Spanish Shilling

August 15th was the national Assumption holiday. A good excuse for a party if ever there was one. The Assumption itself is a little obscure – it’s the belief that the Virgin Mary was taken body and soul into heaven at the end of her life without her body decaying on Earth. The rest of us can only raise a glass to this excellent news, so we do.

Many cities and towns in Spain have their fiestas patronales in the second half of August, coincidentally when the holidays are at their height. Málaga has its fair along with Bilbao, Vitoria, San Sebastián, Almería and many others. If the festival is based on a saint’s day, which it is, it would be churlish of the City Fathers not to spread it across a couple of days, or a week maybe – or perhaps even longer. A quick procession and a Holy Mass by all means, but then some fireworks, speechifying, a mini-marathon, some pop concerts, exhibitions, horse and carriage stuff, perhaps some bullfights, a magic show for the kids, late night dancing and plenty of bunting in the main square.

Seriously though, you can’t fit that all into one day, can you?

There are some standout festivals going on, including the one where everyone throws tomatoes at each other in Buñuel (Valencia) on August 26, the Festa Major de Gràcia in Barcelona (current) and our own modest fiesta here in my pueblo in celebration of San Agustín de Hipona (who no one has ever heard of) on August 28th. Now, that’s a Friday, so we have lengthened the revelry (jolgorio in Spanish) to cover the weekend, plus the two preceding days, giving us in all five sublime days and noisy nights.

This sees us comfortably through to August 30th, which in happier times would mean the end of the hols and the beaches reopened once again for those of us who consider ourselves residents.

September, unfortunately, no longer means ‘they’ve all gone, three cheers!’. But the weather at least is slightly cooler, so we may be feeling a fraction more generous towards our visitors.

You can’t have a santo in a Spanish pueblo without a santa – usually but not always la Virgen María. Our own – celebrated (a trifle less noisily than the August thrash) – is la Virgen del Rosario on October 7th (where the Spanish army prayed for victory in 1571 to the Virgen María against the Ottomans). There’ll be a picnic (una romería) in the countryside plus some events down at the Barrio de la Fuente.

A local fiesta should, and I think that the clue is in the name, be for the local folk. These days, there are so many visitors (all clutching their telephone cameras) that we tend to get pushed to the back. The free paella gets gobbled by people from Madrid or München, the tin-bar in the square has run out of sausages, the carpark is full and I must walk half a mile to get to the bus stop. The local businesses (including the disturbingly large number of souvenir shops – let me ask you this: when was the last time you bought a keepsake in your own pueblo?) – are making out like bandits, and meanwhile the cops are stopping the live music in the foreign bars along the beach at 7.30pm.

In short, the fiestas are a time for dressing up, eating sticky buns (with care), dancing in the village square and taking lots of selfies.

Once it’s over, there are others not so far away. You’ll hear their thunder-flashes at night.

I’ll have to check my engagements, but our local market town of Vera has theirs, (San Cleofás – never heard of him either) in just a few weeks from now.

There apparently aren’t enough homes in Spain for all of us, and thus we must read the daily scare-stories of the okupas, of frustrated house-hunters, of those poor souls renting (or even buying) just a single room, or living in a caravan or a car, or I suppose, slumped somewhere on a park-bench with a few plastic bags of possessions.

We also know full well that there are plenty of empty houses, abandoned blocks, rotting urbanisations and so on (we see them every day), but not perhaps located precisely where we want to live, or even if we did, the town hall, the regional authority, the owner or even perhaps some squabbling inheritors have ruled that the place must stay empty for whatever reason there might be. Usually of course it’s to do with greed.

Some owners of a perfectly usable block of apartments – these things happen – might leave them empty or unsold for speculative reasons. Sooner or later, thanks to demand, they know that the price will go up.

There might be empty business premises which could be turned into residential housing. Sometimes, although rarely, they are. Many downstairs spaces were originally planned as shops or bars or hairdressers – but no one came forward, and so they got bricked up and covered with graffiti.

