La Vida Alcalaína

If you can't tell your cortado from your carajillo , watch this little video:

The Mayor of La Linea, Alejandro Sanchez, announced a few months ago that he intended to charge visitors leaving the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar with a "congestion charge" toll of five euros (Gibraltar residents and the 7,000 Spanish citizens who work on the Rock would be exempt).   Sanchez, whose right-wing Partido Popular (Popular Party) have a majority on the council, says that the town reaps no financial benefit from the millions of visitors who stream across the border each year to shop for tax-free goods, fill up on cheap petrol, or admire the apes and the splendid views. La Linea, which means "The Line", straddles the section of Spanish coast to which the Rock is joined by a thin strip of land.  Looking at the number of vehicles which queue for an hour or more, engines running and pumping fumes and greenhouse gases into the Mediterranean air, you can almost sympathise.  But Sanchez is no Ken Livingstone and it is not concern for the environm...

... I like it hot. After ten years of shivering in an air-conditioned office, coming to live in Southern Spain was pure bliss - I love the caress of warm air on my skin, I love to go barefoot on our cool marble floor-tiles, I love sitting on the terrace on balmy summer evenings watching the sky and the mountains change colour as night falls. But right now, it's too darn hot even for me.  We are officially on Yellow Alert, which means the daytime temperature is between 35 and 39ºC (95-102ºF). At night it doesn't fall below 23ºC, the humidity is high and there is hardly any breeze. Of course there are places further inland, like Sevilla and Cordoba, where figures like these would be regarded as a blessed relief; people regularly have to endure temperatures over 40ºC in July and August. They flock to the coast in their thousands, often in large family groups, and set up camp on the beach with parasols, picnic tables and giant coolboxes.  They don't seem to mind how crowde...

The people of Alcalá are gearing up for the annual Feria, which takes place in the last week of August.  The women are frantically finishing off the frills on their flamenco dresses and raiding the shops for fans, combs, silk flowers and giant candelabra earrings.  The horses are being groomed, their manes and tails brushed and their working harnesses swapped for the decorative fiesta gear.  The younger kids can hardly contain their excitement at the prospect of unlimited candyfloss and vertiginous fairground rides, while the older ones are looking forward to five consecutive nights of consuming vast amounts of  rebujito (dry sherry and lemonade), flirting and dancing the night away.  Only the old men seem unperturbed, as they sit outside the bars on the Alameda sipping fino and playing dominoes. The word feria comes from the Latin for "free day", or public holiday, when slaves got the day off and there were no court sessions.  With the spread o...

Forgive me for neglecting to update this blog for a while.  I've been doing some social networking.  Not the fun kind where you meet your mates for a drink or a meal, but the virtual kind where you sit in a dark room and have typed conversations with people you have never met and are never likely to. One of the drawbacks (probably the only one, apart from the startling absence of paydays) of giving up working in an office is that you miss out on all the random non-work-related conversations over lunch or in the coffee area.  When you move to another country, the problem is of course greatly exacerbated.  You keep in touch with your family and best friends, naturally, but it's that background level of daily trivia that leaves a black hole.  Your OH, with the best will in the world, is no substitute - you know each other so well that you can usually predict each other's responses.   You might make new acquaintances locally, but conversation can be a bi...

THE SOLOISTS OF LONDON PERFORMING IN THE SAGRADA FAMILIA PATIO, AUGUST 2010 Every year in the middle week of August the polite vowels of the Home Counties can be heard in the streets, restaurants and bars of Alcalá.  Hearing strangers speaking English here always gives me a bit of a jolt, as if I have suddenly been Tardissed to the wrong time and place.  But these well-behaved visitors are not aliens, they are here for the Festival.  They are the families, friends and followers of the Soloists of London. The idea of a classical music festival in Alcalá was conceived a few years ago by part-time resident Matthew Coman.  Matt is a member of the Soloists of London, a collection of stringed instrument players whose respective CVs include the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the English Chamber Orchestra, and who have played before two Queens and a Pope as well as jamming with the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney. According to a recent press statement iss...

This article is adapted from Evocaciones Alcalainas 45: Artesanos de Alcalá , by Juan Leiva, who grew up in Alcalá in the period immediately after the Civil War. His childhood memories are being published in short extracts in Spanish and in English on the Mi Alcalá blog, giving a fascinating insight into life in the town in the early 1940s. His source for the contents of this article, apart from his own memory, was his fellow Alcalaino Juan Romero Mejías. Where there is no direct English translation of the name of the craft, I have left the description to provide the meaning. The Centre for Ethnographic Interpretation on the Calle Rio Verde has a large collection of  items from this period, which you can see through the window.  Occasionally it opens its doors and local people re-enact the past in a "museo vivo" using the equipment housed in the museum.  Underneath the centre is a workshop where local people are using the old crafts to restore furniture and equipme...

When you learn Spanish you are taught stock phrases about the weather like  hace calor  (it 's hot),  hace frio  (it's cold),  está lloviendo  (it's raining), hace viento (it´s windy).   The good people of Alcalá obviously didn´t use the same textbook. "¡Que calor!", accompanied by a flapping motion of the hand in front the face, means it´s hot. But this appears to be relative. In July and August when the temperature hovers around 32°C (90°F), you can respond with some sympathy. But I have also heard it used on a sunny spring day when the temperature has sneaked up to the low 20s (high 60s in old money). Conversely, when the blessed relief of autumn brings the temperature down to the low 20s, they cry “¡Fresquito!” patting their arms in a sort of self-hugging gesture. But the same expression is used on the coldest winter days, when the thermometer can plummet to around 8°C (48°F). We are taught in the UK that the diminutive “-ito” added to ...

We live deep in flamenco territory.  You hear it blaring from cars, shops and houses; builders sing it while they are working; I even saw an old boy in a bar late one night, wailing along with whatever he was listening to on his iPod.  At the summer ferias women of all ages, shapes and sizes dress up in their flamenco outfits and dance sevillanas .   El Camarón de la Isla, probably the most famous flamenco singer or cantaor of all time, lived and died just up the road in San Fernando, or La Isla de Leon as it was once known.  (We heard one of his many relatives singing in La Sacristía bar in Alcalá last Christmas, but he was a bit the worse for wear.)  A lot of Spanish pop music is influenced by its rhythms and modes, and genres such as  flamenquillo  and flamenco chill make good listening - check out the bands Chambao or Mártires del Compás. Traditional flamenco comprises three strands, cante, baile and toque - song, dance and guitar. The...