Spanish Shilling

We danced, pranced and tottered around Mojácar during the magnificent Moors and Christians festival a few weeks back - fortuitously on the same weekend as similar festivals cheekily held in the two neighbouring towns of Carboneras and Vera, and please don't remind me about the consequently high cost of the costume rentals.

A festival which began in our case thirty four years ago in 1988 to remember the quincentenary of the Fall of Mojácar (whimsically touted as a 'peaceful transfer of power' from one bloodthirsty lot to another, a bit like what's going on right now in the Ukraine, come to think of it).

Doubly important this year, as a second anniversary has also fallen upon us.

Thirty years ago this week, the Elders of the town decided it was time to 'twin' with another city elsewhere. Perhaps, back in 1992, with the first flush of international tourism upon us, the swollen population of Britons living locally and the opportunity to travel abroad at a reduced and subsidised rate, they might have gone for Henley-on-Thames, or maybe Southend or perhaps Brighton.

The children could have perfected their English, as the Good People of Brighton swapped their brood with their Mojaquero colleagues for a fortnight. The wealthy Henlyans might have bought some decent houses here (in those days, unfortunately, we were only building small apartments - there's more profit in them, even if the dwellers are poorer and short-term).

Maybe they could have chosen some place in Romania to adhere to. It might have sounded like a good idea if we had a socialist town hall, what will all the Romanian immigrants to the area back then, but we don't.

It's conservative. Money, souvenir shops and short rentals preferred.

At any rate, and no doubt after much discussion, we chose to join our futures and twin with a town in Andorra called Encamps ('Encamp' in Catalán).

Andorra is a fascinating place, in many ways, it's a sort of Spanish Gibraltar. Encamps itself is a charming resort with good skiing, lots of shops, a population of
13,000 souls and fourteen banks.

Not much to do with Mojácar you might think, but did I mention the banks?

Every year a bus-load of visitors head north, their bank-books held firmly, to enjoy the attractions of the local restaurant and hostal.

It's all quite convivial and works both ways as look, in our photo, there's some of the Encamps people here in Mojácar to enjoy the Moors and Christians festival. We hope they stayed for the jolly parade on Sunday night (is that a mannequin standing next to our tourist councillor dressed here in purple?).

The story goes that our small inland neighbouring pueblo of Turre was highly impressed by our choice of the twinned town. They famously had a plenary meeting on the subject of finding something equally suitable for them. 'We don't want anything too foreign', they argued, driving a pencil line through most of Europe, 'or really anywhere that is different in their moral values from ourselves' (Catalonia fell from the list with a quiet thud). 'No one who might swamp us with different ideas, incomprehensible languages or food that's picante or runny, and anyway, we don't want to subsidise expensive bus tickets for our inhabitants...', they agreed.

In the end, so goes the story, after several rounds with the porrón, they decided the best answer would be to twin with Mojácar. I'm not sure that Mojácar picked up the gauntlet though.

I like the collection of flags which can be seen in the Plenary Room at the Mojácar town hall. There's the Spanish one, the Andalusian one and the Andorran one there, all in a row.

And if the Andorran ensign is coincidentally the same as the Romanian flag, who are we to quibble?

It is hard to learn a foreign language, and hard to understand the culture behind the conversation. The accents, the words spoken in laughter or whispered or referencing some icon not known to a foreigner: all making comprehension difficult.

Today, the Guardia Civil gave a talk in our local auditorium to the English-speaking residents regarding personal safety and how to avoid robberies and rip-offs. They also told us what to do if anything looked suspicious or if anyone became a victim of a robbery or an assault.

Two young Guardias gave the lecture, apparently on their day off, and did a good job explaining the different chapters in their talk on crime and prevention. I had been asked to translate, but an enthusiastic lady from the Cruz Roja took charge and so instead I sat at the back in a mild sulk.

The presentation was fun, with the two Guardia helping the 'translator' to more or less get the ideas across. They were aided by a power-point presentation in Spanish which the Cruz Roja lady gamely tried to translate, with lots of 'how you say in English...?' and other garbled explanations.

Never mind, as the two Guardias pantomimed various scenarios and everyone was amused and, hopefully, informed.

A leaflet in English was handed out to help with the presentation, but it had an important mistake - a wrong phone number for the local police.

Which begs a question - if you call the local police, or the Guardia Civil, will they understand you?

Those numbers:

• Any emergency 112
• Local Police 091
• Guardia Civil 062
• Police Foreign Tourist Service 902 102 112
• Ambulance 061
• Fire Brigade 080

It’s getting hotter each time around, and worse still, it’s getting hotter earlier.

