Spanish Shilling

Somebody was asking on Facebook – is it easy to move to Spain and get a job? I answered with that old chestnut: ‘the only way to make a small fortune here, is to start with a large one’ (cue laughter and approval from the usual suspects).

For Northern Europeans, their money here is good – after all, whose isn’t? One can buy something, a car, a box, a shirt or a meal – as long as they take it away with them shortly afterwards. A house though, and here’s the problem, it doesn’t move.

In the old days, when houses sold for pocket-change (I once foolishly failed to buy a large apartment in front of the Royal Palace in Madrid for the equivalent of 36,000€), the money was welcome enough, but now we have los nietos, the grandchildren, saying ‘Oh, why did abuelo sell that farm to the ingleses all those years ago for just a million pesetas?’

‘And they still don’t speak Spanish or help us with the olive-pickin’.

It’s probably a small gripe.

We open a bar, but only our fellow foreigners come and drink in it. A local story goes that Gordon – who had run La Sartén since God was a Boy – was feeling seedy and, one thing and another, he hadn’t been around for a few days to the nearby Gabila’s for his morning carajillo.

‘What’s up’, asked El Gabila, in that slow Spanish which is reserved for foreigners after bumping into Gordon one day in the supermarket, ‘why haven’t you been to my bar in the last week?’

‘Well’, asked Gordon reasonably, ‘why haven’t you been to mine in the last twenty years?’

Our Facebook friends who want to move here from the UK might want to take note.

If they open a bar, they will compete with all the other guiris for the tourist trade, and if they stay open in the winter, then they can expect that the expats will drift in once the sun disappears (around half past five); but they won’t get the local trade – and nor indeed will the restaurants (although my mate Juan used to agree enthusiastically with me about ‘los fish y pips’ down at Mervyn’s).

So some of us turn to plumbing (no Spaniard would employ a British plumber – for two reasons – only the second being the paperwork), or they seek work as a mechanic, or a psychologist or a set designer. Maybe a crooner down at the campsite. How about an air traffic controller as somebody was asking today on Fb (after all, she points out, I speak pretty good Spanish)?

Of course, some of us do make a living: real estate or selling adverts or house-cleaning or putting in satellite systems, but our clients will all be fellow-foreigners.

The best way to live in Spain is with money coming in from abroad. Either a decent pension, or an income from business interests or, hey, even a monthly remittance from an angry parent… It’s all good.

Maybe one can swing one of those working-from-one’s-computer jobs from a nice place in Mallorca. These days, it all done on the phone…

If all fails, we must turn our talents to other ends. Ripping off gullible people is so easy (‘Ah yes, I speak the lingo, I’ll get you a deal’).

You see those stories every week in the local free press.

But we will have to prey on our own nationals, because Spaniards won’t fall for it.

Then, if things turn out badly, there’s always the panicky ‘midnight runner’.

‘How’s Bob, I haven’t seen him in a while… Say, isn't that his cat?’

Over the years, the times I’ve been caught here has always been by fellow Brits. On one occasion, it was for quite a lot.

But don’t let me put you off. Spain is a great place to live; it’s just not a great place to make money.

My late wife Barbara wrote this one in 2012.

At some moment of time in the late eighties, I was writing a special for our newspaper on romantic get-aways and I contacted the head of tourism for the small resort of Lanjarón in Granada. In those days, newspapers didn't buy agency copy and we had to either write our own stuff or ask the fellow upstairs to pen something.

Lanjarón is a beautiful village, high in the Alpujarras and famous for its natural spring water and hot springs and old Moorish baths. It had to be a great place to visit, I thought.

After speaking with the head of tourism over the phone, he kindly invited me and a guest to stay in his hotel and spend a weekend taking in all of the wonders of Lanjarón. It was late November and Lenox’s birthday so I thought it would be a wonderful surprise that would normally be out of my price range.

We had driven up to the city of Granada from the coast to make our way over the top of the Sierra Nevada on what turned out to be an alarming and stony track, with the snow either beginning to fall or already banked on the side on our route. The car was a rear-engined two-seater and we had no chains for the wheels if the going got any worse. We gingerly passed through little villages and hamlets at the very summit of the Alpurrajas. Arriving at last in the town made famous from its bottled water, we found the hotel to our surprise to be chained, locked and bolted. The neighbors said maybe the manager (and acknowledged expert on tourism) had gone into Granada to go shopping.

Or, who knows, maybe he had just bolted.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the town - there was just the one street - and finally decided to take a room, at our expense, in the only hotel that was open. It turned out to be a hotel for senior citizens where the Spanish Social Security system brought elderly people by the bus-load in a service called El Imserso.

