If you come to live here, it won’t be long before one of your Spanish friends says something like “I’m no racist but I despise gypsies”. And, truth to tell, as I live not far from a couple of permanent gypsy encampments, it’s not difficult to understand this attitude. For the gypsies – or some of them at least – take anti-social behaviour to extremes. However, there are at least three grades of gypsy here in Pontevedra - the lowest being those who hale from nearby Portugal and the highest being the traders who live exactly like everyone else in one of the city’s suburbs. Down in Madrid, the lowest of the low are said to be the recent arrivals from Romania, in respect of whom ‘antipathy’ is probably a rather inadequate word. So, it was a bit of surprise to see our [gaffe-prone?] senior VP - María Teresa Fernández de la Vega Sanz – express repugnance for the action of the Italian government in taking action to rid the country of illegal Romanian gypsy immigrants. In doing so, she attributed very lofty sentiments to the Spanish government but I’m left wondering just how much she’s in touch with those of the residents of the city in which she lives. Not much, I suspect.

Having praised the serious Spanish press for their obituaries of people scarcely famous in their own countries, I should now return the favour and congratulate The Times for their obit today on Pilar López. She was responsible – the paper says - for introducing flamenco to an international audience but my guess is Pilar’s name, at least, is well known here in Spain. Even if it means nothing to me.

For one reason and another, I find it hard to imagine the wife of ex President Aznar rushing into print with a volume of kiss-n-tell memoirs. Back in the UK, Cherie Blair’s outpourings have been met with a cascade of vitriol, especially from women it seems. An excellent example is this hatchet job today from a leading female columnist, Minette Marin. I guess we could call it a hatchette job. If we were so inclined. My problem is that, having grown up on Merseyside at the same time as Cherie and then studied law in London at the same time, I might actually be in the blasted book. I haven’t always been a man of exquisite taste. But I won’t be checking.

Finally - I went to Vilagarcia by train yesterday. There are two reasons why this is [mildly] noteworthy:- 1. I’ve never done it before, and 2. I had absolutely no intention of going to Vilagarcia, by any mode of transport. So, I give you this bit of gratuitous advice – If you’re tempted to help load someone’s cases on the rack and then to stand and wait like a gentleman so that passengers can pass to their seats, don’t. Bang your way through the buggers and get off as quickly as you can. Spain’s trains – apart from the AVE - may be snail-like between stations but the doors open and close like greased lightening. However, it was sunny in Vilagarcia as I waited for my lovely ladyfriend to come and get me, delayed by only ten minutes of helpless laughter at my plight. But at least my visitors did a good impression of being mortified. And, it being the Day of Galician Literature, no one demanded I pay for a ticket and there was no parking charge for my car back at the station. I could warm to this language normalisation.

Pontevedra has a Guardia Civil barracks down by the river. Driving past it last week, I was struck by how easy it would be to lob a bomb over the wall a couple of meters from the road. Or even from the adjacent pavement. This week the Basque ETA terrorists tried something rather more ambitious up in the north east. According to the media, they attempted to massacre not just GC officers but also their families. They didn’t succeed but, sadly, one officer was killed in the process. The fear is that ETA have re-established their bomb-making capability in southern France. Let’s hope the gendarmes find it soon.

Talking of violence, a Scottish columnist fears the pictures of Glasgow Rangers thugs attacking the police in Manchester this week will have damaged his country’s reputation around the world. Well, not in Spain, I suspect. Here they’ll merely be taken as confirmation that all Brits are either ooliganes or frock-coated toffs. But mostly the former. And I doubt that Scottish independence will change things much.

The figures for economic growth in the first quarter of the year make dire reading for Spain, where the achievement of 0.3% was only half that of the Euro zone average of 0.6% - a figure heavily weighted by Germany’s figure of 1.5%. This, of course, was achieved despite the rise in the value of the euro. Must say something about the fundamentals of the respective economies, I guess. But it’s an ill wind that blows no good and those of us living close to Portugal can now take advantage of the fact that poor country is now in an even worse state than it has been for the last decade of boom here in Spain. A bit of carpetbagging is surely in order.

Which is surely the most audacious link in my blogging history . . . Can anyone explain why the film The Carpetbaggers is called Los Insatiables in Spanish and not, say, Los Aventureros?

Finally - You’ll doubtless be familiar with the Cannes Film Festival but possibly not with the parallel event taking place up in the Galician hills in the village of Cans. Which actually means ‘dogs’ in Gallego, I believe. You can read all about it on its web page but here’s a snippet to give you the flavour - O Festival de Cans é un peculiar festival de curtametraxes que se celebra no mes de maio na parroquia de Cans (O Porriño), coincidindo en datas co Festival de Cannes. Precisamente a idea do festival xurdiu da similitude entre o nome desta aldea galega e a da cidade francesa. Naceu en 2004, polo que a de 2008 será a quinta edición. Este ano celebrarase do 21 ao 24 de maio, aínda que o conxunto de actividades desenvolvidas extenderase ao longo de todo o mes de maio. It would be useful for information to be in Spanish as well but that’s not the way of things these days in Galicia, where Gallego is being increasingly ‘normalised’. But I don’t think you’ll be shot for speaking Castellano/Castelano as you walk around. Though I might be.