The main problem in Spain – or anywhere else – is location. An ambitious young lawyer or accountant wants to live in Madrid, not in Sigüenza (as beautiful as it may be). A dentist or a banker would prefer Barcelona to Cuenca and the best discotheques, restaurants and museums are not necessarily in Teruel.

Or Tossa del Mar. Good beaches though.

But now there’s a new system coming from the USA, which never misses a trick when it comes to screwing money out of the less fortunate. You may be one of those who live in the sticks to save on city-rentals while you practice teleworking. Hunched over the computer each day while wearing nothing more than a tee-shirt with the cat and a cold Martini both waiting for your undivided attention. Rather like I’m doing now.

It seems that clever landlords are charging extra rent if you do that. An apartment is just for sleeping in, showering and watching Netflix. Working from your couch is apparently ratable.

There are more homes in Spain than we like to imagine, although not all are located within the boundary of the M-30. Google says there are 27 million dwellings in España and with 49,700,000 people living here: which works out at a little less than two people to a home.

Whether this figure refers only to functional residences or anything which vaguely has a roof is unclear. 

There are those, of course, who have two homes. The usual residence in – probably – the city and then a second one, that has either belonged to the family for ages and can be found in some forgotten pueblo and is availed of during August, or perhaps an apartment near the beach. The second option being preferable to the young’uns.

I buck the trend by living alone. You can blame me for all the panic stories listed at the beginning of this essay. But, while I’m alone, I’m not alone, since there are 5.6 million of us. A whopping 28% of all dwellings in the country are unipersonal. Shopping for one.

Well, we could get together, maybe on a Facebook chat, and share and loosen up some property. However, says Infobae, ‘A study suggests that splitting an apartment with people with whom you don't share a romantic relationship has worse consequences for mental health than living alone and not having a partner’.

Right now, what with all the visitors making whoopie and making it largely impossible to go out either for supplies or for a gargle, I’ve been staying home and reading.

There are just a few more weeks of this summer frolic to go. Then, once my hibernation is over (the correct word apparently is ‘aestivation’), and the fiestas patronales just a noisy memory and a sticky taste, and when I can park the car in the village rather than having to take the bus, then I'll be able to go out once again and see my friends. Come the end of the evening, I'll head for home, glad to be living alone with my books and my cat.

Updated: Sunday.

All a bit odd – on Thursday morning a large number of apparently young men crossed the bay into Ceuta from Morocco. Bussed to their departure point by the gendarmerie and with the Moroccan border guards all away from their posts. They swam or crossed the rocky boundary into the Spanish enclave and – while there was no chance of them making their way to the Spanish mainland (or to the United Kingdom as faragistas would have us believe) – they milled around in the autonomous city until they had mostly returned, hungry, to Morocco by Saturday morning.

In all, some sixty thousand of them – creating a stink that could be heard around the world.

Around 67 are reported to have drowned in the exercise (and I wonder who lost sleep over that particular tragedy?), and it was noticeable that none of them brought so much as a change of clothes.One who drowned was a player for the Tetuan Women's Football Club, Faten Ben Omar El Azizi. Say her name out loud!

Later (Sunday), the Spanish authorities upped the figure to 72 dead and a massive 73,500 returned to Morocco.  

Why did this suddenly occur?

Could Spain’s recent deal with Algeria to import more gas have been the spark (excuse the pun)? Morocco and Algeria are historic enemies.

And what about Netanyahu’s son working to raise the Moroccans against the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta? Indeed, here's the Israeli ambassador to the UN: 'Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa' (Israel indignant about colonies!).

Or perhaps Donald Trump, annoyed with Pedro Sánchez, along with Benjamin Netanyahu – both firm allies of Mohammed VI – could have hatched a plot.

The Guardian suggests that the Russians were in on it too: 'Russia-linked accounts spread far-right narrative online during Ceuta migration crisis, analysis finds Counter-disinformation group says social media channels connected to Pravda network helped amplify message'. But the Chinese (says El Mundo) are casting the blame for the operation on Mossad.

