a stone, perhaps. I demand she drops it and, fearfully (for there are some fairly weirdy creatures here), approach it.

It’s a turtle. A European pond turtle to be exact. On its back. And now a long way from water.

While I’ve had contact with many scoundrels over the years, I so wished that my daughter, a lover of all things reptilian, was with me to touch this one. Tentatively I turned the shell over and waited to discover if the creature was still alive.

It was. And, standing alone in that field, I was extremely reticent about picking it up. Spanish tortugas might be poison spitting, disease carrying, and reportable vermin. But then it looked at me.

So I embarked on the trek back across the field, turtle in hand, throwing stones at the canines and sliding into the side of the standing, muddy mess of a terrapin environment. Not so much a good deed, but an action to try to make better the damaging impact of domestic animals on these fragile ecosystems.

You say peseta…

When our elderly Spanish neighbour who, like many native Órgivians, lives in town but keeps land and animals in the campo (and thinks foreigners are loco for wanting to live in old stone animal barns) presented himself at the house of friends with a message for us – that a goatherd with a couple of hundred beasts had offered 12.5 million pesetas for his property, but we could have it if we paid more, we initially fell about laughing, speculating about how many pesetas could be scraped out of the ancient nooks and crannies of our old cortijo.

Spain joined the eurozone in 1999 – one of the first-wave of countries to do so – fourteen years after it joined the European Union. The euro became the official currency on 1 January 2002 and the transitional dual circulation period, when both currencies had legal tender status but the peseta only as “book money” that had to be converted to euros, ended three months later.

It’s not surprising that for our neighbour’s generation, or even the goatherd’s, the euro has never become the acceptable currency. Indeed the Spanish central bank revealed a couple of years ago that some €1.7bn worth of pesetas was still held by Spaniards. Perhaps those brought up in rural communities such as ours are, even now, using them to make black economy transactions. Though if they are they can’t exchange them for euros except with the central bank.

And of course many Spanish blame “el crisis” – Spain’s economic “great recession” – on joining the euro because of the housing bubble that followed and which burst so spectacularly. The collapse of the Spanish banks revealed irresponsible and predatory subprime mortgage lending – still a major cause of misery and suicide as people lose their homes but, unlike in the UK, continue to have to pay off the debt.

Those who still think in pesetas are also pretty canny with their mental currency converters. They know what the conversion rate was fixed at in 1999. The rest of us are grateful that online versions still exist that don’t simply declare the peseta to be obsolete. For when we considered the implications of living next door to 200 smelly cabras, along with their dogs, our neighbour’s offer suddenly became a lot less funny.

Our sentiment exactly

 

Our water-man confirmed the story. The goatherd intended to build a nave (a warehouse, in the industrial sense of the Spanish word) to house his livestock. The animals would also have the run of the land. “Muy mal” he said, holding his nose and suggesting that we might want to pay the money.

We suddenly felt as though we had woken in a gigantic pool of blood, 200 goat heads placed in our bed as we slept. Our neighbour may not look much like a mafia boss, but it increasingly looked like an offer we could not refuse.

Rapid consultation with other near residents, some of whom have goats overnighting close to them, though not as close as this would be, further convinced us to scupper the goatherd’s plans. Cute as they are, the smell of goats is a taste few people acquire, and what with the horse flies, noise and other delights that would accompany a large herd in small confinement, we might as well abandon our home.

Within hours we learn that our neighbour has rejected the goatherd’s initial offer, it’s been upped by another million pesetas and is about to be accepted. Another consultation with the currency converter reveals he’s pushing close to the official asking price (in euros), albeit a substantially reduced one since the property went on the market two years ago.

We wondered, cynically, having converted pesetas into pounds and it sounding much better, if we might try it in another long-redundant, more over-valued currency to get an even better result. You say peseta, we say Italian lira, perhaps.

