Death in the Evening

Before passing judgement on the controversial subject of bullfighting, we thought we should see it first hand and Seville turned out to be our chance.  We arrived on a Thursday, the one day of the week that they have fights over summer.  I thought I would write a blog entitled Death in the Afternoon, after Hemmingway's famous book but, given the daytime temperature, they sensibly hold the event at 10pm, which is also the favoured kick off time for football here in Spain.

The particpants emerge to approach the president's area

Each week three young, up and coming matadors get the chance to fight two bulls each in one of the most famous rings in Spain, the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla, watched by a mixture of tourists and knowledgeable locals. The Corrida (literally "running") is not for the squeamish at the best of times but throwing in some inexperienced toreros doesn't help as they are more vulnerable themselves and, worse, less efficient at killing the bull at the end. The consequence was that death was sometimes slightly more lingering than would have been intended - something that the crowd is not impressed by. Nevertheless there was excitement, especially for the mad Dutch woman behind us who whooped and shrieked all evening.

What does impress the home crowd is a bullfighter who can swish the cape so close to his body that the bull seems to almost pass through him when it charges from close range. The third of the three youngsters, a Mexican named Brandon Campos, wowed the crowd with a series of passes on both sides of his body. He was quite a showman too in his suit of lights and wiggled his body at the bull in a manner that would have provoked most people let alone a huge animal with a number of hooked stakes sticking out of its back. He loved himself and that seems half the battle. If he had been a chocolate drop he'd have eaten himself. The other two would-be matadors just didn't have it.

Brandon moves in for the kill

After a number of delicate swooping manoevures which had the crowd in raptures, it came to the nasty bit. Would he kill the bull clinically or would he turn out to be more like Arsenal (looks great but can't finish for toffee)?  Well, he had the bull virtually hypnotised and was able to kill it stone dead with one thrust of his pointy sword. Cue lots of white handkerchiefs as the crowd petitioned El Presidente to award a prize. El Presidente said yes and our boy was duly presented with both ears of the bull by a gentleman with large feathers protruding from his hat.

A lap of honour followed at the end of which he flung the ears into the crowd. Now, it's one thing catching Rafa Nadal's sweaty shirt at the end of a tennis grand slam win but what do you do with an ear? Probably a wet ear at that. Maybe the kid who was having his photo taken with it got his mum to crisp it in the oven, iron it and have it framed. Who knows?

The Real Maestranza at night, with a lone Torero

The ring is a beautiful setting lit up at night.  There is pageantry, drama, and danger, with bull and human life at stake. At times it's ugly but I imagine if it was sanitised you would lose the beauty too. A bit like most things in life.

Should it be banned? Difficult, but personally I would say no (the views in this blog are not necessarily those of the Executive Editor, Suzanne). I can see why people don't like it and it certainly goes against the British sense of fair play. But it comes from a very different culture which makes it hard for us outsiders to judge (which of course doesn't stop us). It isn't the result that counts (the outcome being highly probable if not quite inevitable) but the way it is done. Someone illustrated the UK-Spain cultural difference recently by writing that if the British had invented bullfighting it would go as follows - a plainly dressed bloke would just shoot the bull between the eyes, Indiana Jones style, in the first minute and be done with it, without the delay caused by all the pointless stuff with the cape. And it would now (rightly) be banned of course.

Sevilla

The AVE train deposited us in Seville, the city of Carmen, Flamenco, Gypsies, Bullfighting and the biggest church in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records which (using a measure of cubic metres rather than floor area) puts the cathedral ahead of St Paul's in London and St Peter's in Rome.

Cathedral and Giralda from our hotel roof terrace

It is Spain as the picture postcards have it: houses with shady tiled patios covered in flowers and plants and huddled together across narrow alleyways.  Moorish, gothic and renaissance architecture compete with each other under clear blue skies to grab the photographer's attention while flamenco dresses, bullfighting memorabilia, cold beer and tapas are on sale everywhere. It is lively, colourful and above all hot.

Inside the Cathedral

...the Gothic choir

We drove here for the day from the Costa del Sol back in 1993 in forty degree heat in a rented red Ford Fiesta with no air-con. Then, here for just a few hours we saw some of the main sites but missed the essence of the place. This time from our centrally located hotel we were able to discover the city at a slower place, see the cathedral, climb the Giralda tower and roam the buildings and gardens of the Alcázar, the palace that was started by the Moors and expanded by the Christian kings in moorish and later gothic styles.

Moorish style inside the Alcazar

These huge monuments and the incredible craftsmanship that went into the detail on them stands testament to the vast wealth of Spain's golden age, which was boosted by the riches of South America that flowed from Columbus's accidental discovery of the new world. Like many of the major explorers of the time, his voyage was financed by the Spanish crown and planned in Seville, from where he set off.  Much of the loot from the Americas was stored here because of the secure position of it's inland port and the relatively easy access to the Atlantic. 

