The Día de la Vieja
Monday, March 28, 2022
Halfway through Lent, a peculiar festival is celebrated here and there known as the Día de la Vieja or the day of La Vieja Remolona. It is actually a fiesta from Aragón but for some reason a granny has been substituted from a grandad (the Aragonese version) and it is celebrated in the pueblos of the east of Almería - always on a Thursday. This year (2023!) it fell on March 16th.
Even though it is not an official holiday, if you don’t go to school or to work then no one seems to mind.
The history of La Vieja goes back a long time to when the children needed a break from the rigours of Lent, getting a day off. The whole family trudges up the mountain and has a picnic which includes special breads and pastries made for the occasion. They enjoy twisted breads with hard boiled egg inside and chicherones (pork rind) which I think are as bad as they sound, but on this special day they sell like hot cakes. The children in the villages from our corner of Almería make a paper doll on a cross and, after the picnic lunch in the campo is over, throw rocks at it. 
The head is full of candy resembling the Mexican piñata. Any reason to have a fiesta, hey?
The historians think that some Franciscan monks moved into Eastern Almería following the reconquest in the late fifteenth century to clean the place up, introduce their own traditions and put a crucifix over every hearth. Perhaps they came from Zaragoza.
Like many other innocent children's festivals today, there's a expurgated story behind (you should see what they've done to the carnavales, dropping the disguises as an excuse for anonymous sex, frolic and bacchanalia in favour of a kiddies dress-up; or consider the sinister Ring-a-Ring-of-Rosies song in reference to the Great London Plague of 1665). Thus the Día de La Vieja sounds like there is a creepy version lurking in our unwritten history - perhaps where they took those too old and feeble to work out to the campo for lunch, only to be, ah, left there. Perhaps that's just me being cynical.
There's another even odder version from Madrid. Up until the late seventeen hundreds, a seven-legged granny (sic) would be hanged by a rope in the Plaza Mayor as the cuaresma - the forty days of Lent - began. She had been made from straw on Ash Wednesday and she was revered as the Queen of Lent. Each week, one of her seven limbs was cut off, to record for the citizens how many weeks of fasting remained. It is told that halfway through Lent, on a particular Thursday, the youths of Madrid, tired of the endless gloom, would celebrate with a botellón while running throgh the streeets looking for any old woman to beat with sticks. '¡Muera la vieja!', they would shout.
Around here, following after every merrie holiday comes El Día de la Resaca (hang-over day, groan), like La Vieja it is not an official holiday but you don’t get in trouble for not showing up for work or school. Well, I may be a bit out of date on that one, but it has always served around here as an excuse for absence from one's post...
The old folk (the surviving ones) recall that around fifty years ago, the children would go door to door asking for food for the Vieja picnic and if they did not get any they would play a nasty trick on the home-owner.
Here’s a song the kids in Aragón sing, threatening those neighbours who won’t give them sweets with a stone through their window (come to think of it, the original ‘trick or treat’):
O viejo remolón
Que no quié comer pan,
Sólo chulleta y huevos
Y chocolate si le dan
The lazy old grand-dad won’t eat any bread; only meat and eggs, and chocolate if you give him any.
Time to bash his head in with a handy rock, perhaps?
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Published at 11:54 AM Comments (1)
Shopping in the Sixties
Monday, March 21, 2022
Here's a little background on what life was like in our village in the early 60’s. We would buy our food fresh every day from a tin-shack market-stall. Maria, the lady that sold fruit and vegetables, was illiterate and couldn’t count so she had three rocks - one worth one peseta, one was a duro (five pesetas) and the third was for 25 pesetas; so anything you bought had to weigh the same as some combination of her rocks. She would load up her hand-scales with a likely-looking pebble and then put the merchandise in the other cup. If you wanted two bananas she would give you seven and round up the price because the two bananas didn’t weigh the same as any of her modest collection of weights.
In those far-off times, before cash registers, accountants and IVA, everything worked on the honour system and most people paid when their crops (or their pensions) came in. Failing that, they swapped something for something else. The old mayor told me he had once exchanged a house in the square (it later became a bar) for a goat.
Over in the main drinking establishment - a kind of club for the men who would sit comfortably at an empty table for hours as they smoked their Ducados - the foreigners were a breath of fresh air, at least from a business point of view. In Pedro's bar you could just keep eating your tapas and drinking your beer and wine and when you finished he would ask what you had had and charge accordingly. He kept a piece of chalk handy for the harder sums. A glass of brandy (you were allowed to call it coñac in those days) would cost five pesetas (around three cents of a euro).