We checked into our room and were told that dinner was at seven. Our room was large, freezing and filthy. The view from our bedroom window was of snow; not a beautiful snowy landscape but of packed snow up against the window. We went to the dining room around 7.15 only to find that, in a most un-Spanish way, they meant dinner was served at seven and not, as usually understood, that it started vaguely anytime after seven but best show up around nine.

Every course was a type of purée. The soup, vegetable, meat and pudding had all been put through a blender. Who, we wondered, needs teeth with a meal like that? After this rather disappointing dinner we went out to find a bar and something proper to eat but along the main and indeed practically only street, everything was firmly shut; so we returned to the hotel bar. The only beverage on the shelf behind the bar was an elderly bottle of Cointreau, so Lenox ordered one and, to his gratification, was given a huge water glass full of this sticky orange-flavoured liqueur. I asked for a Coke and the bar-tender had to leave the building only to return ten minutes later with a can of Coke held firmly in his gloved hands: he must have got it out of a friend’s refrigerator.

Some of the other guests were gloomily playing dominoes in the lounge while others were watching the TV. We decided to retire to our icy room and go to bed.

We were wearing every piece of clothing we had packed while all of the blankets and towels were spread on the bed and yet we were still freezing. Lenox suggested adding the rug on the floor but it was covered with heavy clumps of what appeared to be human hair.

After an unsatisfying breakfast of puréed toast and with our hitherto benevolent opinion about Lanjarón firmly in retreat, we decided to leave the town, as even the hot springs and baths were closed for the season. We drove down the mountains towards the coast looking for somewhere beautiful and interesting. To our surprise, we came across a place called Orgiva – looking like the Santa Cruz Mountains of California wrenched directly from the 60s, with long-haired hippies wearing outsize velvet caps, a reek of patchouli oil, Tarot-readings in the market, and a few painted VW buses. The whole lot of them: all apparently moved in a woozy bulk to the Alpujarras of Granada.

We broke our trip briefly in another notable village, Yegen, where Gerald Brennan had lived for many years. The entire place appeared to us to have chosen in its origins to be built entirely in the shade. White houses grey. Our conclusion? Don’t visit it in November.

We continued eastwards, still in search of a nice hotel to roost in for a break - after all, I could always write about somewhere else. We coasted into Trevélez and came across a restaurant apparently famous for its trout so we pulled in to the carpark only to find three bus loads of German tourists parked in mathematical precision in front of us. That would be a lot of trouts for one day, we thought, so we gave up.

It was getting dark, but the only rooms we could find in Trevélez – tourism in the eighties evidently still not being a strong point from Lanjarón onwards – was above a gas station, so we decided to give up and go home. When we regained the coast we changed our plans, deciding not to let our romantic weekend be completely ruined so we went to a giant hotel located on the beach in Aguadulce, Almería. A least the bar would have something crunchy. The hotel was full of English and German tourists all looking to be entertained around the clock and, by chance, it was “Dress in Drag Night”. So nice to see the two nations coinciding for once – if only in complete idiocy.

I had never been so happy the following morning as to return to the beauty and comfort of Mojácar, and until now, all these years afterwards, I have never written that article I had promised Lenox and his readers about Lanjarón.

Things to think about when buying a farm in Spain:

On any old farm the property was measured in ‘fanegas’ – a sort of rule-of-thumb measurement - and every village had a different size ‘fanega’ so the size of one ‘fanega’ here was, likely as not, different from that there. Now things are measured in hectares or square meters so it is standardized but the old properties aren’t. This makes it complicated when trying to read an old property deed.

Another thing is your boundary. Years ago a farmer might have traded a donkey for an olive tree on their land, the donkey will have long passed on but the olive tree now – at least in theory - belongs to someone else. It depends, of course, on whether somebody wrote it down. We ourselves, for example, have a reasonably clear and evident spread of land, plus, according to an old neighbour, an extra five or ten square metres, not existing on any document, about half a kilometer away.

One’s land usually stops at the top of a ‘barranco’, a level of once-arable land supported usually by stones (the dictionary isn’t very helpful), and not at the bottom. If you are lucky enough to have an ‘era’, that is, a round threshing place, you should find out if it is yours or for communal use. Or better still, see if anyone thereabouts still owns a donkey.

Rights of way and animal paths are another problem. For example, there's a piece of land behind ours that gives the owners the right to pass over our land to get to theirs so we cannot fence it off. It is just for the land-owners in this case and not the public but it is evidently something of a nuisance. The water or electric company also may have a special right of way so if you fence the land you must put in a gate wide enough for a vehicle and give them a key. An animal path, called a ‘vía pecuaria’ (or, in Andalucía, ‘una vereda de carne’), is for public use and may go right through the middle of your garden. They may not be used much any more but you may not fence or build or barricade it in any way. No, not even the mayor can. It is not just open to shepherds or farmers with land on the other side but it is in fact a public footpath.