The Anglo Galician Association – open to all who speak English – now has a Forum on the web. If you have a query about Galicia, why not register and post it.

If you'd like to know where Spain features in the international murder rankings, nip across to Iberian Notes. You might be surprised. I was. One wonders what percentage of Spain's total stems from violencia de genero, or domestic violence. This is regularly said to be an increasing problem here, despite government attempts to minimise it.

And if you'd like to see dozens of photos of this lovely part of Spain, go to Google maps, search for Galicia and then click around the various buttons until you arrive at the photos. I'm in one of those for Pontevedra. Honest.

On 15 May 1665, the rather lecherous Samuel Pepys wrote that someone's maid was very 'formosa' (handsome). Either this is a corruption of the Spanish hermosa or our Samuel was versed in Gallego. Wonder if he ever did the camino to Santiago.

Finally, here's two similar views of a mausoleum in Iran - regarded by Robert Byron as one of the great buildings of the world. You probably won't believe it when I say it was built in the 10th century. Albeit AD. Byron claims it has a character unlike anything else in architecture. Hard to disagree.

























If you'd like a bit more detail, here it is, from the man himself:- A tapering cylinder of cafe-au-lait brick springs up from a round plinth to a pointed grey-green roof, which swallows it up like a candle extinguisher. The diameter at the plinth is fifty feet; the total height about a hundred and fifty. Up the cylinder, between plinth and roof, rush ten triangular buttresses, which cut across two garters of Kufic text, one at the top underneath the cornice, one at the bottom over the slender black entrance.

Having learned Persian as a young man, I can actually read the inscriptions and it's one of my few ambitions to do so in the flesh before I depart heavenwards. Or wherever.

Can you tell I don't have much to say about Spain today?

Opening with a smile – I got these two hits to my blog yesterday, within a few minutes of each other. I wonder if they are related . . .
the Anglo Galician Association
the brothel association of Spain

OK, another smile before the serious stuff – A quote from an English newspaper this morning:- The new film of Brideshead Revisited is to include a love triangle between Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and his sister Julia - a scene that Waugh carelessly omitted to pen. Is nothing sacred these days?

Enough levity. On to weightier matters . . . I guess the best that can be said about Spanish racism is that it’s born of naivety and a simple lack of cultural awareness - assisted by a deep-seated Spanish belief that, if you don’t mean to hurt anyone by your words, then they’ve no real cause to be upset. My latest musing on this theme is prompted by this cartoon from yesterday’s Correo Gallego, which relates to the Nigerian episode in the recent life of our senior VP. I’m quite sure the artist would be horrified to be told it’s insulting as this is the standard way negroes are depicted here in Spain:-

The irony here is that the cartoonist is being critical of the VP for not obeying equality rules. Equality and race apparently being differently-entitled things in Spain.

The Spanish property market: A couple of years back, my good net-friend Biopolitical alerted me to the huge stake which the central and regional governments had in the continuation of a construction boom, even if it were driven by little more than speculative greed. This stems primarily from the tax streams that follow in the wake of property transfers. More recently, I’ve commented on the dreadful prospect facing town halls across the country now that the golden goose has shuffled off this mortal coil far more rapidly than either the national or any regional government seems to have even contemplated. I’m once again indebted to Mark Stucklin for putting all this in a nutshell:-Local authorities are totally unprepared for a slump in revenues, even though the present situation could be seen coming a long way off. The growth model and urban planning model many employed was short-termist and unsustainable, and failed to nourish long term wealth creation. Whilst the construction sector boomed, town halls used the revenues to finance a dramatic increase in municipal infrastructure and services that are now fixed costs that have to be paid. Increasing your fixed costs in response to a temporary rise in income is always a recipe for disaster. This municipal finance crunch will squeeze coastal towns the hardest, as construction fever during the boom raged the most on the coast. Town councils in the Valencia Region have been warned to prepare for 3 “very difficult” years. Oh, dear. Here come the increases in our annual municipal taxes, the IBI. Amongst other things. Even more public works down in town, I guess.