Lurking just outside the door, La Muda, the deaf (and dumb) lady would sell cigarettes from her tray. You could buy a single smoke or even a whole pack. She also sold rough cigars from Murcia and Bazooka Joe bubble gum for her younger customers.
The few foreigners who lived in our village, understandably confused by the local version of written Spanish, were relieved when Juana put a sign over her tiny grocery just by the church - a place which might properly have been called una tienda de comestibles - to read both Tienda and Foodings. Juana is there behind the count er, passing you the tins of peaches, bottles of Hero fruit juice, wine in returnable bottles at 14 pesetas a bottle, pickled fish and canned butter from Holland.
Juana was more on the ball than María, and we were expected to count our change.
The third place on our regular shopping excursion was the grandly named Super. Here you could pick things off the shelf and hand them to Isabel who would furiously bang the newly-fangled cash register. Cash was king, although bits of paper were often stored against later payment. Her previous accounting system for charges had recently been canceled for all time by her irate father. This earlier system was for each family to have a kind of family jam-jar and when one made a purchase a certain number of garbanzo beans were placed in one's jar. You can see how this could work.
When you came to pay Isabel would painstakingly count the beans and you would oblige her accordingly. One terrible night, a chicken somehow got loose from the next room which someone had forgotten to lock and it knocked over some of the jars and started in on the garbanzos. The story goes that no one panicked, Isabel (with her father standing behind her) just asked each customer how much they thought they owed and that was what they paid.
With the money, they bought the cash register and a booklet to explain how it worked.
The weekly market brought in a variety of fruit and vegetables, with one old lady selling her veggies out of a wheelbarrow; and now and again a truck would arrive in the main square, honk furiously and then throw open its rear door. It might sell shoes, or fish (or maybe even both - it was always worth coming out for a look).
Those of us who owned a car could always drive the ten kilometres to the local market town. Which we occasionally did. There was even a proper supermarket there, called Emilio's. One Englishman called Roger used to drive there most days, collect people's groceries, and put ten per cent on top.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't perfect. We missed tea-bags terribly.
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Published at 10:18 PM Comments (3)
Mojácar Could Have Been a Contender...
Sunday, March 13, 2022
There’s not much acknowledgment of history in Mojácar (Almería) as a rule, so we’ll gloss over the first few thousand years of the town and arrive, breathless, in the times of the Mayor Jacinto Alarcón, in the early sixties.
That perhaps modest wave of artists, the Indalianos, mainly from Almería (a city surprisingly wealthy in culture - you can see some of their work today in the Doña Pakyta Museum in downtown Almería) had been and gone: weekending in Mojácar, drinking and painting. They had introduced, or at least, promoted, the local stick figure, which they called after themselves – the Indalo. Mayor Jacinto, in charge of a moribund village, had been glad to receive them, and he allowed them to stay in a few tumbledown houses. He instructed the artists, the poets and the writers – go and tell people about our town. By about 1962 Mayor Jacinto had an even better idea – to give away ruins or land to those who would fix them up (bringing sorely needed wealth into the community). Many came, and the town, with less than 600 inhabitants in 1960, began to slowly revive. A small hostelry, the Hotel Indalo, opened in the Plaza Nueva, and, with its bar and first-floor restaurant, it thrived. Some mojaqueros, living in Lyon, Barcelona, Frankfurt or Madrid, heard of the new growth in the pueblo, and they returned.
The foreigners came. They found the village to be a thing of beauty, and above all, cheap. A house in 1966 would cost five hundred or a thousand pounds. A glass of beer, a few pesetas. They brought with them the habits of the swinging sixties: the Beatles, free love and a stick of hashish. The mojaqueros learned of these things as they began to find lots of work in the construction industry. The unexpected introduction of the Almería airport (Franco never liked the province) and the Mayor’s skills at Court bringing us a Parador Hotel in 1964 helped immeasurably. Mojácar was on its way.
Mayor Jacinto was strict, insisting that houses should be traditionally built – with small windows, flat roofs and whitewash. No high-risers and everyone to have a view. The rules were broken by the first hotels, the Mojácar, the Moresco and on the unexploited beach (land at one peseta for ten metres, no takers), the Hotel Indalo. The tour operator Horizon had discovered Mojácar and made it its flagship resort (before going spectacularly bust).