The ‘invasion’ played into the hands of the Spanish right-wing: Feijóo and Abascal both. The pair of them quickly arrived in Ceuta to be a nuisance, and they were joined by the -even further right- Alvise Pérez who was booed and hounded by the Ceuta residents, eventually being escorted to safety by the police. 

As long as events of this type are considered as ‘grey’, deniable and unfortunate, then they will continue – and who is to say that Melilla and Ceuta (and their 170,000 Spanish inhabitants) aren’t a justifiable target?

But now it’s over (except for a certain excitement led by the Italians), and the Spanish media can turn to other subjects; like forest fires, August holidays and Ayuso’s roof apartments scandal.

Sadly, Spain continues to burn. A giant fire in Madrid and another in Ávila managed by Sunday morning between them to burn some 45,000 hectares, but at least this time, the ES-Alarm warnings were sent out and there were no deaths reported. Other major fires were reported in Toledo and Castellón.

By Wednesday, the hectares burned in July had risen spectacularly to 172,000, as another hot-spell – the fourth this summer – arrived. 

El Huff Post on Saturday had an embedded reporter with the firefighters in the south-eastern part of the Madrid region, where the neighbours said that it was the worst fire in Madrid’s history. Even the city to the north was full of smoke and ash. An opinion found at 20Minutos is bleak: ‘we are not prepared for these catastrophes’.

‘As climate scientists long warned would be the case, Europe’s wildfires are worsening in intensity, scale and duration as the planet heats up. When the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, attributed the current crisis to the effects of the climate emergency, he was stating the obvious’ says The Guardian. In a recent report, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe issued a warning about climate change, saying it is directly responsible for intensifying wildfires and their increasing frequency.

The rule is that these responsibilities fall on the regional governments, who may cut back on emergency funds in the knowledge that central Government can and will help if called to do so. And thus we have Madrid’s Díaz Ayuso and the Transport Minister Óscar Puente trading horrific insults over who is responsible to organise the defence against the flames.

The Madrid firefighters are not happy bunnies, as their standing wage of 1,300€ a month (May to October only) hasn’t increased in the last fifteen years. It’s just one of those things: considered as a waste of resources during the winter months, and as an alarming necessity during the fires. No doubt they could be found a useful task in the colder months – cleaning the dry brush, cutting back the growth, trimming the branches near the road and buildings, and even helping plan emergency escape routes and giving fire-prevention lectures to schoolchildren. Indeed, the Madrid firefighters warned back in April that fire prevention efforts had been cut in half.

We read that ‘the farmers criticize rural abandonment and demand a plan to rid the summer wildfires of potential fuel during the winter months’. We also read that the law (la ley de montes) insists on brush-cleaning and other fire-preventative obligations.

Furthermore, we read of donkeys, goats, sheep, bison (!) and even toros bravos grazing clean the hills (following the wet winter and extra growth).

All grist for the armchair firefighters and hostile social media influencers.

The always critical leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, links the "repeated disasters" in Spain to corruption and the government's "climate fanaticism". So not much help from him.

As more than one critic says – we need more firefighters and less bullfighters. 

So, is it over? From El Mundo earlier this week here: ‘The fourth heatwave of the summer will trigger a surge in wildfires starting Wednesday, with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius. The intense heat and dry conditions will cause the fire risk to reach critical levels across almost the entire country’.

It was hot where I live, on a hill overlooking a dry riverbed, not far from the sea. Indeed, Thursday and Friday were both in the 40s.

My daughter was celebrating her birthday that Thursday (she’s also in her forties) and I joined her and others as a Party of Six (follow me please) to the table in the corner, by the windows, in a smart restaurant in the next town from mine.

Our family knows their family, and thus we were treated to cocktails and jamón as the waiter left us some menus, bread and changed our plates and glasses. Smart places always do, for some unfathomable reason.