Meanwhile, the Association of Developers is still begging for taxpayer-sponsored aid to keep them at the level of luxury to which they’ve become accustomed. Or to quote Mark again:- The association of leading Spanish developers has called on the government to inject an extra €40 billion into the economy to stimulate the housing market and soften the “excessive downturn in the construction sector.” The general secretary of the association argues that, if present trends continue, there will only be 200,000 housing starts in Spain this year, well below a real housing demand he estimates at 350,000, and far below the 600,000 plus in recent years. Rather than drop their own inflated prices to stimulate demand and shift some of the 500,000 newly built properties they have in stock, the developers are, as usual, calling on the government to make it easier and cheaper, in the short term, for buyers to load up with debt. Vamos a ver.

But it’s not all gloom. As I say, I may have a massive, ugly concrete skeleton in front of my house [picture soon] but I can at last again park my car in front of my gate. My garage even. And my picture window is at the back of the house, giving me a rather superior view. If I ignore the unsold monstrosities in funeral parlour style to the far right. Which are not shown here . . .

The government’s senior VP – the ubiquitous María Teresa Fernández de la Vega Sanz – was photographed in a Muslim part of Nigeria this week, next to a local entrepreneur and his three wives. When acquainted of this fact, she bizarrely pronounced herself horrified this had been allowed to happen. Not the multiple marriages, of course, but the taking of a photograph which she presumably felt would be interpreted as her personal endorsement of polygamy. One wonders what sort of message this sends out to Spain’s millions of Muslims. Perhaps MTFdLVS should stay at home until she is more culturally attuned.

Relatedly, one is forced to ask in how many countries a national paper would print a headline about 10 little nigger boys, assuming I am translating negritos correctly. But maybe I’m not, as the term is said to be ‘the name originally given by the Spaniards to the aborigines of the Philippine Islands’.

What I’ve called the PP party’s renovation by attrition continues apace. The latest departure from the senior ranks of the Opposition is a Basque lady who doesn’t like the idea of a softer line towards nationalists there and in Cataluña. And possibly in Galicia too. If she knows where it is. Helpfully, the wife of the last PP president, Sr Aznar, has chucked in her tuppence-worth by telling us she shares this concern. How much more of this can the leader of the party take before throwing in the towel so that his successor can be chosen way ahead of the next election? Or before the party tears itself apart.

If, like some readers, you doubt that British society is as violent as it is now regularly painted, here’s an article you probably don’t want to read. It’s by a youth worker in London and it talks of attitudes there among young women. Very disturbing.

Back in Spain, that old corruption issue keeps coming up. The Prosecutors’ Office is reported to be investigating seven ministers in the Catalan Government, on the grounds they’ve spent a trifling €31 million on specious studies handed out to their friends. Hard to credit. My guess is they’ll go to jail for a few months in about eight years time.

Just in case you read this blog to know how your electricity prices will be moving, here’s the latest news from ABC - The National Energy Commission will decide today on an electricity price rise of between 7 and 11%. This will come into force in July and there will be another larger increase in December. So know you know.

Statistical evidence is to hand today for my contention yesterday that the ‘overhang’ of unsold properties must increase. El Pais reports that the stock may already have grown from 600,000 to 750,000 and that, despite this, “there are still a lot of new developments under construction”. The paper also quotes me – and everyone else with common sense and basic maths – in suggesting “The worst is yet to come”. “Although planning approvals and housing starts are nose-diving”, it says, “the number of new properties coming onto the market is still rising, whilst sales have collapsed”. QED.

Telefónica has announced its Rural ADSL service will end on July 1. Does anyone know whether this is good news or very bad news?

Galicia Facts: Down in Pontevedra’s gem of an old quarter, there has been a series of archaeological digs over the last year or so. Walking past one next to our old theatre yesterday, I was surprised to see someone cleaning a ‘grinning’ skeleton lying right on the surface. This turned out to be from a 9^th century cemetery and there are several more, it seems - all lying immediately below the old flagstones. Click here for a photo.

Finally - On 13 May 1665, Samuel Pepys confided to his dairy that he was a bit OCD about his new timepiece - But, Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs upon me still that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o'clock it is one hundred times. Imagine what idiocy he’d get up to if he were writing his diary today as a blog and had a hit counter . . .

The Anglo Galician Association – open to all who speak English – now has a Forum on the web. If you have a query about Galicia, why not register and post it.

The president of Spain’s constructors’ association – more cognisant than most of the devastation in front of him – tells the government that “Concrete measures are needed”. With more than 500,000 unsold properties on the market, I would’ve thought it was crystally clear we’d already had enough initiatives involving concrete.

Incidentally, if Pontevedra is anything to go by, this number of 500,000 can only increase in the next 2 or 3 years, creating even more downwards pressure on prices. Not only are 5 to 10 huge new flat blocks about to come on stream but foundations are being dug out on several vast new sites dotted about the city. No liquidity problems here, it seems. Though it’s gone rather quiet on the site in front of my house. Which has certainly eased the parking problem. It’s an ill wind . . .

