La Vida Alcalaína

I was overjoyed when the Catalan regional parliament voted to ban bullfighting in Cataluña this week.  Although it is widely reported as a being nationalist gesture of anti-Spanish defiance rather than a success for animal rights (see Colm Tóibín´s interesting and informative article in today´s Guardian ), there is no doubt that the tide of public opinion is turning, not only in Europe-facing Cataluña but in "Spanish" Spain as well.  (NB: Cataluña was not the first Spanish autonomous region to ban bullfighting; the Canary Islands did so in 1991.) Polls indicate that 72% of Spaniards express no interest in bullfighting.  More significantly, while half of the over-65s express interest, less than a quarter of 25-34 year-olds do so.    Attendances are falling and some say it is only kept alive by a small but powerful group of interested parties - not least the breeders of the toros bravos who received vast amounts of state subsidy. NOT AL...

Over the last few weeks our customary dawn chorus of crowing cockerels, barking dogs, croaking frogs and bleating goats has been replaced by the sound of stone-cutters, jackhammers and dumper trucks.  They are doing the road up.  The quaintly undulating cobbles, spattered with random blobs of tarmac put down over the years to fill in holes, are being replaced with nice neat grey stones all laid by hand by a fleet of workmen.  They have also replaced the storm-drains, so it's just possible that next time we have torrential we won't get a brown river streaming past the house (we live halfway up a very steep hill). RIGHT UP OUR STREET! Best of all, they are rebuilding the pavement.  If its treacherous predecessor had been in England, some local authority would have been sued by now.  I might actually be able to get my faithful shopping trolley back from town without the wheels falling off!  Unfortunately our neighbour, who had built a concrete ramp over ...

The prickly-pear cactus, or chumbera , grows profusely in and around Alcalá.  It is used for hedges, being fast-growing, hardy and totally livestock-proof, and sprouts along the side of the roads like piles of disorganised green plates growing randomly out of each other.  We have a big tangle of it on the hill behind our house, where it provides refuge and food for countless small birds. The fruits are known as higos chumbos , or more commonly, just chumbos .   Higo means fig, as when they were first bought to Spain from  the Americas - possibly by Columbus himself - people confused them with the Indian fig.  They rapidly spread across southern Europe and North Africa and were later introduced to Australia and South Africa. CHUMBERAS BEHIND OUR HOUSE In the Americas and in the Canary Islands, the red dye cochineal is made from a scale insect that is a parasite of the prickly pear.  In its native Mexico the fruit has been used for thousands of yea...

Alcalá's location as the gateway to the Alcornocales Natural Park is one of its greatest assets for visitors and residents alike. But this vast area of cork-oak groves, shady gorges and sun-baked crags has provided a natural larder for Alcalainos for centuries. In the postwar era it kept many people from starving. Even today you see men returning from foraging trips with the panniers of their mopeds overflowing with wild asparagus, and sacks of tiny juicy snails are sold by the roadside the way strawberries are in England. W ild asparagus E spárrago ( Asparagus acutifolius)  is harvested in springtime, when the young shoots appear. It is thinner and darker than cultivated asparagus, and tends to grow under thorny bushes. Because of its rather bitter taste it is usually cooked with other ingredients rather than eaten on its own; stewed with chickpeas and other vegetables to make berza , or fried with garlic and beaten eggs to make revueltos . Edible thistles Alcalá is...

Every year millions of tourists go into restaurants on the Spanish costas and eat chilled tomato soup followed by fried rice with prawns washed down with a glass of fruit punch. They believe they have experienced authentic Spanish cuisine. But just how authentic are these universal clich é s of Spanishness? Gazpacho has been eaten in Spain for hundreds of years – the jury is out on whether it originated with the Romans or the Moors. It became a staple in Andalusia, particularly in the region around Seville. It consisted of bread, olive oil, garlic, vinegar and water. Legend has it that Columbus took barrels of the stuff on his journeys across the Atlantic. Tomatoes weren't added till the 18 th century; although Cortez brought tomatoes back from the Americas in 1519 they were originally thought to be poisonous, because the plant is part of the Nightshade family, and they were used only for decoration. A famine in Italy 200 years later saw starving peasants eat the frui...

If you know me, you will know that I dislike national or racial stereotypes. Comments like "all Scotsmen are mean" or "the Spanish are a lazy lot" make my hackles rise. So here are some of the generalisations commonly made about the Spanish, harvested mainly from expat blogs, with an attempt to challenge the prejudice with hard facts. The Spanish are always having public holidays - they are hardly ever at work! No wonder the economy is in such a mess. There are 14 statutory public holidays in Spain compared to 8 in the UK. But they get a smaller annual leave allowance here. If you add them together, it works out the same in both countries: "Overall, including the statutory minimum and public holidays, employees in Lithuania are potentially entitled to the greatest amount of paid leave in Europe with 41 days’ holiday per year. France, Finland and Russia rank second with 40 days, followed by Austria and Malta (38), Greece (37) and Sweden, Spain and the UK (...

When we first moved here in May 2008 I lost half a stone over the summer months. I felt very pleased with myself and believed it was due to a healthier diet and more exercise. The following winter it all piled back on, and then some. Not to worry, I thought, it will go again over the summer. But it didn't. Winter 2009 brought another inch or two of “padding”. This summer I have made a conscious effort to lose weight, if only to get back into clothes that I can't afford to replace. But my michelin , as the Spanish delightfully call their middle-age spread, stubbornly refuses to budge. The problem is that the food here is just too scrumptious. The fruit, especially in summer, is so yummy that it is almost impossible not to meet the five-a-day target. Cherries the size of walnuts – I can eat half a kilo in a day. Paraguayos , or doughnut peaches, figs, nectarines, apricots, creamy custard-apples or chirimoyas , great juicy plums in a choice of colours - purple, red ...

Learning to draw and paint had always been high on my Things-to-do-when-I-retire list. I'd done a few watercolours years ago and enjoyed art at school, but never managed to find the time to fit it into a busy working life. You need time and you need space: time to think, doodle, touch and retouch; space to get all the gear out, make a mess and leave it overnight without it getting in other people's way. Those were my excuses, anyway. When we retired and moved to Alcalá in 2008, I had all the time and space I needed and - I could hardly believe my luck!! - an English couple, Andy and Helen, had just opened an art school about two hundred yards from our house. I signed up for a weekly 2-hour class which Andy runs for people who live locally. There were five of us, a nice sociable number but small enough to enable plenty of one-to-one attention. We started off with a still-life, then a couple of life drawings, some lessons on perspective (drawing the interlocking white box...

Extract from a superb flamenco concert in the patio of the Sagrada Familia school, August 2009, featuring singer Argentina and dancer El Junco .

Random shots of Alcalá, with backing track by local-boy-made-good Alejandro Sanz, one of Spain´s leading pop stars.