The owner reappeared and chose the meal for us – an eminently sound idea as I never like to read menus and tend to order the same as the person seated to my left (unless he or she is a vegetarian). I think the best restaurants are those who have no menu at all – maybe a blackboard with today’s ‘catch’ – but the simpler the better. One is there for the conversation, not to get lost in a thick book of food. By now, and anyway, our unopened menus had discretely disappeared.

And it came to pass that, being both a smart restaurant, and with special favour from the kitchen, we were served endless plates of delicious thises and thatses. The plates being passed around to the left and quickly emptied.

The main course began with a similar routine, or maybe that was the continuation of the first course Part the Second. More munching and forks clashing. It was too delicious to talk (and too noisy to hear). Mmm, good! Anyway, it was then followed (fresh plates, clean knives and forks) with a hot piece of iron over a small oil-heater and a large plate of raw beef for us to cook to our liking.

I was reading somewhere that when there’s a choice on your plate, you eat more. At home, not being much of a cook, I heat up one thing or another from the fridge or a can from the shelf, add some mayonnaise and call myself satisfied. But when there are lots of little exquisitely laden plates, multi-cultured tapas, then one can become quite a pig. 

After that along comes the desert, or afters, or pudding. It’s been a while. Here, the same thing: a gigantic platter with at least ten different postres and, like Pokemon, you’ve gotta catch them all. The cake and the (apparently) forty-strong staff all smiling as my daughter blew out the candle.

My granddaughter’s boyfriend was the driver, sitting there poor chap with his glass of water. The rest of us, to a greater or lesser extent, drank beers, wine, gin and tonics and a shot or two of tequila.

Friday morning, I had no hangover but noticed I had put on over half a kilo.

Sometimes, along comes a comment or an entire post on social media written – as often as not – by a Brit on the emotive subject of animals, and how we love them. 

As of course I do.

Mostly.

Cats for example. Fine and agreeable balls of fur one can snuggle with. They give in return a kind of cynical love and the feeling that, if they were only bigger while we were smaller, they would probably drop the pretence and attempt to eat us instead. As it is, cats and their lower-class cousin the feral cat (inexplicably protected by both the vecinos and the town hall) are responsible for the deaths of approximately 400 million animals annually in Spain.

'This staggering figure includes hundreds of millions of small mammals, birds, and reptiles. In fact, free-ranging and feral cats are responsible for significant pressure on local wildlife and are cited as threats to hundreds of conservation-dependent species’, says Google AI.

No wonder the Dawn Chorus is ever-more muted.

But yes, cats are cute. They go ‘Miaow’.

Returning to social media, and the unconditional love of many people for all things that fly, run, stagger or crawl, here’s an exchange about a yellow scorpion I had with someone who found one in her house and was doubtful about taking it outside:

 Me: Nasty things. I've been stung four times (so far) by them. It's around six hours of pain and no apparent wound or swelling to help look for sympathy.

 Them: Poor little guys! Having to encounter a big clumsy oaf of an ape. I hope they're OK.

 Me: I'm pretty sure I stamped on at least three of them.

 Them: Colour me fking astonished. I wish you the same. #TeamScorpion

 Me: You think I should have bought them a drink?

Living, as I do, in the campo, there are lots of wild creatures here that make my life more enjoyable. There are plenty of geckoes (or ‘crocodiles’ as a friend with poor English disarmingly calls them) and a few chameleons; we have wild tortoises that walk right up to me and ask for food; there are butterflies, bees and other friendly insects; rabbits scampering along in front of my car and partridge couples debating whether to gallop straight legged across the orchard or maybe take to flight. There are magpies and hoopoes; a few foxes and a very vocal owl that sits on a branch outside my bedroom window.

But we have other critters I don’t care for at all. Should I accept the social media explanation that ‘they were here first’? Even if they weren’t. Yes, the flies and mosquitos have been here forever, and also the wasps (I destroy a nest whenever I can), but the wild boar and the mischievous mountain goats (ibex) are both new, having descended from the hills in the past ten or twenty years.

The boar dig up the roots of the trees and bushes and knock down the ancient stone terraces in search of grubs and rootlets. I shake out powdered hot pepper which discourages them – maybe they’ll dig up the neighbour’s plot instead where there’s no polvos picantes to disturb their sensitive noses.

