Showing posts with label olives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label olives. Show all posts

Friday, June 26, 2020

Usually it's green paint and buff coloured stone

The province of Alicante, the one we live in, like all the provinces of Spain, has its own particular characteristics. Unlike lots of Spain Alicante is not choc a bloc with cathedrals, medieval quarters and massive stone built historic town centres. It doesn't even have characteristic colour schemes for the houses (well it does but they are not as eye catching as, for instance, the indigo and white of Ciudad Real or the ochre and white of Seville). We do have plenty of impressive buildings but they tend to get lost in a general unremarkability. Say Alicante to any Spaniard from outside the area and the first thing that comes to mind will be beach. If you've ever had holidays here, in Benidorm or Torrevieja or Calpe or if you live in Elda, Monóvar, Aspe or Sax then I'd be more or less certain that whatever you appreciate about your town it is not the architecture.

That's not to say that I don't like our province. Look in any direction from our house and you see hills and pine covered mountains. Out here in the countryside there are lots of orchards of peach, apricot, almond, stacks of olive trees, grape vines all over and a host of other crops from wheat to artichokes. I know that the first impression of Alicante for Northern Europeans, as they look down from the aeroplane window, is that the landscape is dry and everything a yellowy, orange, dusty sort of colour but here, on the ground, it looks pretty green to me.

I like the unending summer heat here, despite the flies. I like the way the province groans and swelters in the bright, bright sunlight with such tremendously deep skies. And we do have that beach and that flashing blue sea. Something else I like is the strange distribution of houses and hamlets. Alicante is out of kilter with much of Spain because the houses are scattered, higgledy-piggledy, across the countryside. In most of Spain houses are gathered together in villages and towns with hardly any people in between.

Not long ago agriculture was what there was in inland Alicante. People lived close to the land they worked. Then things began to change. Other sectors became the big employers and agriculture now only employs about 4% of the workforce as against around 20% in industry and 75% in services. We have lots and lots of unworked land around here. To oversimplify and overgeneralise the families that worked the land moved away. The blokes, and it is blokes you see, who drive the tractors and still work the land are old and battle scarred. They may still rope in the family at harvest time but basically the farmers are dying in harness and their children prefer to work at a keyboard, in air conditioned shops, factories and offices. The houses the farmers owned in the villages and hamlets often still belong to the families (unless they were sold on to we rich foreigners) but they are only opened up occasionally - maybe for a party or a couple of cheap weeks in the countryside. 

The landscape is criss crossed by a maze of back roads; those lanes are used by tractors and locals by day and by drunk drivers avoiding possible police patrols at night. The roads are usually narrow, twisty and some are pothole scarred but most are perfectly usable. They get narrower in spring and summer as the abundant grass encroaches onto the tarmac. The herds of goats that once kept the verges well mown are now few and far between too. Alongside the roads are little hamlets and clusters of houses. Nowadays most of the houses are deserted or they get that very occasional use. Of the ones that are occupied all the time it's probably true to say that foreigners make up a disproportionate percentage. Spaniards and Northern Europeans have different ideas about the delights of town versus country living.

In one way those villages and hamlets are just a repetitive pattern but they are one of the things I really do like around here. Suddenly, in amongst the vines and the almond trees, there will be a cluster of stone built houses with faded paintwork, abandoned farm implements and the shady spot where generations of locals once sat to tell tales and share their lives.

Wednesday, February 05, 2020

Olive, the Other Reindeer?

When you buy a beer at a bar in Spain they usually give you something to go with it - olives are favourite. In fact olives are everywhere in Spain. They come in salads, they grow in the fields beside the road, they get milled over the road in Culebrón village and we always cook with olive oil as well as using it for dressing on salad.

I needed olives and beef for the recipe. We only had black olives in the cupboard so I added green olives to my shopping list.

When I got to the shelf with the olives I found black olives, olives stuffed with anchovies, olives stuffed with jalapeño pepper, olives stuffed with red pepper and even a variety made to look like a monster sperm by shoving a small gherkin into the hole where the stone had been drilled out. There were also the manzanilla ones.

Now manzanilla is an interesting word. If you're in Sanlucar de Barrameda it's the local dry sherry. I prefer it to the similar fino sherry produced in nearby Jerez de la Frontera though both are rather splendid. Manzanilla is also camomile or camomile tea; once, in Vigo, in a bar, we asked if they had manzanilla. We were delighted when they said yes and mightily disappointed when the anticipated crisp cool dry white wine appeared and was some sort of nerve tonic tea.

Alongside the other olives were lots of Manzanilla olives. I'd always presumed they were sherry soused. I sniggered to myself as I searched the shelves. Imagine that, a country loaded with olives and no olive flavoured olives to be bought. I asked a passing shop worker and she pointed to the Manzanilla ones. "But aren't they flavoured with wine?," I asked. "No, manzanilla is a variety of olive," she replied.

I felt stupid. Something so simple and something that has taken me fifteen years to discover

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Rocking and Roving

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Land Rovers. I have no idea why. I think it's forty three years since I first drove one and maybe twelve since I last did. I still notice them though. Terrible vehicles really. Noisy, thirsty, probably environmentally disastrous, clunky, with awful visibility, uncomfy seats and the way they tramp about at the back at the least provocation can be terrifying. That hasn't stopped me liking them.

