Village life in Andalucia

Posted by: puebloman | May 23, 2015

Farming in Southern Spain: The Bee loud Glade

I will arise and go now, And go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, Of clay and wattles made. Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee loud glade. (from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats 1888)

Oh what a glorious thing to be, A healthy grown up busy busy bee! Making hay while time is ripe, Building up the honeycomb just like tripe! To be a good bee one must contrive, for bees in their bee house must BEE HIVE! Flirting with the butterflies high upon the wing WHOOPS! Oh death, where is thy sting?(from “The busy bee song” composed by Kenneth Blain for Arthur Askey in 1938)

I was born in post war Portsmouth in 1950, when food was still rationed. In spite of the bombed houses and the mangled dockyard, it was a good place to live and a good time to be a child. In spite of post war austerity – no money, and no loans – the welfare of children was one of the Atlee government’s top priorities. We all got pre-school free milk for calcium and strong bones. and orange juice and Rose Hip syrup with loads of vitamin C added to improve our chance of health and lower our chances of getting rickets. And all this supplied by the milkman. When we went to school we got milk at break and a hot dinner at mid day – free if it needed to be. It was that golden age of decency and integrity in government. Before Margaret Thatcher.

Sugar and sweet things in general had been in short supply during the war. In fact, because sugar had to be imported it quickly became scarce. The first ration book in 1942 was called the “Sugar book” because sugar was the first food to be rationed. As the war progressed back yard honey production was encouraged as part of the “Dig for Victory” strategy and “Bee Loud Glades” could be seen for the first (and last?) time in the back yards of town houses and in suburban gardens.

This was before my time of course. I was born into the 1950’s – a world with all sorts of sugar in it. Our “Bee Loud Glade” was a big jar of honey kept in the larder for vaguely medicinal purposes. Hot “lemon and honey” was cure for everything from a temperature to a sore throat. Honey was also supposed to be antiseptic, good for cuts and grazes, respiratory problems, asthma, high blood pressure, anaemia, fatigue, rheumatism and liver disease. Our jar had been given to my mum by her mum. No one remembered how old it was. We thought it was probably pre war. Mum said “it never goes off” and “it’s full of goodness”, which meant that if you were told to eat it you had to. It glared down at us from a great height, a big jar half full of grey stuff so dense you had to stab it out of the jar with a knife or heat it up by the fire. Apparently this was to do with commercial processing, which made the honey look crystallised and opaque. We kids preferred Golden syrup that looked exactly like it said on the tin, Golden and Syrupy, like modern honey. There was also treacle, which was black, for treacle tart with pastry and cornflakes. This stuff is still sold in Spain today as miel de cana – “cane honey” as opposed to miel de flores – honey from flowers. Real honey.

I decided to keep bees this year to extend my little farm. I started last year with poultry. I can’t grow quality fruit like my neighbours, but they do appreciate eggs and I thought they might like honey. Also bees don’t need daily care, they are self-sufficient and you can leave them on their own for part of the year. I live in a fruit-growing area, ideal for bees because pollen and nectar, the food of bees, are produced by this mixture of fruit trees and annual wild flowers every month except for the pollen gap in August, which here in the Axarquia is like a terrible boiling winter.

It’s a social and neighbourly thing to do, keeping bees. They fertilise your neighbours’ fruit.

The disadvantage is that bees sting, and this means you have to consider very carefully where you put a hive. You have to site it 25 metres from tracks and pathways and ideally the “bee line” from the hive to the nearest flowers should not cross a human pathway. I have a little citrus grove near to my water deposit (bees need to drink a lot) and this leads out to some steep wild land overlooking a (usually) dry ravine with an avocado plantation on the opposite slope. This seemed ideal.

It’s a good idea to meet other bee keepers before you get your first bee hive and this can be difficult if you live in a foreign country so I went on Facebook and found “Beekeepers, Bee enthusiasts, honey lovers in Andalucia” that has news, tips discussion and adverts for bee enthusiasts. It’s an ex pat site.

A traditional bee skip. The bee keeper would have put a spring swarm into this, and set fire to it at the end of the season, collecting the honey and killing the bees

A traditional bee skip in the Museum of honey. The bee keeper would have put a spring swarm into this, and set fire to it at the end of the season, collecting the honey and killing the bees

I signed up for a course at the museum of honey – the “Casa Museo de la Miel de Malaga” in Colmenar. It was a two day course run by local Spanish bee keepers who spoke English. One was a vet. Half of the course was conducted in the museum and half in the field doing practical work in the apiaries. It cost €180 for two days, which I thought a lot. The fact that it was very good value was partly due to the two venues – one for theory and one for practice, partly the friendliness and expertise of the teachers, and partly the other students who were all ex pats. After fifteen years of meeting ex pats in bars I half expected a bunch of morbidly obese chain-smoking alcoholic “Tinto Tories” with their dogs. I needn’t have worried. We turned out to be a group of eight charming, intelligent people. Apart from me of course. Almost everyone knew more about bee keeping than me (who knew nothing) and everyone was cleverer. Quite a shock. Perhaps it’s the bee keeping that makes the difference. So the education for me was many layered, and I met some nice people. Students learn best from each other, under the supervision of creative teachers.