But the mountain goats! They’ll get onto the terrace and chew the bark off the ornamentals, or strip the leaves, or – and this is just nasty – break off branches from the citrus and other fruit trees and leave them scattered around as a message. It’s just as well they don’t have a Facebook account.

I know, I should get a large hound. But then, where I live, we are infested with the black fly that gives the poor dogs leishmaniasis. Which kills them.

Oh look, there’s an egret in the garden!

The heat right now is far from normal. There are those who post things on Facebook like ‘It’s summer, of course it’s hot’ or ‘They’re on purple and are running out of colours for the maps’ or (worse still) ‘It was much hotter twenty thousand years ago’. Silly remarks to try and make light of our current global warming.

Brought on, as much as anything (Mr Trump, are you reading this?) by burning fossil fuels. Drill, baby, drill indeed.

Spain has moved towards clean energy, whether solar, wind or geothermal, thank goodness. It wasn’t so long ago that the Partido Popular government had a ludicrous ‘sun tax’ to keep us burning diesel and gas.

I’m doing my bit – staying home and reading. Drinking plenty of water. Using the fan at night (apparently, it costs about six cents for an eight-hour breeze). The book I’m reading right now is a Hammond Innes thriller about people caught on the ice-flows of Antarctica. The Baddy is trying to kill them, and he has just rammed and sunk their whaling ship. It’s cold as Hell.

The heat is terrific. My phone says, ‘Tomorrow will be hotter’. I have to shower several times a day in cold water. The wild boar are attacking my orchard, digging up the roots and knocking down the stone terracing. Bastards! 

But this is nothing. From my window I can see across the valley to Bédar, a small town I used to live in back in the seventies. It’s on fire. Smoke obscures the setting sun, and flames stretch along a corridor of maybe fifteen kilometres. Small flashing blue lights, and a helicopter overhead. I can see the sky glowing behind the mountains. The Facebook is alive with pictures and updates. Bédar has been evacuated and the townsfolk (it’s a small place) have been ordered inland to the next pueblo, Lubrín. They are in the municipal building there. Others have been sent to Los Gallardos below, but then that too became under threat. Movement on the A-7 motorway was cut by the police. Fire moves so very quickly. You can come round a bend in the road, and find it’s taken a short cut and is now both ahead of you as well as behind.

My son is a fire-fighter in America. He tells me on WhatsApp to be ready, to pack a bag with my passport and a change of clothes – and of course my Hammond Innes book. Close all the windows and shutters, and the interior doors. Be prepared. A friend from Bédar sends me a worrying message from where she lives, out in the campo: ‘Road in both directions blocked by flames. We’re out but there’s hardly anywhere to go. We stupidly waited too long’.

By midnight on Thursday, the authorities were talking about a dozen fatalities. People we know. Maybe my friend.

Updating this on Tuesday, The fire is out, the president of Spain and the President of Andalucía have had their pictures taken and my friend and her husband are among the now thirteen dead.

Those of us who live in Andalucía (or, for that matter, in Castilla y León, Extremadura or Aragón) now have a regional government made up of the PP (the majority party) in alliance with the Vox. The tail in every case, wagging the dog.

This dreary coalition, I call it the PPox, has the program of the Partido Popular with certain policies from Vox added under duress (or at least, so Juanma Moreno claims) such as the discriminatory Prioridad Nacional. 

Wiki explains: ‘National Priority or preference is the idea that a series of political, economic, or social rights should be reserved exclusively or primarily for the members of a nation. It is a popular term that encompasses the concepts of nativism and social chauvinism’.

Málaga Hoy says that the Andalusian agreement supposes: ‘National Priority for housing, a ban on the burka in public spaces, and an emergency plan to address waiting lists are among the 150 measures in the pact. For access to public housing, ten years of residency registration will be required for purchases and five years for rentals. There will be a priority pathway for cancer diagnosis and an annual audit of the cost of healthcare for foreigners’.  