This may be because I’m becoming older, and it’s just a subjective opinion, or it could be that the meteorologists, climate scientists and environmentalists are right: global warming is occurring and, on first impression, that’s not good.

The record high temperatures reported this year at the poles must be a concern. All that ice melting into the sea can only mean that, sooner or later, the coastal cities are in for a nasty shock. It’s starting already with Venice, and perhaps we have seen those mock-ups of London, the Netherlands or Seville under water.

And really and for true, using less shower-water; or putting the plastic bottles in the right-coloured trash-container; or cutting out the inconsiderate use of ear-wipes, are all very commendable things to do, but at the same time – it won’t make an atom of difference. The major polluters: the oil companies, plastic container-users, the coal burners, the cruise ships, those who chop down the forests and those who sell us the SUVs – none of them will slow down their drive for profits – even if it kills them.

Recycling – the great panacea to our industry-encouraged over-consumption – is more of a chimera that a reality. Did you see that mountain of unsold clothing dumped in Chile? Did you think that plastic can be melted down and used again? The Chinese don’t want our old plastic bottles or the sun-bleached sheets from the invernaderos anymore. How about those accidental fires over at the vehicle and tire-dumps?

Spaniards are worried about the climate-change which they are experiencing, but they are not necessarily prepared to do much about it. No one accepts a higher tax on petrol, or to eat less meat, muchas gracias.

We put up with not getting a free shopping bag from the supermarket – as we load all of the heavily wrapped-in-plastic products we took off the shelves into a cloth-bag. Who are we fooling here?

Those of us who are older must worry for our children and those that come after. We think that they won’t have it as well as we did: even if they can afford an air-conditioning system.

This latest heat-wave we have suffered in Spain, where apparently half-cooked baby birds fell from their nests in Córdoba, is said to be nothing compared to what is coming in the years ahead.

Most of Spain is on a high-plateau. The coastal bits are relatively benign, but the inland parts of the country suffer temperature extremes. Ándujar (Jaén) has just reported a new June record for Spain, at over 44ºC. Last year’s August 14th record of 47.4ºC in Montoro (Granada) still stands for the moment.  The World Meteorological Organisation says that this heat wave just settling down now was around 10ºC hotter than the usual for this time of the year in Spain and France and furthermore, ‘was a harbinger of things to come’.

Together with the fires (another sad record in Zamora this week with 30,000 hectares burned), the polluted lagoon at el Mar Menor in Murcia and the generic desertification, we are indeed facing an uncertain future.

Summer, by the way, began on Tuesday – what we just went through, that was Spring.

I was in our local cemetery, where the foreigners at last lie in peace with their Spanish neighbours. Walking around slowly: looking out for my parents, for old friends and for people I knew. Here is the British bullfighter; there the Air-Vice Marshall. Here is my dad. There is my mum. Here's Fritz the artist, who's headstone claims he was born on November 31st, a month with only thirty days. Old Pfeiffer, whose apfelstrudel was all the rage in Vienna, is there: dead these forty years. And then I saw the stone for Eve Steinhauser, who despite her name, was an Englishwoman who worked for Horizon Holidays.

I had also worked for them, briefly, when I was 17; taking tourists round the sites (the sights) in Crete, the old Minoan Civilization. A posh accent describing the Minotaur to retired doctors, bank-managers and their wives. I was at the top end of the tour-operator's offer, a subsidiary of the holiday-company called Wings.

Eve had been sent to Mojácar by Horizon to see if it was worth bringing their holidaymakers to the small resort. Mojácar doesn't really work as a tour destination - it is a pretty village two kilometres away from the sea on a high hill, with beautiful views, and with a long coastline (for all practical purposes) of a dozen kilometres. From your hotel to wherever you wish to walk... is a long pull. There was no bus then although there was a couple of old taxis - we are in the early seventies; but there wasn't much to do after a hot walk, besides take the inevitable tour to the cowboy town in Tabernas an hour away in a coach (cue some Morricone music) or see some dodgy Flamenco in the hotel disco.

So Eve, conscious of the fact that a man who works in a toothpaste factory wants a holiday that won't stop, knew that Mojácar wasn't the right place. There was just one hotel in the village that could work and nothing of any size on the beach.

But then she met my mother.

Heather had suffered from encephalitis some years before she came with my dad and myself to Mojácar in 1966. The scars in her mind were slight, but she had no spacial memory, no recent memory, and she had somehow lost the bit that stops you from being rude to strangers.
 

