Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.

And, lo, has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light!

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable: Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’

Cosas de España

HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for the news that: Foreigners account for 20% of homes sold in Spain. the highest figure on record. Despite Brexit, Brits still lead the pack though only just, ahead of the Germans.

ThinkSpain tells us here that: Every now and again, Spain’s traffic authority launches a campaign to remind drivers of what they should and should not be doing, or to answer common questions. The most recent DGT awareness campaign covers distractions behind the wheel. Lenox has his own take on this here. It’s not as if they needed new rules for us to break . . .

So, if the reduction of noise is a Spanish objective, will there be radars on terraces? To catch folk all shouting at the same time. Or revellers singing and shouting in the street at 3am. I guess not, as they won’t be wearing number plates, making them easy to identify – and tax – later.

The rain god is certainly taking his/her/its/their revenge on us right now, after months of draught. After 6 days of rain in the last 7, the stuff is forecast to stay with us for another 7, at least. Good for the ducks and the reservoirs but not for me as I cross O Burgo bridge 4 times a day. The good news is that the raging winds have reduced the price of electricity, it’s reported. I wonder if we’ll notice.

Once apparent consequence of the recent and current weather seems to be an explosion in the snail population in my garden. And, right on cue, comes the news today of a snail farm here in Galicia, supplying – naturally enough – the huge French market. Far less controversial than an octopus farm, I guess

I went to Correos last night, to mail to Canada my cousin’s phone charger and cable. As ever, the process using the computer to fill in the forms seemed to take longer than when one did this oneself. In this case, the main reason was that the clerk was stymied by the fact that she couldn’t find ‘charger’ in the long list of dispositivos eléctricos, on the screen, however much she scrolled up and down. So it eventually went as ‘auriculares’.

Which sort of reminds me . . . Given how often one reads praise of the Spanish healthcare system, it was odd at a table of Spanish friends last weekend to hear all the complaints about the health service in Galicia. Perhaps this is because this is a ‘devolved competence’ and less is spent on it here than in other (wealthier) regions. A post-code lottery, in fact. An anathema in the UK but accepted here as a reality of life.

My complaint of the week . . . Having again paid €300 to bring my daughter and grandson from Madrid, I wan’t thrilled to read again – in the Guardian article I cited a few days ago – that you can do the same distance from Madrid to Barcelona for €19. Despite the fact the high-speed element of a trip to us ends halfway. Boy, is Renfe fleecing us Galicians at the moment! It’s a monopoly, of course.

Another quote from Cees Noteboom’s Roads to Santiago: [Written in the mid 1980s] Spanish friends of mine talk about transición and movida, and I would be a miserable traveller indeed if I did not see how much has changed; sometimes the change is so dramatic that I forget that I also lived and travelled in Franco’s Spain in the days of censorship and bigotry, of Falange uniforms, death sentences and executions, holy masses for the Blue Division, Which fought beside the Germans in Russia, the banished writers, the bitter reticence of those who had fought on the losing side. All that has vanished, save from the heads of those who suffered – sometimes it seems as if the vast country has sucked it all up like a sponge, has let it dry and evaporate along with the memories and the blood, a few more scars in the tanned bull’s hide, scratches in a history that refuses to end, the saga of Romans and Moors and Jews and Visigoths, of foreign invasions and slow reconquest, of discovery and colonisation, of oppression and civil war. I don’t suppose you can reasonably make this connection between space and time. Yet it seems to me that Spain, still the emptiest country in Europe, has preserved a different sort of time, as if topical issues, however vociferously debated have less relevance, and so lapse into an infinitely slower measure. Perhaps it depends on where you go, because what I’m after is deceleration, and regardless of the laws of the land, I find what I am looking for. In a landscape where a solitary tree is visible miles away, time is measured by different standards. It is that disparity that I have come for.

Portugal

Doing rather better than Spain as regards investment in ‘commercial capital goods‘.

The EU

There’s a new agreement on the electricity market. Click here if you understand this byzantine subject and are interested in this development.

The Way of the World

This is an interesting thesis on why folk of the (far?) Left have vastly more sympathy for Palestinians than they do for, say, the 600,000 poor souls very recently ethnically cleansed by the Azerbaijanis. About whom virtually nothing was said. And no demonstrations were held.

Finally . . .

Not too surprising to read that Barcelona and Madrid are the most expensive cities in which to live in Spain, but astonishing to read that Pv city is in the bottom five. Perhaps before the recent explosion in property purchase and rental prices was taken into consideration.

For new readers:– If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there – updated a bit in early July 2023.

For those thinking of moving to Spain:- This is an extremely comprehensive and accurate guide to the challenge, written by a Brit who lives in both the North and the South and who’s very involved in helping Camino walkers.