And so we find ourselves about to be the owners of nearly 1500 m2 of land with two huge avocado trees, olives, oranges, nisperos (medlar fruit), three chickens, some scabby cats, a trailer (oh what luck, we were planning to buy one of them), a three-roomed casita with no bathroom or kitchen, and an out-building. But even the wise heads of Orgiva’s legal advice and translation service, who helped us in dealing with our neighbour’s determined daughters and the legal paperwork, agreed we had no option.

There are of course bright sides to this predicament. We have learned from this whirlwind process that in Spain, vendors who receive an offer for a rural property which they are inclined to accept are obliged to offer it to their immediate neighbour, especially if the land was once part of the same catastral (piece of land), as ours was. So at the very least, we know our rights have been respected.

And then there’s the strategic benefit of owning land adjacent to ours, given the options it opens up (and closes down), increased water rights at a more sensible time of day than we currently enjoy (see Zeds (or lack of them) and the art of pool maintenance), and finally being shot of a not so easy vecino.

Our daughter, who plays the video strategy game Civilisation, commented that it was a bit like a move where a city state is invaded for tactical reasons to stop someone else having it, and by doing so yet another piece of land is blocked off which could have value to opponents.

And judging from a call we received from the owners of a holiday home the other side of the would-be goat ranch, we might yet be considered local heroes.

Earthquakes shake Spanish land and politics

A series of earthquakes measuring up to 6.3 on the Richter Scale rocked our coastline in the early hours of Monday morning and was heard and felt up in our mountains. Beds shook and the remaining olives on our ancient tree rained down on the roof above our heads.

The quakes’ centre was in the Alboran Sea, between the Spanish mainland near Malaga and the Spanish enclave of Melilla in north Africa and came just days after a series of tremors were felt along the Costa Tropical. It’s a reminder of our proximity to the colliding Eurasian and African plates and that hundreds of people were killed in Granada and Motril in the 1880s during the deadliest earthquakes – a tragedy still “celebrated” in Motril during its annual Día de los Terremotos (Day of the Earthquakes) fiesta.

It’s unlikely that seismic activity here would cause such devastation again. But the predicted political earthquake as a result of December’s general election has certainly put an end to traditional two-party, rotational Spanish politics.

Over a month since the election, Spain is still without a government. PSOE and PP lost significant ground to the anti-austerity Podemos and neo-liberal Ciudadanos – indeed it was one of PSOE’s worst results since democracy returned to Spain in 1977. Manoeuvres to try to form a coalition government continue, while acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has refused the king’s investiture invitation. A PP-Ciudadanos coalition is alternately on and off the table, and even if it does happen it won’t deliver Rajoy an overall majority. Not that Rajoy has stood aside – he hasn’t ruled out accepting another offer from the king.

Meanwhile, PSOE’s efforts to form an allegiance with Podemos, and possibly the United Left or regional Catalan and Basque parties, remain stuck on Pablo Iglesias’ party’s support for a Catalan independence referendum, along with his determination that his MPs take many of the top government posts, including deputy PM.

How either Podemos or Ciudadanos, which both stood on anti-corruption platforms, can contemplate coalitions with the parties most associated with the defrauding of public money and remain credible new political forces remains to be seen. (I am reminded of the newspaper cartoon depicting a conversation between two children: “Vamos a jugar politicos (let’s play politicians)”. “No sin mi abogado (not without my lawyer)”.)

Still, Iglesias and PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez did manage to speak for 20 minutes recently, with the former tweeting that Podemos has an “historic opportunity to be the change”, though his public statements following an earlier meeting with the king, including that the PSOE leader would have him to thank if he became PM, are unlikely to assuage Sanchez’s suspicion.

Whatever the outcome of negotiations – and it may yet be another election after several more months of a government-free Spain – the country’s traditional parties are being forced to face the reality that the Spanish people voted for change (except the trusty Andalucians, who remained as loyal to PSOE as ever) and though they may not achieve it in seismic proportions, they have a right to demand, as IU said, a progressive government “that meets the demands of the social majority and finishes with the disastrous policies imposed by the government of Mariano Rajoy”.