Google AI says: ‘The "national priority" (or prioridad nacional) policies proposed by conservative coalitions aim to give native-born Spaniards preference over foreigners for state aid, social housing, and public subsidies. However, experts note these moves directly conflict with national equality laws’ (and indeed, Article 13 of the Constitution: “Foreigners shall enjoy in Spain the public freedoms guaranteed by this Title under the terms established by treaties and the law"). The European Commission doesn’t approve either: ‘Brussels warns that it will ensure there is no discrimination with the National Priority’.

Furthermore (the Right has always been uneasy with the science of climate change), Andalucía will be declared "free from the burdens of the European Green Deal". There is no mention in the program regarding gender violence, LGTBIQ+ rights and Muslim and Arab language school studies are to be dropped, as the manly activities of bullfighting and la caza (hunting) now take centre stage. 

elDiario.es has: ‘Through 150 measures, the agreement consolidates ideological concessions made by the PP to Vox, such as the outright rejection of the 2030 Agenda and the creation of a new Law of Concord (forgive and forget the past crimes under the Dictatorship). The far-right leader Manuel Gavira will become vice president with a super-ministry under his control: the Ministry of Tourism, Local Administration, and Justice’.

The whole deal was announced just half an hour before the Thursday coronation of Juanma Moreno, giving little time for any revolt among the conservatives. The reaction from the regional PSOE leader María Jesús Montero was to call it a "pact of shame. For the first time since the Franco regime, the far right will enter an Andalusian government", she said.

Will this state of affairs be a success? In Madrid, Alberto Núñez Feijóo (screaming daily for fresh elections) admits that, if the voters wanted it, then he would agree to a pact, a pax, a PPox with Vox.

I may have given the impression over this long and normally enjoyable life that I was a little distrait with my family, my closest friends, my circle and with the nice man in the tax office. The thing is, like many people over the age of, let us say fifty, I am stone deaf.

My grandmother had an ear trumpet which she would point towards whoever interested her. The result was that the whole family tended to raise their voices which in my opinion is a good idea, especially here in Spain where ‘the dog that doesn’t bark doesn’t get fed’.

And thus, like many a slightly vague senior, I eventually gave up and admitted to myself that I am a trifle hard of hearing – a bit like the Twelve Steps:

‘My name is Lenox, and I’m deaf’.

‘Speak up, we can’t hear you’, they shouted back.

I happen to have a Spanish connection. These are very common between our hosts, but quite rare for Johnny Foreigner. There will normally be a sister-in-law who is a judge, a brother who works in the city hospital, a school friend who is now a Guardia Civil and so on. Almost everybody has a useful contact either through the extended family or by happenchance. They like to say: ‘It’s not what you learnt at school, it’s who you sat next to’.

A very fine system it is too. In Spain, everyone is in with a chance.

For we foreigners, this is a lot harder, but I’ve been here for a long time: almost sixty years (cough cough!) and, anyway, where I’m going with this is I know someone in the hearing aid business, or rather I did as she has since moved to Tenerife. Long story short, I got some staggeringly expensive pinganillos for a song. Fifty percent off the listed price.

Spain is very noisy, and one may be tempted to soldier on without a listening device (sorry, that’s the best the Thesaurus could come up with apart from ‘a vacuum-tube hearing aid’). The ambient noise, the drills, the shouts, the tricked-out mopeds, the horns and sirens. It’s not so bad when you’re deaf, for sure, but then you need to hear what your darling says too.

The main drawback to my hearing aids is that they faithfully pick up all kinds of noise that I would rather not hear – the folk at the next table, the coffee-grinder behind the counter, the television and the waiter shouting ‘dos cañas y una Fanta limón’ to the woman working the bar. I can always take one out of my ear, unplug myself on one side as it were, to better hear what’s going on the other side where my neighbour is seated. Unless it’s not interesting, in which case I can more or less manage what my grandmother used to do with her ear trumpet, which was to point it the other way.

