Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.
And, lo, the hunter of the east 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’

NB: If there’s a RV in brackets after a (paywalled) link, you might be able to read it via a Reader View extension to your browser, avoiding the paywall. If there is no RV, it will mean that the article is free to view or listen to. If there’s RV2, it means a second click on RV might let you see the article though the first RV click didn’t work.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Property

• The (monetary) value of a garden . . . . Mark Stücklin advises here that: A garden can add considerable value to a home in Spain, but how much depends on where the property is, how big the garden is, and how useful it is. Bigger is not always better, and the first few square metres can sometimes be worth much more than the last few hundred.

Tourism.

• As Spain looks set to overtake France as the world’s most popular holiday destination, it’s said here to be losing its battle against tourism.
• That article reports that in Toledo – a city with the same population as Pv city – measures have been taken to control the flow of tourists through the historic old town. A limit of 30 has been placed on groups and megaphones have banned for guides, so that the tourists must wear headphones to hear them. I guess this is what we’ll see in Pv city one day, where I’ve noted groups of as many as 50 being instructed – i.e. shouted at – by guides. While they block the street.

Society

• This article features US residents of Pv city comparing Halloween celebrations back home with those of Galicia. Which are, of course, increasing influenced by marketing-driven US excess. When I was a kid in England, trick-or-treating was totally unknown. On what we knew as ‘Duck Apple Night’, we spent the evening ‘apple bobbing’ and ‘snapping’, which Wiki describes here, adding that: ‘The tradition of bobbing for apples dates back to the Roman times, when the Roman army merged their own celebrations with traditional Celtic festivals’. Probably after US customs began to take over, I recall trying to carve a face out of a turnip. Believe me, this is a lot harder than doing it with a (soft) pumpkin. But this option wasn’t available to us in the UK back then. And I could never get the bloody candle to stay upright in the turnip head that had taken me quite some time to make. I probably didn’t try again the next year Or ever. And I never went trick-or-treating. Simpler times . . .

A reader has kindly sent me this Guardian article on the Spanish institution of el menú del día.

Three things I learned today . . .

• Galicia is big on the growing of that arnica plant, said to be much in demand by pharma because of its bruise-healing properties.
• Galicia is said to be of growing inportancce in the world of falconing/ hawking (cetrería).
• There is at least one young lady in the world called Osmarya. Whose Venezuelan parents were Osmond and María.

The United States of Trump America

• The USA will soar again after Trum: Corruption and incompetence may yet derail the American miracle but on my travels before the midterms I saw indomitable spirit that gives me faith.
• The republic can be repaired/restored. But it’s going to take a monumental effort – and no doubt many years – to fully rebuild faith in the system.

Trump’s mid-term plot might have failed, as demonstrated by his frenzy. (RV)

Relevant Books

• Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest
• Hell and Back to Democracy. On Amazon or here. This is not simply a book about Trump. He is the vessel, not the disease – the product of a system decades in the making, fueled by powerful interests, weakened democratic institutions, and a media ecosystem that too often chose access and complicity over accountability. The book confronts the defining questions of our time: How did we get here? Why did so many institutions fail when they were needed most? And what must we do now to defend democracy before it is too late?
• The final pages of Kurt Andersen’s fascinating run through the USA’s history – Fantasyland: How America went haywire. A 500 year history.
• Profiles in Cowardice, by Jacob Weisberg. Cited in this podcast.

The Way of the World

As Trump’s time runs out, this could be his most dangerous legacy: a world divided into three.

Spanish

• Flete: Freight. Charter. Cargo.
• Jurel: Horse mackerel
• Empanar: To bread, batter, crumb

You Have to Laugh

The cited article above on Halloween in Pv city includes a reference to Lizzie Borden, which brought to my mind this clerihew, learned in my childhood:-

Lizzy Borden bought an axe

and gave her mother 40 whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

she gave her father 41

I see she was acquitted of her parents’ murder.

Finally . . .

Like me, Lenox Napier learned to touch-type before it came very useful in the age of computers. And, like me, Lenox hates to have to type on the keyboard of a mobile phone. So, like both his daughter and mine, I’ve shifted to the voice option for messages that really don’t need to be written. Lenox writes here on this subject.

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.

The Usual Links

This – from veteran blogger Lenox Napier – is an excellent weekly newsletter (Business Over Tapas) on all matters Spanish. Indispensable for those who needs insights on how and why things happen here.

You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. If you do this but don’t read the posts, I will delete your subscription. So perhaps don’t bother if you have other reasons for subscribing . . .

I can also be read on X at Thoughts from Galicia. And on Substack here. I no longer post on Facebook.

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.

If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you. And this, on the annual costs of owning property here.