Unsettled election, unsettled history

Andalucian president Susana Diaz continues to try to govern alone after failing to secure a majority in last month’s regional election, in spite of winning the same number of seats as in 2012. Her Socialist party (PSOE) is eight seats short of what it needs to avoid having to negotiate with other parties to pass every piece of legislation.

Anti-austerity, anti-corruption party Podemos, which secured 15 seats, is hardly coalition material for a ruling party that is following an austerity agenda and has three former ministers suspected of involvement in a billion euro fraud case. And the other newcomer to Spanish politics – the right wing Ciudadanos (Citizens), which won nine seats – has also ruled out a formal alliance, even with the conservative Popular Party (PP), which came second but lost 17 seats.

The Spanish media continues to predict that Podemos could hold the balance of power after the general election in November. But given that the Andalucian vote, especially the collapse in the vote of PP (the party of national government), is seen as a strong gauge of the outcome, it is difficult to envisage what sort of coalition Podemos might be a part of.

Meanwhile, the breakdown of voting in Granada province, and particularly in Las Alpujarras, shines a light on the sides taken in our villages and towns during the Spanish civil war.

The people who work the land here do not consider themselves to be anything other than working class – it is uniquely Spanish anarchism. But the terrible experiences of the civil war are, for many people of the Alpujarras, still painfully recent. Here there are estimated to be as many as 25 mass graves containing the remains of Republican or anarchist villagers who tried to resist Franco’s armed rebels who came up to these mountains from the coast. Towns such as Torvizcon were repeatedly attacked and their inhabitants “disappeared”. Órgiva marked a frontline throughout the war and remains proudly anti-Franco.

With a few exceptions, such as the pristine spa town of Lanjarón which narrowly voted PP – perhaps as much because of the relative wealth of its inhabitants through tourism as that it was Nationalist during the war – this remains a staunchly socialist region. PSOE won the majority of Alpujarran municipalities, with Podemos coming second or third in many. And it is unsurprising that while the United Left (IU), which includes the Communist Party of Spain, lost seven seats in the Andalucian parliament, it had a relatively strong showing in many places here.

Take the tiny pueblo of Cañar, from where our internet signal is beamed. IU achieved 6.8 per cent of the vote – that’s eight people in a village with a population of just a couple of hundred. If only those eight could get their hands on that broadband transmitter…

Voting for hope in Greece and Spain

Now that the people of Greece have rejected austerity and voted for a party that wants to renegotiate the country’s debt, Podemos (We Can) – Spain’s anti-austerity party founded last year in the wake of the mass “Indignados” or 15-M movement against inequality and corruption – has been bolstered in its belief that the general election here will go the same way.

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias tweeted after the Greek election that the result represented hope and finally the Greeks had a Greek government and “not an Angela Merkel delegate”. He said his party would be celebrating the change in Europe, in Spain and in Greece.

His conviction that Spaniards will choose a similarly new path as the people of Greece have done will be tested in Andalucia earlier than expected. Andalucian president Susana Diaz has brought forward the region’s elections to 22 March after the collapse of her Socialist Party (PSOE) alliance with Izquierda Unida (United Left), which she accuses of moving to the left in response to the growing popularity of Podemos.

IU’s national leader Alberto Garzón has been trying to distance the party from the Socialists and its Andalucian coordinator general Antonio Maíllo has pushed for a referendum among its members on whether to leave the coalition should the PSOE refuse to push through social reforms to try to tackle growing inequality and poverty in Spain’s poorest region. Andalucia has been governed by the Socialists for more than 25 years, but the party’s rightward shift, along with fraud charges brought against two of its previous regional leaders, have damaged it.

Nationally, Podemos’ showing in the polls is strong. A recent voter intention survey carried out for newspaper El Pais showed it to be ahead of the PSOE, with 28.2 per cent support. While the PSOE may well hang on in Andalucia, the democratizing movement that is sweeping Spain looks set to bring an end to the two-party system at the national elections later this year.

