Issue #18

Viva La Roja!


Yesterday was a red letter day in Spain. La Roja, the Red, as España is fondly known, was in the finals for the World Cup for the very first time and against Holland who was hoping to be 'third time lucky' after having lost the World Cup final twice before.

I watched my first ever World Cup match at La Alegria Bar in Benalmadena Pueblo. In spite of the visible and vociferous support for Spain, they lost to Switzerland.

The next match I watched was in in the home of my Spanish friends. I cheered when David Villa scored the winning goal against Portugal.

In the words of Paul Breen-Turner, "The truth is that the Spanish team are a bit tasty, with quality all the way through the side. They work together for one another and there are no 'prima donnas'!"

The headlines trumpeted 'La Roja beat Germany in Wednesday's semi-final thanks to a goal from Payol', a match that I watched at Mesón Miuria.

The Spanish TV news stated that 60,000 Dutch people live in Spain but not an orange jersey was in sight last night as I returned to La Algeria to watch the final. My superstitious nature was on high alert because I had watched Spain lose in this bar so I ameliorated the bad luck by wearing a red soccer shirt emblazoned with "Villa" and "7" on the back and Spain's crest on the front.

The strain of watching both teams playing their hearts out to the end of the ninety minutes with no goals took its toll and the noise level in the bar elevated. At two minutes before the end of extra time, Andres Iniesta, a Spanish player described by England's Wayne Rooney as "the best player in the world" scored. The sea of red in La Algeria erupted!

In overtime, ice hockey games are settled by 'sudden death' but in soccer, extra time is thirty minutes, full stop. This meant that Holland had approximately two minutes in which to redeem themselves. The tension was such that I thought my head might blow-up and the 120 or so seconds until Spain was declared the winners of the World Cup seemed to last much longer than a mere two minutes.

Pandemonium ensued and even people who are not veteran futbol fans celebrated throughout the night.


This is the last of the Correo Costa del Sol.  Please read The AFB, my newsletter from Singapore.

Issue #17‏

La Noche de San Juan


Andrea MacLean wrote in the June 16th edition of The News, "Andalucians love a good party and there are plenty of opportunities to celebrate with over 3,000 festivals every year...one of the most remarkable is Noche de San Juan." La Noche de San Juan on June 23rd is another example of a pagan celebration being co-opted by the Christians. In this case it is the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year.

It is St.Jean de Baptiste Day in Quebec, Canada and the Saint Jonas Festival in Lithuania but here in Spain it is the biggest party of the year! Thousands of families, mainly Spanish but also some foreigners (yours truly included) celebrated Noche de San Juan with barbecues and bonfires on the beaches of the Costa del Sol.

Traditionally, Spanish people used this fiesta to perform rituals to affect weather, purify their bodies, attract love and scare away evil spirits. There are even rituals thought to prevent woollen winter clothes from being devoured by moths over the summer.

Júas or effigies are burned along the coasts or on riverbanks to mark the arrival of summer and superstitious people take a dip at midnight or leap over the fires to garner good luck. At 1 a.m. the sky over the Benalmadena harbour exploded with light and colour. The fireworks ended the festivities with a flourish but some hardy revellers stayed the entire night.

In Arroyo de la Miel, Noche de San Juan is the beginning of six days of celebration. The Feria de San Juan includes a procession of the town´s patron saint through the streets and ending at the fairgrounds next to Paloma Park. Located here were scores of rides, side shows, attractions and stalls.

Temporary bars called casetas and stages were set up on the streets of the town so that the fiesta atmosphere was not isolated in one area and daytime events brought music, dancing and paella to the streets of Arroyo.

Issue #16‏

All Aboard!
On March 6th my friend David and I went to Madrid. We went from Malaga on the AVE train. AVE is an acronym for Alta Velocidad Española which means Spanish high speed. Coincidentally, ave is Spanish for bird.

There are two train stations in Madrid: Puerta Atocha in the south and Chamartin on the north side of the city. The trip from Malaga to Puerta Atocha in the historic centre of Madrid cost less than 50 Euros. The AVE reached speeds of 300 Km/h and the 537 kms from Maria Zambrano Station in Malaga took 2 hours and 50 minutes.

The train is comfortable and free headphones are provided so that passengers can watch the movie. Light meals, sandwiches, snacks and beverages with and without alcohol can be purchased at the snack bar near the front of the train.