Lord Byron wrote after visiting here that Seville is famous for the quality of its oranges and its women. We know for a fact that the oranges are sweeter and juicier in Valencia, but he could be right about the women.  They certainly must have made an impact on him if he thought the history, architecture and flamenco weren't worth a mention.

Summer in Madrid

We spent a night in Madrid for the first time since 2005, which was before our house was finished. The people seem to speak more slowly now, which is nice.

We stayed in the same hotel as last time as it is near Atocha station and handy for the centre so we could revisit the two famous squares, Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol, in the course of a couple of hours wandering on a hot sunny afternoon.

Plaza Mayor

Plaza Mayor is just as grand as always but Puerta del Sol, the epicentre of Spain from which all internal distances are measured, still retains signs of the recent protest camp. It has now shrunk back to a couple of tents which maintain the presence and give out information. A Greek flag hangs in sympathy for the fellow sufferers across the Med but all was peaceful, except that Su was fired at by a protester from his tent with a water pistol. Not a major problem in the blazing heat of summer - we must have interrupted his siesta.

Solidarity with Greece at Puerta del Sol camp

Visiting the capital did make me think from a different perspective about the current economic woes about which many are understandably protesting. Having read two books recently about the poverty, violence and general misery that was Civil War Madrid we found a stark contrast. One of those books, Winter in Madrid paints a picture of those difficult times when 25% of the GDP of an already impoverished and mainly rural economy went up in flames. As the title implies the book is set in the cold of winter with snow everywhere. By contrast here we were in bright sunshine in a sophisticated capital city that stands comparison with any other in Europe including London. The GDP of this now much richer country has hardly fallen at all during the crisis and the price of beer does not suggest a place that is economically on its knees.

I don't wish to belittle the current position at all with all its difficulties and inequities, but what a long way this country has come in the thirty years since Franco, let alone from the Ashes of a Civil War. Perhaps things aren't so bad - it's figuratively speaking as well as literally, Summer in Madrid.

Some Old Paintings

You never know quite what this area will throw up next as we learn more about the history and culture of the region.  At this time of year as the Moors & Christians fiestas begin, the focus is of course mostly on the Christian Reconquest of Spain through the middle ages but people have been living here long before even the Moors arrived.  A few traces remain of the lives of the pre-Roman era people - for example there are some walls of a 2,500 year old village on the top of the Segaria mountain ridge opposite our house - but most has been lost in the mists of time.

We were surprised and pleased to find when reading one of our local guide books that, a mile or so up a track off an inland road that we know, there are some 8,000 year old cave paintings, which were discovered only in 1980.  The pictures at Pla de Petracos, recognised by UNESCO as a world heritage site, are some of the oldest and most important in Spain and give some clues to the lives of these Neolithic (later Stone Age) people for whom fertility and abundance, being the key to survival, were central to their values.  

These farming communities were the first to sow seeds, develop pottery and domesticate animals in this region and the cave paintings high up in the rock wall in sheltered places, rather like modern shrines, mean that this was almost certainly a religious place.  There are eight caves in a row, five of which still show images in red on the walls. The image in the cave shown below is of a bull's head and a woman which together are thought to represent fertility.  The other four images represent humans seemingly praying, arms outstretched, the family, hunting of a deer and the agricultural cycle. We went along to have a look and to marvel at being part of such a long chain of human development. Wonderful.

The paintings are clearly visible from the viewing platform

...but the zoom lens makes them clearer

Moors & Christians

By 711 AD, less than a century after Mohammed founded Islam, the Moors (a mixture of north African Berbers, black Africans and Arabs) had crossed the straits of Gilbraltar and overrun almost all of Spain and Portugal.  Their dominance was such that at its high point around 85% of the population of the Iberian peninsula was muslim, evidence of which can be seen here today in the food, customs and architecture of modern Spain.

The Moorish advance was turned back when they were defeated in 722 at Covadonga, in the north, a battle which opened the path for the Christian reconquest which spread slowly south, until it was finally completed 770 years later.  More than half a millennium into this gradual process, the catalan King Jaume took control of the Kingdom of Valencia in 1279 after the battle of Alcoy when St George allegedly appeared to frighten away the Moors and bring victory to the Christians.  The battle is commemorated by the Moors and Christians fiesta, which takes place in many of our neighbouring towns at various times of the year.  This week has been the turn of Pego, our nearest town. 

A captain on horseback rallies the troops

These lot were at the scarier end...

A lot of preparation goes into the event with the rival groups (filas) of Moors and Christians competing to put on the best display and most of the town comes out to watch.  We went along to watch the entry of the Moors, when eight filas paraded towards a mini-castle erected in the town centre.  Each fila has a captain who leads his team down the street brandishing his cutlass, grinning maniacally and generally looking a bit unhinged.  He (or she) is then followed by some ranks of colleagues in costume, arm in arm, dressed in the sort of frightening manner that you would associate with marauding armies of invaders.  The men mostly smoke cigars too, a detail which may or may not be historically accurate.  Each fila hires a brass band from a local village to accompany them along the road with suitable music.