Mojácar’s fame grew abroad. The Indalo was often seen in London, and Mojácar became a modest phenomenon internationally. More foreign settlers arrived and a couple of local families began to take over the local economy. They became very wealthy. By 1990, they were multimillionaires –and friends of the mighty.
Everyone lived together more or less agreeably: the money was all foreign and it kept on arriving, ending up – sooner or later – in local pockets. As perhaps it should. Yet Mojácar itself, with the old mayor’s retirement in about 1978, began to change from a residential town to a tourist resort.
A Corsican businessman knocked down the village carpentry in the square – a squat building connected by arches spanning the narrow streets on either side – and built a three story nick-nack shop called Sondra’s. The first ‘democratically elected mayor’ (the foreign population of course couldn’t vote) also allowed the rest of the main square to be demolished, including a beautiful theatre, and a furious scramble of more nick-nack shops appeared on the three levels of the ‘Multicentro’: tee shirts, beaded wrist bands, pottery from Nijar and junk jewelery from China.
The old hotel, the Indalo, that decrepit but key building that commanded the square, was similarly demolished for even more ‘souvenir shops’. On the beach, the Pueblo Indalo was built. The town had decided that tourism brought in more money than resident home-buying foreigners. Tourists spend heedlessly and then they go away; home-owners stay (and perhaps vote, or try and compete in jobs and businesses). Old Jacinto’s call for ‘Mojácar, where the Sun Spends the Winter’ was, for some reason, ignored and the town became very seasonal: 25,000 in the summer and just 6,000 in the winter. On the construction side (where the real money lay), small apartments, good for a couple of mildly uncomfortable weeks, were built rather than comfortable villas.
By 1985, as local homes were demolished and rebuilt to architects’ designs, the village had begun to change from ‘a beautiful Moorish clutter of cubist homes’ to a slightly ugly town with neon lights, narrow streets and a wonderful view. The foreigners themselves continued to enjoy Mojácar (although its fame abroad was vanishing), and many chose to live in a number of 'guetos' - as the Spanish call them - in urbanisations overlooking the beach, ridiculously British, yet still at apparently ludicrous prices. Mojácar was a fine place: there was no Sky television and the only news came from the World Service of the BBC – far off and, beyond the fluctuations in the daily rate of exchange, of little interest.
The second mayor (third really, the age of ‘mociones de censura’ had begun) was Mayor Bartolo, a PSOE man who had worked in a local savings bank. Bartolo was – one way or another – influenced towards the new president of the Junta de Andalucía, Manuel Chaves, and, inspired to make Mojácar a modern town, he brought back an architect called Nicolás Cermeño, by chance Chaves’ nephew, to rebuild the old Mojácar fountain – La Fuente.
It would be the beginning of the end of Mojácar and its easy cohabitation.
Remarkably, an open meeting was held in the Town Hall to discuss the plan for a new tourist fountain to take the place of the old public one. The mojaqueros were against the idea – one of them, José María (carpenter and undertaker), gave a famous speech about how he had seen enough marble to last a lifetime and he was against an austere gray marble fuente. We all agreed.
 Work began a few days later.
The foreigners were aghast. An early copy of ‘The Entertainer’ (the English-language newspaper) has a picture of a local Brit holding a placard which reads ‘Ninety Thousand Pounds to Wash my Knickers?’ (the reference being that, in those days, the fuente was used by washerwomen as a laundry). A few days later, the foreigners made a demonstration in protest against the outrage. They were (unwisely) led by an American actor and long-term local resident called Charles Baxter (who lived openly with his Spanish boyfriend) together with Silvio Narizzano (whose sexual perversions in Hollywood and London were palpably well-known locally, as was his artist and playwright boyfriend Win Wells). I was warned by Antonio, a local friend, ‘to keep clear’. It was well that he told me, because the foreigners, amassed in the main square, were set upon by the mojaqueros and a fight developed. Eventually, the Guardia Civil arrested Silvio (later to be freed: ‘unshackle that man’, said the mayor standing outside the Town Hall. Silvio gave him a large bunch of roses and a kiss). Shortly after the event, Charles Baxter – the gray-haired dapper doyen of the foreigners – left Mojácar for good.