Since July 2008 the sculptures Noche y Día (Night and Day), by Antonio López have been on show at Atocha station in Madrid. They are three metres high and weigh 2 tons. We had to beg security to let us take pictures of me standing next to the sleeping baby head because they were shutting down the station. I asked our taxi driver why there were so many police and he said something about a minister (my Spanish isn´t great and people in Madrid have a different accent) so I´m guessing some high-ranking government official was coming into Madrid by train. Stay tuned for more about Madrid!


The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

Issue #15

Toro, Toro, Toro


It occurred to me that many of my faithful readers are not on Facebook and so will not know that I am now a published writer! I can now claim to be a regular contributor to the El Dorado News.

I have been in Spain for many months and have yet to attend a bullfight. I am torn between an anthropologist´s desire to witness, first hand, a performance that is an icon of Spanish culture and an animal lover´s abhorrence at watching the bulls suffer. If the flurry of articles appearing in the English-language press is an indicator, I am not the only one who is conflicted. The El Dorado News provided a brief history of the sport indicating that cave paintings in Altamira, Spain dating back to before 2,000 B.C. suggest the roots of bullfighting. The Moors, according to the article, “changed bullfighting significantly from the brutish, formless spectacle practiced”. Some believe bullfighting to be a sacrifice stemming from Roman bull worship. The modern bullfight began to develop when the men on foot, who used capes to aid the men on horseback, attracted more attention from the audience and it is much the same today as it has been since about 1726 when the use of the sword and the small cape was introduced in Ronda.

Last month, Catalan parliament voted in favour of the introduction of a law to officially prohibit the killing of bulls for sport. Navarre´s regional parliament approved a declaration recognizing the region´s bull running festival and bullfights as an intangible cultural heritage. The running of the bulls in Pamplona in July is a huge tourist attraction and a spokesperson for the Convergencia de Democratas de Navarra said it was “advisable and opportune” to recognise the value of bullfights for Navarra, now that there is an open debate nationwide about such events. The conservative Popular Party is calling for respect for what it says is “a deeply-rooted, uniquely Mediterranean tradition that dates back to the days of Ancient Greece.”

Bullfighting, however, is more than a tradition, it is a business. In Torremolinos the town hall has put the contract for running the bullring up for tender. The five-year contract would cost about 20,000 euros per year and conditions include organizing at least fifteen bullfights every year. The economic crisis could turn bullfighting into a dying art. To cover the cost of breeding and feeding a fighting bull, it must sell for at least 5,000 euros. Some breeders are selling off fighting bulls for food for a maximum of 420 euros per animal. Others are diversifying into pigs or olive and cork production. The worst affected, according to industry experts, would not be the bull breeders but those directly and indirectly employed by the industry. Bullfighting employs approximately 200,000 people and accounts for 1.5% of Spain´s GDP. Ever dwindling numbers of spectators, cutbacks imposed by limits on fiestas´ budgets and a one third drop in the number of fights in the period of 2008 to 2009 may all contribute the end of bullfighting in Spain.

Some of the regional governments in Andalucia have launched a project to encourage tourism and targeting the beleaguered bull fighting industry. The project named `Torritorio toro´, or bull territory, will include tours of bull breeding farms to see the bulls in all stages of development and the chance to fight a small cow. There will also be visits to bullfighting museums and rings with a focus on learning about the customs and traditions that are part of the ´national sport´.

Issue #14

Semana Santa

                                                                                  

Alright, I´ll admit it - I went to Malaga, a city I know well, instead of Seville, which I have yet to visit, because I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Antonio Banderas. All of the English-language newspapers carried photos of him and mentioned how he takes part in the processions. One of the papers stated,"Banderas is a keen participator in Malaga´s Easter week processions which are considered on a par with those of Seville." This is a rather strange comment; not the "Banderas is keen" part but the "on a par with those of Seville" part because, in fact, Malaga holds the most elaborate in the world!

I took about 300 pictures of which only a third were clear enough to make out the Nazarenos dressed in the tall, pointy hats or the groups of 200-plus men bearing up to five tons of trono. Not one of the photos was of Antonio.

In Rachel Stewart´s piece `My Holy Week Experience´she wrote,"After a rather long wait and plenty of speculation as to which person draped in the cream robes of the brotherhood [Fusionaldes] could be Banderas, the `nazarenos´ came into sight guideing the rest of the group, accompanied by the elated squeal of a friend who was adamant that she could recognise him from his eyes and expensive-looking shoes."

Normally, I would have been freaked out by the crowd but this time I felt a part of it. When I excused my way through the throng and a man asked me, in Spanish of course, where I thought I was going in this crush, I simply smiled and pointed over his head into the ocean of people behind him. Yes, I was actually going to dive into the sea of bodies rather than run screaming from them.