Land Rovers stand out yet blend in. The one in the Rocketman film gets a spot in the trailer. The one in Four Weddings was just so right, so upper crust. Our local quarry has a fleet of them, David Attenborough uses them. There are several  pictures of the Queen, in a headscarf, in front of Land Rovers. I suspect there is no news story about a forest fire or an earthquake that doesn't feature a Land Rover doing its bit. Production stopped in 2016, after 67 years, so I suppose they will slowly cease to be so ubiquitous as any number of much more anodyne but sophisticated vehicles take their place.

This reminiscing was brought on by the simple fact of seeing an oldish Defender, probably from around 1998, parked in our local supermarket car park. It had an old style of Spanish number plate, retired in the year 2000, which tell you where the vehicle is from. J for Jaén, the Andalucian province full of olive trees in this case. That was a second thing. I've recently taken to playing a song over and over again called Andaluces de Jaén. The song is based on a poem written by Miguel Hernández who died in prison, he was on the losing side, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. He was from Orihuela which is just down the road from us. Obviously enough the poem/song is about the people, the Andaluces, from Jaén. Ostensibly about growing and collecting olives but I suspect it may have a somewhat deeper meaning than that!

The time I first realised that a battered Landy is nearly as axiomatic a sign of deep, deep, Spanish rurality as the small white van and bright blue overalls was in 2006, in Cazorla, also in the province of Jaén. We were sitting in a square in the town as Land Rover after Land Rover went by. They may, in fact, have been Santanas because, between 1958 and 1994, Land Rovers were built under licence in Spain. To be honest it's immaterial whether they were built in Solihull or Linares because they were instantly recognisable as Landies.

Looking at the prices, even for old and battered examples, it's unlikely I'll ever be able to buy one but if anyone has one and feels environmentally guilty you could always salve your guilt by gifting the motor to me.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Neither the Nothingness grow them
nor money, nor the lord,
but the silent ground,
work and sweat.

Together with pure water
and together with the planets:
all three gave beauty
to the twisted trunks,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

How many centuries of olives,
with captive feet and hands,
all day long, sun and moon,
weigh on your bones!

Jaén, stand up, brave,
on your moon stones,
don’t become a slave
with all your olive groves.
Andalusians from Jaén.

Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Lovely

Just a bunch of assorted trivia that has tickled my fancy in the last couple of days.

There are a lot of stars in Culebròn. That's probably an incorrect assertion. I suppose there are exactly the same number of stars as there are anywhere but lots of them are easy to see from Culebrón because we get lots of cloudless night skies and there's very little light pollution. That's not quite true either because, at the moment, we have a dazzling Christmas light display which, for the very first time this year, features a spiral of LED rope around the palm tree. The Geminids meteorite shower was flashing across the sky all last night though in an even more dazzling display. Lovely.

We went to the flicks yesterday evening, we often do. We'd been to visit someone and we were a little late away; we went the long way around so we arrived at the cinema a few minutes after the advertised start time. The cinema we often use shows the sort of pictures that don't always attract a lot of advertising. So, sometimes, if the start time is 6.15 the film actually starts at 6.15 but, then again, if it's a bit more Hollywood, the 6.15 film might not start till 6.30 after the trailers and ads. Whilst Maggie waited to buy the tickets I went to have a look at the monitors to see if the film had begun. If it had we had a second choice. The manager, who was on ticket collection, said hello, lots of the staff greet us by name nowadays, and asked me which film we wanted to see. I told him. It was due to start 10 minutes ago he said, but there's nobody in there so I'll start it when you're ready. A private showing and to our timetable. Lovely.

Bad keepers that we are we'd missed the annual update of the vaccinations for the house cats. I took them both in today. I was amazed - apart from the chief vet everyone that I saw in the vet's surgery/office is doing or has done at least a couple of English classes with me. Of course I shouldn't be driving but I thought the 5kms in to town wouldn't hurt. As I drove Bea home she had a bit of an accident, bowel wise. She's not a big fan of car travel. At the exact moment that the stench of her reaction assailed my nostrils the very obvious yellow van of the bloke who looks after my motor went the other way. He flashed his lights in greeting. I would have waved back but a bit of chrome trim chose that exact moment to fly off the front of the car and bounce off the windscreen. I went back to get it later, on the bike, and fastened it back on to the car with duct tape as a temporary repair. Lovely.

And finally, yesterday, we passed the bodega/almazara in Culebrón. There were a stack of cars and vans queuing to hand over their olive crops to be pressed into oil by the almazara, the oil mill. The bodega, the winery, did its stuff back around September time. So I strolled over with the camera to take some snaps. I have no idea what the process was but I liked the small scale nature of it. Little trailers full of olives, plastic bags full of olives, people standing around and chatting waiting to have their crops weighed in. The cars are obviously modern enough but the process is probably as old as the hills. Lovely.

Wednesday, November 04, 2015

October weather

Here's the October weather report for Pinoso prepared by Agapito Gonzálvez.

The highest temperature was on the 5th when it got to 28ºC.and the lowest temperature was 4ºC overnight on the 22nd. The mean daily high was 22.2ºC and the mean daily low was 10.3ºC which all averages out at 16.2ºC.

The rain was just 9.4 litres of water on every square meter in October and a third of that came down on the 20th.

We only had nine days of clear, sunny skies and another fourteen with sunny periods. Less to my taste we had four days when the sun didn't come out at all and it rained on seven days.

Everyone tells me that this is good for the olives. Personally I prefer the searing heat of August.