 The mojaqueros had the last word – we don’t like the new fuente but it’s for us to complain – not you. The relationship with the foreigners was broken. A few months later, Bartolo used the same architect to ‘remodel’ the Castillo - the castle at the top of the town. No one complained.
...
Years after (in 2014), a local man called Francisco Haro, the son of the old owner of the Hotel Indalo, wrote an astonishing homage to the early foreigners who had brought Mojácar back from the brink of ruin, a fully-illustrated book called ‘Mojaqueros de Hecho’ (Honorary Mojaqueros). Tales of Fritz the mad artist, Charlie Braun, Bill Napier, Paul Beckett, Ulf Dietrich, Preacher Jim, Ric Davis, the Polansky brothers, Salvatore, Geri, Theresa and many more who brought wealth, fame and fun to the area.
The book was completely ignored by the current Town Hall which has, at best, an uneasy relationship with the guiris. These days, and despite the 60% of foreign inhabitants versus just 20% of mojaqueros (more or less, depending on the vagaries of the town hall padrón), Mojácar is considered officially as a seasonal tourist town.
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Published at 11:59 AM Comments (4)
The Brief yet Exceedingly Independent Republic of Albox
Monday, March 7, 2022
At the end of the 19th century, Albox, a town in the wilds of Almería, was a place unknown to much of Spain, and therefore to the world. Until 1891, that is. The nearest railway station was a two-day hike and the outdated industry of wool and fabrics for farmers made it possible that many families managed to live frugally, if not well. Nevertheless, the population - close to 11,000 people - gave Albox a certain allure thereabouts and its wealthier citizens were able to spend time in one of the two casinos that the town boasted, or perhaps the odd evening enjoying a show in the theatre.
At the time the Mayor was José Antonio Mirón Jiménez. A man who was "Conservative and influential", according to Miguel Ángel Alonso, a local historian who has rescued one of the most picturesque events of the history of Albox and revives this peculiar story...
Local elections complied with the unwritten requirements of the time, that is, they were heavily controlled by the local poobah, whose motto would be: "For friends we have the favour and for enemies we have the law". A proposal which worked very well for Don José Antonio. The mayor (they used to call people like this 'El Cacique') ruled thanks to the vote of just the wealthiest - and worthiest - residents. In particular, to a coterie of 54 persons, who thanks to the specialized voting system of the times were the only ones who decided through the noble institution of the ballot box who would occupy the Mayor's office.
The system nevertheless took a body blow when in 1890, a new national party called the Partido Liberal Fusionista revolutionised the political landscape by introducing universal suffrage to Spain. All men (sorry Ladies!) over 25 years could vote in the elections. Coinciding with the modification of the voting rules, a humble resident of the Albox neighborhood of Locaiba called Andrés Pio Fernández cheekily ran as a candidate for the elections of February 1891.
The conservative mayor never believed that his opponent could pose a threat. However, he was quite wrong and was soundly defeated. The people speak, although their voice is not always accepted with pleasure (nice quote from the historian which I couldn't resist).
But then, the morning after the election day a storm of people surged through the streets waving sticks, guns and swords. Yet, even more sinister than the weapons they were carrying were their banners: "Long Live the Federal Republic of Albox!". At the head of the mob was none other than the defeated former mayor José Antonio.
The indignant politician and his accomplices proclaimed a "universal declaration of independence and a brand-new country" which would have "nothing" to do "with Central Government in Madrid". They sent a letter to Madrid expressing this very sentiment. The experiment, based and inspired by recent events occurring in Cartagena (they declared independence from Spain on July 1st 1873 and entered into a five month war with Madrid) didn't last long in the case of Albox.
History doesn't say what went on in the new republic. Perhaps business boomed briefly in the two casinos and the theatre. It's possible that a new anthem was penned by the old mayor's wife. Certainly a few streets were renamed. They always are.
Maybe the local clink was full to bursting.
After two days "of terror", the provincial Governor realized that what looked like a joke had little humour about it, so he proceeded to send the Civil Guard troops to regain control. Twenty one rebels were detained, once the prison had been emptied of the earlier lot, although it is recalled that they were soon released.
It was the end of the first - and short-lived - Federal Republic of Albox.
Many, many years later, with Albox (now called All-box by its thousands of British inhabitants) once again returned to its habitual serenity, the question arises - can we try that again?
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