I felt very fortunate to have been able to witness this important tradition.

Issue #13

The Sun is Shining Today!

For time immemorial, neighbours have chatted about the weather but here in Spain the weather has been so dramatic as to be the stuff of headlines. This month the top weather story was Barcelona´s blizzard. One of the English-language publications here on the Costa del Sol stated, “If you think Andalucian weather has been bad then just take a look at Barcelona, which has been hit with the heaviest snowfall in 25 years. The Catalan capital came to a standstill, while flights were cancelled, schools were closed and trains were trapped on the tracks after 50 centimetres of snow.”

In 2004 the European Environment Agency predicted that Spain and Portugal would be most affected by coming climate change. “Storms, floods and droughts are likely to become more and more frequent with a significant rise in temperature expected…Natural disasters appear to becoming more frequent with twice as many serious events recorded in Europe in the nineties in comparison with the previous decade. Such events can cause very heavy economic losses, e.g. the droughts of 1999 caused losses of more than 3 billion euros in Spain.”

Ironically, the weather news in Andalucia this month has been about all the rain. Roads in Nerja, ruined by floods in 2007 and that deteriorated further with recent rains will be repaired, cliffs are to be reinforced and a bridge will be replaced. The price tag is an estimated 257,000 euros. Agricultural losses and estimated damage to infrastructure due to recent heavy rainfall in La Axarquia region is 172 million euros. Olives alone account for four million of that figure. In the Forest Hills area of Estepona, recent rains caused devastating landslides last week. Eight of the evacuated families have been given the green light to return to their homes but three others are not so fortunate. The Estepona town hall is repairing the affected streets. Cartama town hall has reported damage caused by heavy rains to the municipal cemetery and thirty niches had to be relocated to a new pavillion. Alhaurin de la Torre town hall is suing the owners of the Santa Amalia stables for the cost of removing the carcasses of twenty-six horses, along with numerous dogs,goats, and ponies who died when the stable, built illegally on a floodplain, was inundated by the Rio Guadalhorce. Economic commentators state that the unseasonably poor weather on the Costa del Sol and its resulting lower tourist numbers have had a greater financial impact on local businesses than the international economic downturn. Andrew Forbes writes in the Sur in English.”…it appears the winter weather has been the last straw for some of the coasts most prestigious hotels.” He quotes Count Rudi Von Schonburg as saying, “climate change and the heavy rain has put clients off coming here.”

Issue #12

Top of the Morning to You!


I have celebrated St. Patrick´s Day only once before and that was in Montreal. At the time I appreciated the irony of attending festivities for the patron saint of Ireland in the heart of francophone Canada. Here I am once again paying homage to that priest, this time in Spain. According to The News, one of the English-language newspapers available on the Costa del Sol, St. Patrick´s Day was officially celebrated for the first time on March 17th, 1753.

Little is known of Patrick's early life, though it is known that he was born in Roman Britain in the fifth century to a wealthy family. At the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken captive to Ireland as a slave. According to his Confession, he was told by God in a dream to flee from captivity to the coast, where he would board a ship and return to Britain. Upon returning, he quickly joined the Church in Auxerre in Gaul and studied to be a priest. In 432, he says that he was called back to Ireland by God, though as a bishop, to save the Irish, and indeed he was successful at this, focusing on converting royalty and aristocracy as well as the poor. Irish folklore tells that one of his teaching methods included using the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) to the Irish people. After nearly thirty years of teaching and spreading God's Word he died on 17 March, 461 AD, and was buried at Downpatrick.
In hopes of making a political statement, during the 1798 rebellion, Irish soldiers wore full green uniforms on the 17th of March. The phrase "the wearing of the green", meaning to wear a shamrock on one's clothing, derives from the song of the same name. St. Patrick´s Day was also believed to have served as a one-day break during Lent, the forty day period of fasting before Easter. This would involve drinking alcohol; something which became a tradition.

I always thought that everyone is a little bit Irish on St. Patrick´s Day but judging by the surprised looks on the faces of my Spanish neighbours, I was wrong. My assumption probably was based on the fact that the 2006 census by Statcan, Canada's Official Statistical office revealed that the Irish were the 4th largest ethnic group with 4,354,155 Canadians with full or partial Irish descent or 14% of the nation's total population.

And whether or not you are Irish or of Irish descent,

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind always be at your back

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

and rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of His hand.