Get your property surveyed because the piece you were shown might not actually be the piece you are buying, you might be buying the side of a cliff.

Many years ago, A trick sometimes played on one foreigner by another was to get a ‘papel del Estado’ – a fancy-looking watermarked paper dripping with seals and everything on it from the ‘estanco’ – the government paper, stamp, seal and cigarette shop - for twenty-five pesetas and merrily write your contract on that. If you didn’t know any better it looks pretty damn official. With more awareness, and a nodding understanding of the function of a notary and a lawyer, that has pretty much gone out of fashion but at one time, people ended up paying a lot of money for a paper they could have gotten at the ‘estanco’ and then finding out they didn’t own a house.

Check who has been paying the taxes for the last ten or so years because they might own the land now. Most old farm-houses or ‘cortijos’ have been inherited by a number of family relatives sometime along the way, so you need written consent from ALL members of the family in order to buy. Lot of times, there’s someone in Argentina, another in Barcelona, another dead (with six still-unlocated children) or in prison and there is often one ‘clever’ family member that holds out and winds up still owning a room in the house. It may not seem like a problem if it is an old ruin but once you have remodeled and are living in your new mansion they can put pigs in their room or try and sell it to you for a vast amount of money now that the property is worth something.

Does your farm come with ‘tandas’ or hours of irrigation water - from springs or the town fountain? If it does you need to know how many hours and what days your land has (it’s usually out of a cycle of ten days), then you go to the spring and change the water-ways to go to your farm and irrigate or fill a ‘deposito’ for later use. This can mean a very early start, depending on the timetable. Many farms have three or more springs that they are entitled to but it is a lot of work to walk down the water channels and move the gates so that the water reaches you.

Another thing to find out is if your land is protected archeologically, meaning you can’t under normal circumstances build at all. Indeed, we now have student archeologists, with the proud support of our town hall, merrily digging up a mountain just behind our house where there could conceivably be Moorish, or Roman, or Phoenician or even Martian ruins. It's all very exciting.

The land is registered with the ‘registro’ and also with the ‘catastro’. These two offices are mutually exclusive. The first is the Property Registry - think old bits of curling parchment and lilac ink – and the second is the Tax Register. Often, the property is different in one from the other: the vital one – often as we have seen rather lost in the old pine-tree and the large rock which boundaries with Paco el Loco’s land – is the true record of ownership. An ‘escritura’ or the rather shorter ‘nota simple’ are the receipts of the ownership: copying the salient points from the Register.

So what are the rules about blurring out faces in press photographs and TV news and documentaries? Are we protecting the innocent, or maybe the guilty? I’m confused. Is it the perpetuators, the criminals and the revolutionaries we shouldn’t see, or the police who catch them, or the innocent parties that happen to be in the picture? When ex-President Aznar flipped the bird the other day at some students who said he was a monster, we were treated in the Spanish press to Aznar, his raised second finger and the students, but not the surprised fellow with the computer-generated re-touch standing next to the truculent politician.

In England, they would have edited the offending digit.

When they remove the prisoners’ faces in those tedious documentaries about life behind bars in Alabama, I can’t help wondering (as I search for the TV control) why they don’t want us to see them. We might recognise them if we saw them again?

This would be a bad thing?

Sometimes – for our benefit and viewing pleasure – children’s faces will be blurred, if we are talking about children, or perhaps we see them modestly just from the waist down, or then again, the children just appear in the photograph, or video, because we were talking about something else. They are children, nothing more, except on news shows when they become victims or, just sometimes, future prisoners in Wandsworth. Conversely, why could we see Jon Venables as a child, but not as an adult?

Are we protecting them from these sex-lunatics we hear about, who will commit foul crimes upon themselves if left to contemplate this photo (but not that one)? So why are we occasionally covering or distorting their faces and why is it the other way round on the American shows? Or is it?

Lawyers, in a word. Don’t get me started.

I imagine fortunes were lost with the arrival of the face-mask. Not just for facial recognition technology, which was certainly put back by several years, but also those who have the job of blurring out people's mugs. There's probably a button, anyway. What is a member of the legal profession to do? You can't sue when you can's see Sue!

It gets worse, the producers now blur out bits of the decoration they don’t like. The fellow’s tee-shirt on the Discovery Channel might have a brand-name written on it, or his cap, for Goodness sake (better not swear!). And what did that footballer just do? Heavens-to-Betsy! Blur it out!

