Parking: a petty issue?
Sunday, July 13, 2014 @ 9:12 PM
Parking is of course a big issue for many people the world over - one of those so-called petty issues which cause millions to fantasise about slitting their neighbours' throats. We were no exception. Marino became the focus of our wild fantasies in this regard.
One day he dragged another large pile of his larger branches and put them right where we parked our car below the house (in our original parking area). He then parked his van on our new parking area. We'd only recently cleared this area near the pool, put down a membrane and covered it with tons of gravel. So, he now had his things on both of our parking spaces, leaving us in the ridiculous position of driving up to our cortijo and having nowhere to park.
'Move that van!' I called out to him, when I saw that I couldn't get onto our land.
He shouted something indecipherable, but clambered down from his terrace, got in the van and moved it onto a neighbour's land.
'Bloody hell,' Adrian moaned. 'Now we'll have to pay for Patrick to come up and concrete in some posts and shove a chain and lock across it. Just to stop that bastard.'
He was clearly afflicted with what Marita described as the local disease – envidia (envy), and envidia often led on to codicia (coveting). Because he coveted what we had, he decided he’d just use it, as though it were his.
On our nearby olive terraces we had a similar problem with a man called Pepe from Barcelona, who despite having a vast area of his own on which to park, would stick his car on our very small parking area where only one car could fit, so that if we went there we had nowhere to put our car and we couldn't leave it in the middle of the track that was in constant use. It was just him trying to bully us really.
Yet another time we found that someone had parked a large digger on our olive terraces. We had no idea whom it belonged to and put a note on the seat weighed down with a rock, telling them that they were on private property and to please move it. It was a damn cheek, but the owner of the digger also could quite easily have crushed our irrigation pipes and if we knew one thing about the Spanish it was that if they broke anything of yours then that was your own lookout; they wouldn't be paying to fix it.
To see our current properties for rent take a look at:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p86636
And also another of our completed projects:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p475271