+ One night in the bar +

Eve - I'm here to see if Mojácar is the right place for a tour operator.

Heather - Don't you f***ing dare to bring in those a***holes to our town you horrible woman.

Lenox writhing in embarrasment.

Eve would tell the story (since my mother forgot) - I had quite decided to tell Horizon against coming to Mojácar, until Heather changed my mind.

So, the company came to the village, to turn it into a resort. They bought a second hotel on the hill, a hulk which they were forced to demolish, before rebuilding it alarmingly over-budget. With the new hotel, the Moresco, and the other place above it, the Hotel Mojácar (built with public money by Roberto Puig - a Valencian who couldn't bear the thought of customers in his hotel), Horizon Holidays opened Mojácar, as my mother would say, to the f***ing trippers.

Horizon was bringing in tourists, the Mojácar people reacted accordingly. The foreign residents, who had brought in money, bought houses and opened bars, were quickly dropped in favour of the trippers. Nicknack shops opened, and Old Jacinto the mayor changed the name of the main street up to the village from the Generalísimo to Avenida Horizon.

The company, now heavily invested in Mojácar, was allowed to build another hotel, an ugly skyscraper on the far end of the beach: a twelve storey monstrosity called the Hotel Indalo. Shortly after this, as the millions of British trippers insisted on continuing to enjoy their holidays in Benidorm, several hundred kilometres up the coast, Horizon quietly went bust.

Clarksons came and went, as did other tour-companies of the era. Mojácar attempted to sell the tourists (here on a shoe-string holiday) small and squashed-together apartments. No one was buying villas any more.

With an ever-larger presence of Britons in the town, whether living here or merely visiting, it was only a matter of time before we twinned with a tourist town, and where more appropriate than Encamp, the Andorran town famous for its banking with no questions asked. The Avenida Horizon became the Avenida Encamp. The Hotel Mojacar was rebuilt as apartments, the Hotel el Moresco has been closed since 2008 (never to reopen). The Hotel Indalo along the beach is now the Hotel Best and the playa itself is now full of bars, ice cream joints and of course, an unending supply of nicknack shops selling Chinese-made goods.

Residents don't buy souvenirs, but (to employ my mother's word), trippers do.

Benidorm, meanwhile, continues to grow.

The summer hols are upon us. We shall pack our bags (or our hand-luggage if we are travelling with one of the cheapies) and jet away to somewhere warm, where we shall get drunk, have a brief romance, buy a souvenir, punch someone and be sick in a flowerbed. Perhaps we shall look wistfully at a property if there’s a rainy day, or discover to our surprise that the holiday business has become an industry.

Spain is no exception.

Ludicrous newspapers like The Express are always full of stories about why readers shouldn’t be holidaying here for one reason or another: whether it’s a limit to six drinks a day in the all-inclusive hotel, the ignominy of having to queue in the Non-EU line at the airport or the bar-staff that can’t understand you when you ask for a bacon sarnie.

The Spanish probably couldn’t care less what The Express thinks, short of a few small hoteliers who are worried that anyone is going to change their mind because of some inflammatory article about Etias visas and decide to stay for two weeks in Southend instead.

Meanwhile, Easyjet and other airlines cancel large numbers of flights from the UK for some reason or other. More queues, more anger, less time around the pool.

There are several issues of slightly more weight that worry the Brit tourist, such as the 90 / 180 day deal in the Schengen Zone, and the agony of whether a resident can use a British driving licence (both subjects sublimely ignoring the self-inflicted punch of Brexit).

Some of Spain’s destinations are crashing out of the tourist stakes – such as La Manga, which overlooks the Mar Menor: now a dying lagoon. Under extreme threat too from illegal wells is El Parque Nacional de Doñana in Cádiz.

Cruise-ships now are so large that their pollution is impossible to ignore. While they visit Barcelona giving enough time for passengers to disembark and visit a souvenir shop or two, they leave behind far more CO2 than they do travellers' cheques. The city hall says it intends to limit their numbers.

So, tourism changes: it diversifies and it evolves. Now we read that the second kind of tourism, what might be called city-visitors – is facing a crisis as China considers halting all Chinese holidays abroad. They may not be much for bucket and spade tourism, but they do appreciate a flying visit to Madrid, Granada and Barcelona to see the sights.

Better news comes from Germany, where the travel agencies are mooting the idea of sending their senior citizens en masse to Spain for the winter months to save on energy (a sensitive topic in Germany at the moment). If Spain tuned in, they could convert some of their abandoned villages into merry North European retirement centres (and get funding to pay for it).