This explains the fuss with Justin Timberlake revealing one of the boobies from that Jackson girl during the Super Bowl a mere twenty years ago now (some things can never be forgotten!). We had already contemplated the horror that day before the producers could hit the Red Button.

Indeed, thanks to that, ah 'accident', now live entertainment has something called the ‘one minute delay’.

And, as I think further, why do we suppress the sound of swearing in Anglo shows, with a LOUD BLEEP to make sure that the viewers will know that the censors and defenders of public morals are ever vigilant. Now they even put a blurry bit over the mouth so we can appreciate the censor’s zeal – unless you, the viewer, happens to be one of those rare people who can read lips closely enough to have the sound turned off (with the added advantage of not being pestered by those irritating BLEEPs), yet is somehow stirred to violence, wrath and the Old Testament by the prospect of a naughty word.

If not, let me tell you all about subtitles.

Of course, beyond a previous agreement with the Eye on Spain editor, I must abide by the Anglo rules of printing swear-words in my article with an absurd substitution of asterisks with just the first letter appearing before to give clever adults a guide as to what I might mean, yet confuse those children who look forward to my weekly output and would read them all in one go if only the adults ‘ud let them.

Those same kids are expected to be in bed by 10.00pm as something called a ‘watershed’ is passed at this time. I am sure that they have watched enough ‘grown-ups’ telly’ long before they blossom into discovering the superior diversions of booze, sex and the other manifold attractions of young adulthood. In Spain, at least, the government control on our viewing is considerably more relaxed – and they don’t usually wait until 10.00pm before switching on ‘the better stuff’. In fact here, even some of the adverts are downright risqué. Unfortunately, the European parliament, again concerned about public decency, has managed to hold in check quite a bit of Spain and Italy’s more lusty output on the ‘little screen’, no doubt to keep those sweet little kids pure – those that bother to stay in and watch the box. Telly, come to think of it, is now no longer used at all by the eight to eighteen demographic, which prefers the endless attractions of the Internet where, despite the best efforts of Mrs Whitehouse’s continental successor, we can still pretty much find anything we want and, with a clever doodabby called the vpn, pretend that we live in some other country entirely, where downloading something of interest isn't a sin. 

Spain has nevertheless picked up a few ideas from the Anglos and will now blur things it doesn’t approve of. Policeman’s faces are often pixelated here and on occasion can sometimes be covered by a sinister looking black balaclava – particularly in the Basque Country – as if the local population would tear them apart if they only knew who it was that was marching their handcuffed second-cousins from their homes during a dawn raid.

We also have the 'Protection of Data' act which basically means each company in Spain has to send an annual cheque to some agency that has the authority to sue - as far as I can see - those who don't pixelate where they should.

So, as the blurry figures from the TV – and, who knows, maybe YouTube – together with the silly expurgated BLEEPs, flicker and echo through the household, what about Hollywood? Have you ever seen a movie with a swear-word and a blurred mouth? No, you haven’t.

You won’t on Spanish TV either – here, they are not afraid of their language. All those expressive four (five and eight) letter words which pepper the idiom are given their full value, not hidden behind those silly asterisks. Honestly, the children don’t mind. Indeed, the Leader of the opposition Pablo Casado just last month asked the President of Spain during a parliamentary session what the heck he thought he was doing. Only, he didn't say 'heck'.

And, whether we can join the dots or not I don’t really know, but there is a lot less crime and disrespect here in Spain than you will find in Britain

Perhaps because the populace isn’t treated entirely like an idiot.

An item from my Business over Tapas bulletin (it also lurks on Facebook)

The Little Hotel in the Middle of Nowhere

The Junta de Andalucía has changed its tune about property in the region, allowing new licences for various projects which would not have been allowed under the previous regime. If only the Hotel Algarrobico had have been built today (ahem!).

One new hotel – a small one with just thirty rooms and a swimming pool – has been given the green light to be constructed in what was an old esparto-works in the Cabo de Gata (Almería): just a short walk from the Playa de Los Genoveses, described here (in a strange but understandable English) as ‘…the most beautiful bay of the Nature Reserve is this beach consists of dunes virgin fine golden sand’.

Diario de Almería has the sad story here. Oddly, the thirty rooms will need a licence for parking for seventy cars, which seems a lot – two to a room? Perhaps it’ll be a hotel for assignations. More likely though, even if they forgot to mention it in the article, there’ll be a swanky restaurant. Valeted parking, anyone?

(Say, if they let Fulano build a hotel in a National Park, why not me as well, or how about just a teeny tiny urbanisation…?).