Here in Órgiva, campaigning for May’s municipal elections is underway and reflects the same mood which has fuelled the rise of Podemos. A new platform has been launched which is open to anyone interested in strengthening democratic decision-making processes in the Alpujarras.

Ganemos La Alpujarra (Win the Alpujarra) describes its aims (and apologies for the rough translation), as enabling anyone who believes in “political ecology, social equity and democratic regeneration” a chance to participate in the elections and local institutions.

It calls for the disappearance of “clans, cronyism, patronage and other political ills” and the giving way to a “more honest, more just and more effective management” deserved by the people of La Alpujarra.

My continued engagement with British politics has emails from the Labour Party dropping into my inbox on an almost daily basis. I’ll do my best to return to London to pound the streets in Hampstead and Kilburn before the UK’s general election, but Labour, as well as Spain’s PSOE, needs to heed the lessons that the Greek vote and the mood in Spain, including in our beautiful mountains, offer –  not only are there alternatives to austerity and to two-party systems but that if they’re not given, the electorate will find or create them.

Olives, pickers and rowers

Stuck at Granada airport before boarding a three-hour delayed British Airways flight to what was originally London City Airport, but became the somewhat less glamorous “London” Southend (as owned by Eddie Stobart), I reflected that the presence of the Great Britain men’s rowing team among the gloomy passengers provided at least better company than the drunken hen party I had endured on my previous Easyjet trip back to the UK.

Nice lads. Very tall. Very strong. They’d been training at the high altitude pre-performance centre in the Sierra Nevada. I eavesdropped on their stories about Olympic medals won and lost and exchanged brief small talk with the ones who sat around me on the plane. We arrived in the early hours in the wretched Rochford, endured a miserable coach trip back to a freezing cold London City Airport, and I thought little more of the rowers.

Until now. As I make up a pitifully small olive picking team, I so wish I’d got the GB rowers’ numbers.

The annual olive harvest has been going on for a few weeks, but we’ve worked on it with a neighbour for the last three years between Christmas and the New Year. It’s when the olives are at their best and, in theory, when there are people with a bit of time on their hands.

This year, both olives and people are thin on the proverbial ground. It’s biennial, but the additional impact of drought and higher than average Spring temperatures has resulted in a much depleted crop. A grove we worked on last year has nothing at all to offer. Our own tree, which produced 60 kilos of olives last year, struggled to give us one. The price of Spanish extra virgin olive oil has been going up year on year due to shortages, but is predicted to rocket now (how will my north London friends cope?).

Yet there are some trees still dripping with fruit. And so I stand, head, neck and arms painfully straining upwards to reach the precious purple and green treasure, watching others precariously perched on top of ladders, chain saws cutting the highest branches, and I yearn for those men of oars.

Tangerine dreams

During a recent trip back to London for work, I became trapped in a wine bar with a friend by an army of yummy mummies. It was mid afternoon and perhaps we should have anticipated that a roomy, women-friendly venue in an affluent part of Clapham would be a favourite for green tea and cake-fuelled debates about the relative merits of different brands of organic baby foods. But as increasing numbers of well-dressed young women manouvered their designer baby tanks through the double doors and assembled next to and around our comfy sofa, we began to share a mild sense of discomfort, soon to be displaced by incredulity.

Having failed to suppress our giggles over “she’s a little bit special about yogurt”, we lost it when one yummy asked another: “have you tried George with tangerines and if so, do you peel the skin off every segment for him?”. Yes, and yes.

We received benign, no, patronising smiles in response to our sniggers. Time for us to clamber over the all-terrain baby mobility systems and return to our cynical sanity.

It’s not that I’ve been away long enough to forget about the posh buggy clubs that operate in certain parts of the Capital (in our little bit of north London, baby jogging and “walkie talkie” groups on Hampstead Heath are what the new, or not so new, mothers who don’t need to work do to pass the time). But it’s so far removed, and offensively so in these straitened times, from the day-to-day reality of parenting small children here in Òrgiva, or indeed in any working class community, anywhere.

