La Vida Alcalaína

When we first came to Alcalá, the main watering-hole for the small colony of Brits was Pizarro's, or Pizzies as it was usually called.  These days the Paseo de la Playa is full of bars and cafes, but back in 2005 there was very little choice.  One of the reasons we liked to go there was the charming owner, Paco.  He was still cooking then, and used to bring us out little plates of food to try, often sitting down for a chat, listening patiently to our broken Spanish.  He loved meeting people, especially foreigners who had elected to visit or move permanently to his home town. So it was with great sadness that we learned of his death last week, at the age of 82.  He'd been ill for a while, but would still come down to the bar occasionally for a game of dominoes.  Just two weeks before he died, I drew a picture of him and was wondering how to give it to him as I hadn't seen him for a while... Paco Pizarro may be the best-known Alcalá resident of all t...

Swearing in Spanish involves a fair amount of shit. Me cago en la leche (I shit in the milk) or me cago en el mar ( I shit in the sea )   are   fairly mild expletives, along the lines of "Oh fuck".    Me cago en tus muertos/tu puta madre  (I shit on your dead relatives/whore of a mother) are stronger, and more likely to get you into a fight.  Me cago en Dios (I shit on God) is in the first category - vulgar, certainly, but not likely to get you arrested. But Spanish actor, theatrical director and left-wing activist Willy Toledo went too far for some people when he posted on Facebook last year:  "Yo me cago en Dios. Y me sobra mierda para cagarme en el dogma de la santidad y virginidad de la Virgen María"  (I shit on God, and have enough shit left over to crap on the dogma of the holiness and virginity of the Virgin Mary). This outburst was in response to the reopening of the case against three women who in 2014 had paraded an enormous v...

The municipal park in Alcalá, next to the Paseo de la Playa and site of the new tourist information office, is named after one Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente.  But few visitors from outside Spain have a clue who he was. Félix was born in 1928 in Poza de la Sal, Burgos, into a middle-class intellectual household.  During the Civil War (1936-1939) he was home-schooled, and spent a lot of time outdoors where he developed a deep passion for the natural world.  At the age of ten, he was sent to a religious boarding school and lamented his lost freedom, but on a summer holiday in Santander he apparently witnessed a hawk taking a duck in flight, which led him to become interested in falconry. At a falconry exhibition in 1955 After leaving school he went to the University of Valladolid to study medicine, at his father's insistence, but he was more interested in environmental issues and was never a good student.  It was there that he met and became influenced b...