The girls get in on the act

...and dance too

As the procession wore on we were treated to belly dancers, horses, donkeys, camels and a tractor pulling a cart full of “Moorish” children who threw things to (at?) the crowd.  The gentleman in front of us was hit on the temple by some kind of missile but took it very well.  The Moors marched off to certain defeat for yet another year but seemed to determined to have a very good time in the process.  We take the result for granted of course now, but what if the Moors had never lost control of Spain? On a local level we would eat a lot less ham for sure, and wouldn't the world be a different place if the conquistadors had taken Islam, instead of Christianity, to the Americas?

Red Flags and Floyd

Our love of Spain can be traced back to various influences early in our relationship but probably the most significant was the 1992 food programme, Floyd on Spain, in which the late Keith Floyd, the legendary chef, toured the country, sampling the local food, doing a bit of cooking and of course drinking a vast quantity of the local wine.  We emulated a few of his recipes at the time, some of which have remained in our repertoire ever since and we were inspired to make our first visit to Spain later that year to Barcelona where we ate in the restaurant Los Caracoles (“the snails”) that was featured in his programme. 

Floyd on Spain is repeated regularly on the various specialist TV food channels and we have a recording of the one where he visits the Valencia region, learns how to cook paella and visits a strange village restaurant run by communists.  Nearly twenty years on, and after a little research, we found a restaurant that we thought might be the one and set off inland into the spectacular mountain scenery that we know well through our various trips with the Costa Blanca Mountain Walkers.  An hour or so inland lies the village of Tarbena where, a year after the forced deportation of the Moors that ultimately ruined the economy of this region, the village was repopulated in 1610 with seventeen families from Mallorca.  They brought with them the tradition of making sobresada sausage (still made in Tarbena four hundred years later), beginning the culinary tradition which brought Floyd here.

Sure enough we found the restaurant, Casa Pinet, almost unchanged from 1992.  The woman who prepared fideua (paella made with noodles) with Floyd all those years ago was on hand to show us a photo of him on the wall among pictures of famous left-wingers such as Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Hugo Chavez.  I avoided the temptation to try to explain in Spanish that our flat in London is near where Karl Marx is buried – I tried that speech in the cemetery in Buenos Aires where Eva Peron is buried and while I think I got the Spanish mostly right, Suzanne thought the curator of the cemetery who I was talking to was bored out of his mind.

The people at Casa Pinet are more than ever convinced of their political leanings in the current economic circumstances.  Posters exert you to support political prisoners in Cuba, give to food parcels for Gaza and contribute to the struggle to free Western Sahara.  We had a quick drink and left them to contemplate their sausages, the class struggle and the decline of international capitalism.

The Summit at Last

Every day that we have spent here (and there have been a lot in more than five years), we have had the pleasure of enjoying the view of Serra Segaria, the mountain ridge opposite the house.

Serra Segaria

Without ever getting close to making it to the steep sided summit, we have visited various other parts of the ridge and it has become a popular excursion for many of our visitors.  It has great views both south to Denia and the mountains behind Benidorm and north back to Monte Pego, the rice fields beyond and the coast sweeping round as far as Valencia itself.  It has been home to humans for a long time and on the south side the ruins of a Moorish settlement sits on top of an ancient Iberian village some of whose 2,500 year walls are still clearly visible.

We were introduced to the walking routes around Segaria by our friends David and Carol and have subsequently found a few more by trial and error, where error usually means longer than planned walks and lots of scratches.  Happily, life has now been made easier by the various new marked tracks and signposts provided by through the efforts of a local walking group, the Club Excursionista d'Ondara, to whom we are indebted.  Small yellow and white markers painted on rocks now guide walkers all the way from the car park at around 80m above sea level to the summit itself at 509m and today we made it at last in around ninety minutes before taking a longer, less steep route back to the car.

At the top

From below the rock face seems too vertical to be climbed without ropes but a path winds its way up gradually and you only have to use your hands a little on the more difficult bits.  Having marked miles and miles of trails on difficult terrain, provided a car park, spanking new spotless toilets and a guest house with space for 32 people to stay overnight, the Parc Natural de Segaria has everything.  Well everything except a sign off the main road telling you which alley way you have to drive down to find it.  It is actually harder to find the park in the car than it is to find the summit once you are there, but then this country does not win international awards for road signs.  Fortunately there was a friendly local on hand to guide us.

Looking down on our house from the summit

This being late June, and really too hot for walking, we made an early start and had the mountain largely to ourselves apart from four young local firemen on a training walk (I thought Su was going to feign injury and have to be rescued), a fox and the usual collection of birds, butterflies and lizards.  Segaria is only an eighth the height of Mount Cameroon but being able to sit by the pool and contemplate the summit having now finally been up there is extremely rewarding.  I'm almost tempted to open a beer...