Spain is the second-noisiest country in the world, only behind Japan – and that’s because they have paper walls (useful in an earthquake) whereas ours are made of machimbrado: thin brick and plaster. The sound travels through them, and once it has arrived, it bounces off the tiled floor and naked walls.

Which is why I like a carpet and a painting or two in my quarters.

Hearing aids are not as easy to remember as glasses. I will have reached for my specs right from the start, while clambering out of my pit, but I may be behind the steering wheel before I remember the hearing aids, blast them.

Still, I probably won’t need them just to do the shopping and to have a beer and a tapa afterwards. Deaf people are very good at saying ‘fancy that’ and ‘well, I never’ when they can’t hear you.

I’m feeling better now. Barman, bring me another caña!  

Aren’t we lucky speaking, reading and writing in English? We either managed to be born in an English-speaking region, or we learnt it as a child (easily) or as an adult (more difficult). There are those who don’t speak the language and they doubtless will have found themselves at a disadvantage as they go through life in the West.

Like Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Santiago Abascal for example.

English has become the lingua franca, the common tongue, even though it’s not the first official language in any country of the EU-27: and then only in Eire and Malta, which make up between them just 1.3% of the European Union’s total population. Nevertheless, around 43% of the EU speaks English, led (after the aforementioned Eire and Malta), by the Netherlands, Croatia and Austria.

Probably using subtitles rather than dubbing on the films and TV shows is a help.

Disappointingly, around 77% of Spaniards, says the INE, speak no English whatsoever. Yes, despite the tourism.

General Franco didn’t help, banning all languages to be spoken other than Spanish (hence the subtitles). This included Catalan, Euskera, Galego and even signing for the deaf.

English of course does better elsewhere, thanks to the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, and a host of other countries around the world. If you are thinking of going into business, the hospitality sector or politics, it’s a vital tool to acquire.

Which brings us back to Alberto Núñez Feijóo (not an easy name, and I say this in sorrow, for English-speakers to remember on indeed pronounce).

Feijóo was on a TV chat show the other day – on one of the commercial channels: needless to say, he won’t go on the national TVE. He told Pablo Motos on ‘El Hormiguero’ that he doesn’t speak English at all (he blames his childhood school rather than Franco) but he says that he can always translate something, when necessary, on his handy mobile phone.

There’s the memory of Mariano Rajoy refusing to answer a question put by the BBC in English at a meeting in Brussels back in 2017.

The lack of English in (most) Spanish politicians came to light back in 2013 with Ana Botella, the mayoress of Madrid (José María Aznar’s wife) and her promotion for Spain’s capital city with a: “Relaxing cup of café con leche in Plaza Mayor”.

Today, with the departure of Alberto Casado from the PP, no one in that party particularly speaks what the Spanish fondly like to call ‘the Language of Shakespeare’ (not many of us do either, but that’s another story). Over at Vox, Feijóo’s putative partner Santiago Abascal speaks a little broken French (apparently), but that’s as far as it goes. 

Thus, once again, Pedro Sánchez and his team have the advantage in Brussels, at the UN in New York and elsewhere. Sánchez speaks good English and French; the Minister of the Economy Carlos Cuerpo has English, French, plus adequate Mandarin and Japanese. The Minister for the Environment Sara Aagesen Muñoz is fluent in English. The Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares Bueno has fluent French and English. The Defence Minister Margarita Robles Fernández has ‘good’ English and French. The Minister for Hacienda Arcadi España García has some English (and presumably a lot of Math). The clever Minister for Transport Óscar Puente speaks good English and so on (Thanks to Google AI for the foregoing).

Returning to Feijóo, who won’t remain the leader of the Partido Popular for much longer (says El País), we can look at the two leading rivals for his position.

The president of the Madrid Region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso speaks some English (she worked as an intern on a radio station in Dublin), but she has acute political problems with her boyfriend now finally coming to roost. The other is Juanma Moreno from Andalucía, who says he is currently taking lessons from ‘a native teacher’.

Thus, once again, the difference in professionalism between the current government and the competing PP/Vox politicians is evident.