La Vida Alcalaína

Several years ago when we were visiting Alcalá just after Christmas I went to the local shop to buy some flour.  "I´m sorry", explained Jacinta, "I can´t sell eggs or flour today.  It´s the day of the Holy Innocents."  Scratching my head at what appeared to be yet another bizarre Catholic custom I went home flourless. It wasn't until I returned to England and asked my Spanish teacher that I found out what this was all about.  El Día de los Santos Inocentes, 28 December, is Spain´s equivalent to April Fool´s Day.   As the long school holidays drag on, the gap between visits from Papa Noel on Christmas Eve and the Three Kings on 6 January is filled by the opportunity for children to play jokes, known as  inocentadas,  on their elders and betters - some of which involve eggs and flour.  Other less messy pranks include sticking a cutout paper figure or  monigote  on someone´s back without them knowing, or putting salt in the...

There must be a hundred cockerels in this town.  Early one morning I counted thirteen different cockadoodledoos, each one more distant than the last, as they sounded their unique territorial reveilles.  So there should be at least five hundred hens, scratching about in the huertos (little produce-gardens tucked in between buildings), or living on roof terraces, or even along the roadside. Other domestic fowl reside here too; we are occasionally held up while driving out of town by a half-dozen stately geese ambling across the road.  One house on the other side of town has turkeys roosting in the orange trees, and there are some strange-looking fat grey birds which may or may not be guinea-fowl, down near the waterworks. But when I popped out to get some eggs this morning, the first three shops I went in had none.  I was offered several excuses: The weather has been bad lately, they haven't been laying. Everybody is doing extra baking for the holidays. Th...

We had been looking forward to a day's birdwatching with Stephen Daly of Andalucian Guides for weeks, and the recent wet weather even compelled us to buy some wellies just in case.  But we need not have worried; the day dawned clear and bright, if nose-drippingly chilly. We met Stephen in Benalup where we piled into his  4x4 and set off along an old drover's trail, now part of the Corredor Verde Dos Bahias  hiking route from Los Barrios to the Bahia de Cadiz.  This took us into the area known as La Janda, once a vast inland lagoon but drained in the 1950s in order to grow crops (mainly rice).  Stephen was a mine of information; we learned that the work had been paid for by the Americans in a deal with Franco whereby the US established military bases at Rota and Morón de la Frontera, and the malaria-infested lagoon was drained and then drenched in DDT to kill off the mosquitos.  Fortunately the area still attracts huge numbers of migrating birds and th...