The thieving locals.
Saturday, June 14, 2014 @ 4:58 PM
At this stage the garden gates hadn't been fitted, as they might have got damaged with the wheel-barrows coming in and out. So the house was vulnerable to theft. Denise had already stolen the beautiful glass bricks and God knows what else might have gone walk-about. We seemed to be constantly buying tools, ladders, and sacks and pallets of all descriptions.
One day we were in the downstairs room which looked out onto the garden, when I saw Juan, one of the nicer neighbours, walking straight through the garden, picking up as many of our bricks as he could carry and making off with them.
'Ade. Quick! Get out there. Juan's stealing our bricks!' I said.
Adrian was out in an instant.
'What are you doing?' Adrian asked.
'Benjamín said I can help myself to them,' Juan replied.
'Well, Benjamín didn't buy them, so he has no right to give them away. We're still using them,' Adrian replied. 'We haven't finished the obra.'
The bricks were going to be used to build housing for the kitchen and bathroom sinks and to support the work surfaces.
'Sorry. I'll bring back what I took then,' Juan said.
'No, it's okay. You can keep what you took. But don't take any more,' Adrian said, soft as usual.
(Of course we had no idea how many he'd taken. And it meant we had to order more later on.)
We were talking to a Spanish builder who had done some work for us a week or so later and while talking about the locals' thieving habits I said:
'Yes, we had a big pile of sand at the bottom of our track [on our land outside the village]. It's just disappeared.'
It had been left over from some works we'd done and had served as a barrier to stop people driving onto the property (and casing the joint); it would also no doubt have been useful later on.
'Oh, that was me,' he replied. 'I needed a bit of sand for a job I was doing. I knew you wouldn't mind.'
Because he was our 'friend’ I felt guilty for even mentioning it; I didn't want to make him feel awkward…
The previous month I'd gone up to our olive terraces one morning while the children were in school. I thought I'd spend a few pleasant hours gathering olives to take to the mill (I was an obsessive olive-picker) when I found a woman in her 60s, helping herself.
'What are you doing? Who are you?' I asked.
'I live down there,' she said, pointing off to the left. 'And who are you?'
'I'm the owner of this land. I've come to collect my olives.'
She had the decency to look embarrassed then, with her bucketful of my olives next to her.
'The cabrero said I could have the olives,' she said.
'But it's not the goatherd's land. It's my land and I want my olives.
'I'll go and fetch what I took then,' she said sheepishly.
And like Adrian with the bricks, I said, 'Oh, that's okay. You can keep what you've taken. But don't take any more. I collect these for the oil.'
Bloody goatherd. He'd asked if he could gather up the little branches for his goats, we said he could and then he acts like it's his land and his olives to give away.
If you didnt super-glue your stuff to the ground, off it would go.
To see the end result of all the work on the casa, take a look at the house now:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p86636
And also another of our completed projects:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p475271