Spanish Shilling

It always seem to me strange that people, using old dusty stories, yearn to take your land, or your city, or your home… and make it theirs.

Historical examples abound, right enough – from Gibraltar to Palestine; from Comanche Territory to The Ukraine; from Belize to uh, Olivenza.

There’s always somebody waving an old document, or maybe a rusty key. My great-great-great grandfather used to live here and then the government threw us all out and now look, we want it back.

The Moors have claims to Córdoba, the Moroccans want Melilla and the 1,200,000 Miami Cubans are the cause of the sixty-six year old US blockade against Havana.

If they come in and take over, will they let me stay? Is there someone with a better claim to my farm because of an old deed, or a tradition of what’s written in someone’s Good Book?

The Moriscos lost their properties in Sixteenth Century Spain and were obliged to head off to North Africa – where none of them had ever been before.

The true gibraltareños living in San Roque, worrying all day long about getting their rock back.

Those who had to flee from their homes thanks to the Spanish Civil War, still living grumpily in France or Germany.

Refugees the world over: war, greed and politics.

Then, if that’s not bad enough, it must also be very trying for the folk who live in a house to know that the bank wants it – because of monetary considerations (the rent, the mortgage, the new tower block that someone plans to build on the same site).

But we were talking about Olivenza.

Olivenza, also known as Olivença, is, says Wiki ‘a town in south-western Spain, close to the Portugal–Spain border. It is a municipality belonging to the province of Badajoz, and to the wider autonomous community of Extremadura’. It was Portuguese for a long time, but it was ceded by treaty to Spain in 1801 following a squabble. Presumably the locally defeated Portuguese burghers have been talking of little else since then, Bless them, fingering their old iron keys and maybe a contract or two.

Maybe there’re a few well-oiled flintlocks in a chest somewhere in the attic held just in case. Two hundred and twenty years is but a moment in time, right?

And those 12,000 Spanish oliventinos who live there now? What to do with them – give them Portuguese identity cards and build a few flats? They’d rapidly become a nuisance.

See, Nuno Melo, the current Portuguese Minister of Defence (that’s to say: the man in charge of the Portuguese army) is now claiming Olivenza (or Olivença) because you know: the treaty/schmeaty.

For España for once, the shoe is on the other foot.   

By the way, some idiot from the Vox party stole a breeze-block from Gibraltar in 2014 and it’s now taking pride of place in the foyer of that party’s head office in Madrid.

The Gibraltarians want it back.

Maybe the Portuguese could help…

The Spanish are generally an easy-going people, happy to be a little early, or more likely, a fraction late for an appointment. They will – and this is part of their charm – round things upwards: an extra dollop on your ice-cream or a shrimp on your tapa.

Only the statisticians will be prone to the sin of exactness, of putting a number down to several decimal points. They would probably get fired if they said something like ‘half of the customers were satisfied’ rather than ‘49.27% admitted to being pleased’.

Well, they use a comma where we use a point, so it would be: ‘49,27 per cent’.

That’s out of a hundred (although only 99 people were there, plus a small dachshund).

Our bean-counter, working for the INE – the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas – is paid to be exact, but his numbers will not make sense to anyone except another accountant. He might claim that ‘85,056,528 foreign visitors visited Spain in 2023’, where a mathematician would probably say ‘85,060,000 foreign visitors’ and a journalist would lead with ‘something over eighty-five million visitors’. 

Who is going to remember, or even read properly, that first number from the INE?

Secondly, of course, despite being exact, it is hopelessly misleading and wrong. Did they count the people in transit through the airport to another foreign destination? How about the cruise ship passengers, or the people who drove across the border from Portugal? What about the ones who stayed… or live here as foreign residents?

It’s a useful figure to draw political conclusions maybe, or to contrast with the year before or after, but not much beyond concluding what we already knew: a whole lot of tourists.  

Our favourite example of this anal delight in myopically clicking away at the abacus next to a flickering candle comes from a Canary Islands newspaper: ‘In July this year Lanzarote recorded just over 275,363 tourists according to the Lanzarote Data Centre’.  

A confusingly exact figure, although the article suggests maybe they missed one somewhere…

But hey, at least they couldn’t drive there.

The problem then, is not the exactitude of the numbers fielded by the statisticians, but the error that they can easily make, which in turn breeds false results. Otherwise, why bother to add them up anyway?

A town’s population is based on its padrón: its official census. That doesn’t mean that it’s right, what with long-term visitors, people who are registered in one town but living in another (for a variety of reasons), sundry vote-stuffing activities, foreigners who either aren’t on the padrón, or maybe have moved away without taking their names off the list. 

Let’s be fair though – the information is provided painstakingly and to the last level of accuracy, as is to be expected. On the other hand, there’s the concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’, where the numbers are just plain wrong, due to false information, or corners cut. Take the Spanish fiscal information, the Gross Domestic Product – used, says Wiki, ‘to measure the economic health of a country or region’, and thus very important for comparison, European funding, reputation and so on.