I was reminded of gorgeous George and his perfectly peeled tangerines as I sat with my daughter on our decking a few days later. Off sick from school, she had decided that sitting in the sun and attempting to relieve our loaded trees of their burden of fruit might help clear her aching head. “Vitamin C mum, vitamin C.”

I sampled one, winced at the hit of acidity and nearly choked on the pips. I don’t have the knack of spitting out the stones that my daughter acquired as a baby and has finely honed over the years. Not for her the peeled segment. Call social services.

Three months

Time to assess progress so far

Casa del Sol has been something of a building site since early September. While some of the work could have been done before we got here, had we been more strategic in our planning, only after living in a place longer than three weeks does finding solutions to problems start to become really urgent. So when the daytime temperatures dipped to below 30-ish, the work got going.

The cortijo was renovated in the mid-‘90s and the many people who have lived here since appear to have put up with some uncomfortable issues that we never could. When we bought el Sol in the summer of 2012 we noted the number of sink plungers distributed around bathrooms and kitchens. Our predecessors had relied on them to get the grey water out, and the method worked well enough for a fair while. But the place was well used by friends and relatives in the weeks up to our arrival in August and the plungers were no longer up to the job. Regular “rodding” of the pipe that lay beneath the garden, allegedly taking grey water to a soak-away somewhere south of the swimming pool would get things moving again, but my increasing anxiety at not having a dishwasher (I’m a Londoner: I can cope with a lot of what living in Órgiva deprives me of, but not washing up) meant a long-term solution had to be found.

Our knight in armour (nothing really shines here, except the sun and the snow on the top of the high sierra) has been an accomplished digger-man. A worthy steed, the compact machine might become a must-have gadget in due course. Skilfully operated, it sliced through the soil, following the line of the pipe (our hero initially had nothing better to go on than this drawing done, it seems, by a small child – note the swing from the olive tree, wishful thinking perhaps).

map of el sol drains

Water doesn’t run uphill

The excited cry from one observer to the operation (it’s been a bit Piccadilly Circus-like here) that “it goes uphill there” sums up what our rudimentary drainage system has been up against. A narrow pipe, laid in far too shallow a ditch and, indeed, on an upward incline in places. James Dyson may have been able to make water flow uphill, but there was something lacking in the science in our backyard.

A deeper trench, a proper soakaway hole in the ground (the original was found to be nothing but a perforated pipe “designed” to discharge water into the acequia channel or thereabouts – not that water is likely to have reached that far) and an appropriately-wider pipe now provide us with sinks and showers that do what they are intended to: drain. A minor kitchen re-design is the next step to achieving that longed-for dishwasher.

Restoring the garden to its former glory may take a little longer.

There’s something in the library

It was never really a shed. The building by our gate once provided access to a friend of a previous owner of el Sol to her land and nave (an agricultural building), which is down a track behind our real shed. But after a falling out between the two, and then a court battle between the unfortunate still-owner of the now inaccessible land and the immediate previous owners of our home, what was a walkthrough wood store was blocked up and given a makeshift roof.

Which gave me an idea. Where to put the books? Time to realise that childhood dream of having a library. So the walls were raised, concrete roof erected, render applied. Shelving arrived from the UK via Aberdeen (simple shelving systems are hard to come by in España). And now at least some of our boxes are unpacked.

No, we’re not entirely sure that our library/office is legal, but it’s there. And that’s half the battle won in this part of Spain. And, importantly, it’s still a wood store. Much like swimming pools here are albercas (water storage tanks).

Centrally heated knickers

Well, not knickers (most of which have been pulled off the washing line and shredded by the dog). I was just inspired by unpacking Michael Rosen books. But what we are doing is something seemingly innovative for rural Spain – installing wood-burning central heating. Common in off-grid areas of the UK, radiators heated by a stove with a back-burner are rare here. Our builder friend, who has helped to provide the inspiration and practical solution for this, has been greeted by some incredulity when he’s tried to explain it locally.