Mind you, the new hotel does sound nice – at least, according to the ABC which says here (paywall) that guests will be able to take the goats for a walk, thresh the hay and other bucolic delights. You might want to take your dinner jacket off…

The final word (apparently, Gosh don’t things change?) must come from the town hall, which in this case is Níjar. So far, the local PSOE mayoress says she hasn't all of the information to make an informed decision.

Another piece of mine from Business over Tapas.

Regional Elections, Right?

The regional elections in Castilla y León are upon us, with voting due on Sunday February 13th. The likely winner will be the current president of the autonomy Alfonso Fernández Mañueco and his party, the PP. However, he will almost certainly need the support of a second party as he did back in 2019 with Ciudadanos.

This election was precipitously called just after the Ciudadanos councillors were ejected from the government by Mañueco, so he certainly won’t be planning to rely on that party. Furthermore, generally speaking, Ciudadanos is currently melting faster than snow on a hotplate.

Mañueco’s only likely ally following the election returns will be Vox – and what will be their price?

Vox is something of a dark horse. We know that it is far-right, or fascist, or Nazi (I’m misquoting a judge here), but it is bringing in around 20% of the vote at the present time. The only way to lower that is to move the Partido Popular further to the right, banning abortions, gay marriage and euthanasia and maybe even ‘tourism from other races’ (here). They would also need to support bullfighting, hunting, the armed forces and religious lessons in school – nothing too harsh, but gentle signs on the road towards extremism.

Pablo Casado visits a cow

The results in 2019 in Castilla y León – an area of nine provinces (the largest region in Spain) which holds the cities of Burgos, Salamanca and Valladolid – gave the PSOE 35, the PP 29 and C’s 13. Vox got just one seat. Current projections give the PSOE 27 and the PP 36. Ciudadanos might get 1, Unidas Podemos maybe 3 and Vox appears to be standing at 10. All the latest poll results are at Wiki here.

A further wrinkle in the region is the brand new party that represents – or claims to – the empty forgotten bits of the countryside: the España Vaciada.

Nationally, the single-province version of the Forgotten Spain, Teruel Existe, supports the PSOE/IU Government.

Following from a supposed PP/Vox victory, we would then expect something similar in Andalucía this summer, possibly with a modest Ciudadanos presence (the date hasn’t been set, but it could be as early as May). How would the national government, and indeed the Spanish people, react to such a couple of major wins for the right, righter and rightest?

I write a weekly news bulletin for subscribers called Business over Tapas. Here's a piece from this week about the turnabout in the labour reform bill:

Curses Moriarty, Foiled Again

The Cortes duly voted on Thursday for the Labour Reform law, but things quickly became very odd. The Government had expected the law to pass, and although both Bildu and the ERC had said they would vote against (izquierda parties voting against labour reform – but that’s politics), the centre-right Ciudadanos had agreed to support the measure.

Thus, they had their ducks in a row.

The vote was held, but then, to the concern of the authors of the reform (and no doubt, the millions of Spanish employees that the law aims to protect), two deputies from another minor party, the UPN, broke party discipline (they had reached an agreement with the PSOE some days before) and voted against the measure, leaving the Government one vote short. The measure had failed! The speaker of the house announced the result (cheers from Vox and PP, groans from PSOE and UP), when… but what is this? Excuse me ma’am, but one of the PP deputies appears to have pressed the wrong button and voted in favour.

Chaos.

The vote is passed! (Triumphant video here).

The disgruntled leader of the PP Pablo Casado now intends to take the inopportune result to the Constitutional Court.

Good luck with that.

The UPN meanwhile is now looking at the removal of their two duplicitous deputies… It further appears that the two politicians had held a long meeting with senior PP representatives that very same day, and it was clear to observers that the PP had expected the Government to lose the vote.

…

*The seat from the UP ex-deputy Alberto Rodríguez remains of course empty (as the party in the Canary Islands continues to campaign against his removal). Thus the Cortes numbers are one short – 349 voting deputies rather than 350.

*The involuntary new champion of the workers is a Partido Popular deputy who voted telemetrically from home called Alberto Casero.

*The law, agreed by the Government, the unions and the CEOE employers association, brings reforms to worker protections, savaged in a 2012 vote. Its approval meets a commitment made by Pedro Sánchez’s government to the European Commission, enabling the euro-zone’s fourth-largest economy to collect its next instalment of EU pandemic recovery funds.

*Later - the UPD has fired its two deputies, but they won’t go!

*From Antonio Maestre at La Sexta, a comic view of the Labour Reform Law vote begins ‘I’m writing this while I have to break off every sentence or two because my sides hurt too much from laughing…’.