From elDiario.es we read ‘The main official indicator of the Spanish economy, the GDP figure, is wrong. The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has been measuring it incorrectly for at least three years. At best, we are talking about a huge negligence, the most serious in the history of Spanish statistics, the one that will cost us the most…’

The title to this story is ‘The most expensive statistical error in history’. Not good. The methodology which may have worked in the past is now obsolete – there are simply more useful figures available.

Another headline says: ‘Official statistics admit a deviation of 32,480 million euros in the Spanish GDP. The INE carries out the largest revision in its history and corrects upwards, for the third time, the growth data of the Spanish economy in 2021’. Naturally, the lower figures for 2021 (following on from the Pandemic) paved the way at the time for opposition attacks on the Government: “These are your green shoots? This is where we came out stronger?”…and so on.

A sober report from The Corner says ‘The main change that has caused this increase in the volume of GDP is mainly due to the incorporation of the information derived from the new Population and Housing Census 2021, which has led to an increase in the number of inhabitants and, therefore, this has an impact on GDP…’

Sometimes, a journalist may need to go to the INE page. It’s hard to find the information one is looking for on this complicated site when one visits there and also, at least with the Firefox web-browser, when we do, we get a sinister ‘Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead’ which is a bit off-putting.

They need to not only buck up their ideas, but also their Internet presence.

Thus many news-sites will make up their own numbers, based perhaps on their experience, their politics, or perhaps on other more-or-less reliable sources.  

…

Note: The Europeans use a different mathematical nomenclature from the Americans and British. The Google translation of ‘32.480 millones de euros’ correctly reads – for Anglo readers – as ‘32.48 billion’. This is to do with ‘the long and short scale’, a confusion one doesn’t want to make.

Just to be clear, a Spanish billón (a ‘thousand million’ or 10⁹) is the same as an American million million (that’s to say, a trillion).

Silly? Hey, they still use Fahrenheit.

One of the questions now being asked, now the local fiestas, celebrations, concerts, rallies, expositions and sporting events are largely over, is this:

Who exactly do they benefit?

The apocryphal story from the mid-sixties is told of my mother stomping down to the main square from our apartment by the church wearing her slippers, dressing gown and a hand bag – with which she slugged the mayor shouting ‘turn the music down, I’m trying to sleep’. 

In those days, there’d be a few strings of bunting, a local pop band, the bar doing a brisk trade, and the old deaf-and-dumb lady, la muda, selling cigarettes (single, or a half- or full pack), along with Bazooka Joe bubble-gum and wax matches, cerillas from a tray hanging from her shoulders. The families would dance together – small children up to the oldest grannies, all holding hands and bobbing around. There were songs like La Chica Ye Ye or the grisly Las flechas del Amor…

Brandy was three cents a tot. A small glass of a kind of red wine which would make one’s teeth rot was even cheaper.

They were different times. The only visitors would be family who had emigrated to Barcelona or France or Germany. I remember a family known as los marseilleses, who would come for a few days around that time in their Citröen Ami, look down their noses at their country-cousins, and then disappear again.  

There’s the World Day of the Tourist coming up in late September (when they’ve all gone home again), but in our town, neither this nor the non-existent Day of the Foreign Resident are pencilled in. No celebration as such, even if we are here all year long putting money into the economy. Mind you – I think there’s another Saint’s day which pops up around then.

These days, as we’ve all seen (only too vividly) the fiestas are a joy for the shop-keepers who will obligingly stay open until late, but there’s not much pleasure for the locals. Even if one does attend, and has a pricey beer at the metal chiringuito raised in the square (next to the deafening dance-band), who ya gonna talk too? Who ya gonna dance with? So, what with the visitors all enjoying their last few days of the holidays, the instant traditions taking up the usual parking spaces (medieval market anyone?), the far-from cheap drinks and tapas or the ride on the roundabout, I’ll take vanilla.

They’ve even extended them an extra day or two, since one can never have enough fun.

In the old days, maybe a neighbour owned a black and white TV and would kindly leave his window open for the curious, at least for the football game, but now everyone has a huge flat-screen with a hundred channels and a fridge full of beer. Why go out, say the vecinos, when one can be dazzled at home for free?

It comes down to this – a local event can be for the local people, or, if it’s the summer and you are in one of Spain’s ‘Most Beautiful Villages’, then it’s for the business-folk and the tourists. The visitors will all have to sleep somewhere – and for that we have the Airbnb hosts and the hotels, all rubbing their hands.

The Residents don’t stay in them; and for that matter, they don’t buy souvenirs either – making us very disappointing as customers.

And if we do need to drive into the centre to join the festivities and see the fireworks, where can we park that's not a half-hour walk away?

So if something is a bit expensive, yet perceived as cheap by the tourists, then that’s the price of a fiesta without the people it is meant to be for (and, one way or another, who paid for the music and the bunting).

Or who knows? Perhaps we are just getting old.

Meanwhile, and sad to relate, there’s no one left prepared to stomp down to the fiesta at three in the morning, waving her handbag, to tell the mayor to go and pull the effing plug.