Shipping the estufa (stove) from Italy turned out to be substantially cheaper than a UK-manufactured Hunter, as much as we’d have liked one. Inevitably, given its provenance, it’s stylish, though its charms are still hidden in its box as we await the delivery of a final, crucial, element of the network of pipes that have been appearing in and around the house.

And when it’s still keeping us toasty warm in the morning, in the way that our old wood-burner does in the evening, we might launch one of those Open House architectural days that have become so popular in London. After all, we all like a glimpse of how other people live. Just as this blog tries to paint a picture of how we live.

Floats and flamenco

There is much more to Orgiva’s annual feria than tradition and doing things the way they’ve always been done. The four-day festival that celebrates this rural town’s history and culture is as eclectic as its community.

Without getting too teary-eyed about the significance of the giant paella, the massive free portions of which would set us back several pounds at most community festivals we’ve enjoyed in London, or of the tradicionales huevos fritos con ajos (fried eggs with garlic) handed out with bread in the main square, the egalitarian nature of feria reminds us of what is possible for a society.

Floats and flamenco dresses, elderly locals in their finest (new sombrero plano for him, a splash of colour for her), ex-pats keeping the pop-up bars busy. That they are juxtaposed with the powerful Brazilian and afro-Cuban drumming rhythms of Espíritu Santuka is a tribute to Orgiva’s diversity.

Another feria highlight, the carrera de cintas, a traditional sport in Spain and Latin America where contestants ride horses (though it is done on bicycles too, apparently) to a wire to try to capture a belt or ribbon hung from a loop, underlined the difference between equestrian activities here and in the UK. This wasn’t a gymkhana for privileged youngsters. These were working class men, racing their animals on a patch of waste ground in the middle of a housing estate (and no one at the council tried to stop it on ‘elf and safety grounds).

It’s difficult to spend money during feria. Most events are entrada gratuita. Only the Friday evening espectáculo ecuestre – the Andalucian horse dressage display – carried a charge. Not that anyone bothered to collect the €3 entrance fee from spectators. But I hope the hat was passed around for the €2 entrada solidaria at the theatrical production, money intended for Orgiva’s food bank.

As if four days of festivities was not enough for this town, we learn that Monday is another bank holiday, a fiesta in honour of Nuestra Señora del Pilar – the Patroness of Spain, the Guardia Civil and neighbouring town Lanjarón. There’s a saint for everything and everyone here. Any excuse for a party.

Four weeks

The bluest of blue skies above the Lujar

Funny how four weeks at Casa del Sol have felt nothing like a holiday. Perhaps it’s the lack of return tickets, the absence of a countdown to a return to what was (perhaps still is) home, or just the presence of an overgrown puppy forever after something to eat that will surely rip its insides apart (the pool solar lights are particularly tasty), but books have stayed unread, sunloungers unlounged on. Even the pool has cooled from lack of action. Instead there is a routine of early morning dog walking, school running, weekend piano lessons, fun with new friends and, oh, working.

For you can take the London out of the journalist, but you can’t take the journalist out of our much-loved new home town, Órgiva.

A client asked if I was on holiday after getting the international ring tone. I explained I was not, but still received a slightly provocative “but you can still have a quick Sangria when you fancy it”. Perhaps I protest too much, but if I was working in London during what I read has been a glorious September, would it be assumed that I would nip out for a drink half way through the day?

That said, I found myself closing the bedroom windows to shut out the sound of the swimming pool’s jets after they noisily fired up while I was conducting a telephone interview with someone whose business was struggling and who said they hadn’t had a holiday for years. There was no reason why they would assume the sound of running water was anything other than, well I’m not sure what in the context, but I had this horrible sense that my phone could somehow betray my location to my interviewee.

Working from home in southern Spain for UK clients is clearly going to have its challenges and carry with it a fair amount of guilt. But the bright blue, clear September sky, accompanied by the cooling breezes that attracted us to this valley, make it unlikely that I’ll be returning to Northern Line misery to assuage my conscience any time soon.