Since we’re talking property today, here's a interesting comment from Mark Stucklin’s Spanish Property Insight blog. Frankly, I wouldn’t advise anyone who’s struggling to pay the mortgage on a flat in southern Spain to read the rest of the article:- But what if you are in the happy position of being a buyer in this market? Can you take advantage of rising foreclosures of holiday homes in [southern] Spain to snap up a bargain at auction? Probably not, is the honest answer. Really great opportunities still get snaffled up by insiders long before auction. And those that do make it through may be earmarked by the auction ‘mafia’, who are people you don’t want to cross. If you bid against the wrong person in a public auction in Spain, there’s no telling what might happen to your property. Your best bet is to let bank managers and estate agents in your target area know you are a solvent buyer in a position to move quickly. That way you might find a distressed vendor prepared to take a big hit for a quick sale to avoid the costs of repossession. On second thoughts, I probably should have advised you not to read this extract either.

And still on property . . . One of our numerous local papers reports that Galician constructors started investing their profits in East Europe, Africa and South America at least a year ago. Not stupid, these Gallegos. Possibly a wiser move than that of Ferrovial’s purchase of BAA and its British airports, which are hated even more now than they were before. Quite an achievement.

Finally, if you want a perfect example of the sort of thing that went on – and of the level of greed/stupidity displayed by British buyers – the latest big name to go into voluntary administration is the development company, San Jose Inversiones. As Mark reports, despite being legally obliged to do so, they didn’t give bank guarantees to people making stage payments for properties bought ahead of construction [“off plan”]. Needless to say, these are now likely to be lost.

My Sunday squid and Albariño in Vegetables Square was rather spoilt this week by two things; firstly, the arrival of relatives and, secondly, the persistent interruptions of a wide-eyed young lady seeking a donation of 10 centimos from each of us. We have several sorts of beggar here in Pontevedra but this was a new one on me. Not only was she well-dressed and not unattractive but she had a glass of something in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A class act, in other words. But it availed her nothing at our table, I have to admit. The other beggar to bother us was a regular who has the habit of tapping you on the shoulder and then putting his ugly face to within a few centimetres of your nose. I gave him my customary Anglo-Saxon greeting but was then surprised to have the lovely waitress, Olivia, not only ask me what this meant but also seek pronunciation lessons. I look forward greatly to next Sunday as Olivia is not known for her dulcet tones. She calls me Frank, by the way. But that’s another story.

Only joking about the relatives. Honest.


The Anglo Galician Association – open to all who speak English – now has a Forum on the web. If you have a query about Galicia, why not register and post it.

A few weeks ago, a Spanish reader wrote to highlight the success of the Santander Bank through its Abbey subsidiary in the UK. I didn’t bother to say then that the issue I have with Spanish banks is not profitability but customer service. So why am I mentioning this now? Because, passing a Santander hoarding this morning, my visiting brother-in-law volunteered there was massive criticism in the UK press of how Abbey was treating customers it had garnered via its exceptionally attractive special offers. What I’ve previously called the traditional Spanish catch ‘em-and then screw ‘em strategy. And this on the same day it’s reported BAA will probably have to sell Heathrow.

Anyway, we were, in fact, en route to the local hospital to have his painfully crocked back attended to and I have to record that the level of service there was exceptionally good. And nearly always provided with traditional Spanish charm. But they don’t need to have attractive introductory offers and then bleed you dry, do they?

Talking of comments to this blog - There was a brief exchange recently about the continuing importance of class in British society, in contrast with Spain. This is an article – albeit from a right-of-centre paper – which argues that the main problem the Labour party now has is that, between them, Mrs Thatcher and New Labour destroyed the class-basis of support for the left-of-centre party in Britain. The author writes - If we are to make sense of our political future, we must come to terms with the enormity of what has happened to Britain since 1979: class divisions, in the old sense, are pretty much dead. Social injustice is not a matter of the privileged classes exploiting the labouring ones. It is now a direct product of the manipulations of political policy - in education, in the tax and benefits system, and in the employment market. This is a truth pretty widely acknowledged by enlightened politicians of all parties. Politics is now an open contest between conflicting solutions to real problems in which parties must convince individual voters of the force of their arguments. We just might be on the verge of a triumph of reason over sentimentality. Would it be an exaggeration to say that Spain has been at this point for a long time? Or at least since 1976?

A note for dog owners: My old border collie started to stagger around last week as if he’d lost the power of coordination. But, after I’d taken off the Preventef flea-and-tick collar I’d recently put on him, the problem cleared up. So, if you have a pet which doesn’t have a drink problem but can’t put two legs in front of the others, you might want to check what chemical it’s exposed to.

The Anglo Galician Association – open to all who speak English – now has a Forum on the web. If you have a query about Galicia, why not register and post it.