The most popular hive here in Andalucia is called the Layens hive, invented by Georges de Layens in the 1880’s. It’s simple and very cheap, consisting of a plain box with hole in the front for the bees to get in and out, a flat waterproof roof, and twelve frames inside, on which the bees build their honeycomb.Each box will house a colony – a single queen, thirty to sixty thousand infertile females (workers) and some fertile males (drones).

The colony with its queen, drones, and workers is like a single living creature. It takes the team work of an entire hive to make honey. The queen (which might live for several years) lays thousands of eggs per day so that the nursery workers can raise thousands more worker bees. Some of these will guard the door of the hive, some will make new honeycomb, some will fan the hive with their wings to maintain a constant temperature, some will clean and renovate old comb and some will forage the flowers for nectar and pollen.

These traditional Spanish hives are propped up on clinker blocks to keep out the damp. To take the honey, smoke the hive and lift the lid, taking the out er frames

When the colony gets too big for its box, the old queen will swarm, taking part of the colony with her, leaving a new queen to develop in the old hive. In this way a colony feeds, grows, breathes, and reproduces, just like a single animal. The brood and babies are produced in the centre of the hive, the honey and pollen are foods, and are stored in the periphery.The bee keeper manages the hive and harvests the honey by removing one or two of the outer frames of the Layens hive, always leaving enough honey for the bees to get through the winter. To do this the keeper needs a bee proof suit hat and veil and a smoker. Old leaves or dry grass is put into the smoker, lit and the smoke puffed into the hive. The bees, sensing a forest fire, gorge themselves on honey. This is so that they can rebuild the colony as efficiently as possible after the fire. However, once their bodies are stiff with honey, they are unable to bend their abdomens to sting. Also the smoke masks the alarm pheromones that bees release when under attack. So the colony remains calm when the hive is opened.

The bee keepers suit. Note the gloves! The tin box to the left contains fuel for the smoker the smoker with its bellow is on the right

The two great enemies of the honey bee are varroa and insecticide. Varroa is a mite that infects the hive and destroyed Spanish honey production during the last century. Bee management requires its constant control, and you have to register your hive with the authorities so that it can be monitored.

The pesticide threat is well-known and has been the cause of a mass die off of bees since 2005. The latest herbicide threat comes from neonicotinoid herbicides. The bees become addicted to the nicotine in them and bring them back to the hive. The Junta de Andalucia passed new laws this year restricting their use, though Spain is notorious for over use of all forms of pesticides and has been heavily fined by the EU for their excessive use.

So wish me luck keeping this lot alive. At the moment its only one hive – just 40,000 bees, but I shall be looking to expand and I’ll keep you posted!!

Me and my beehive in the “Bee loud glade”. Its set on three clinker blocks and has a polystyrene fish tray on top with some water in it so the bees can get a quick splash as the arrive/ depart

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Posted in culture, Hill Farming in Southern Spain, Me in Andalucia | Tags: bee keeping, Colmenar bee keeping course, Ex-pat life, farming in Andalucia, Hill farming in Southern Spain, layens beehive, Spring in Andalucia

Posted by: puebloman | May 6, 2015

Dogging in England, dogging in Spain

Dogs. The season of arse sniffing slowly gives way to group shagging as spring dawns

The Cat will mew, and Dog will have his day (Hamlet 1602 Shakespeare)

Let us bang these dogs of Sevil, These children of the devil! For I never turned my back upon Dog or devil yet! (“The revenge”, 1878 Tennyson)

When I was a child we weren’t allowed a dog. Every so often I’d suggest one. Mum would look at me and say ” A dog? It’d be a five minute wonder. You’d get tired of it and ” Muggins here” (indicating herself) would be taking it for walks. You can have a mouse. Or a goldfish. They aren’t so much trouble”.

So I did and they weren’t. Although mum really wanted a cat. She preferred cats to dogs. To her, dogs were male, and she didn’t much like men. “Dirty buggers” she would mutter under her breath.

She thought of cats as female though – when she was in labour, our cat brought kittens in one by one in her mouth and made a nest out of her pullovers in the bottom of the wardrobe by the birth bed. They were, according to her “hembras empáticas” – sympathetic females. Well she didn’t actually say that, I made it up. Also, we had a grocers shop and cats kept down the rats. At least the females did. “Toms are lazy buggers” muttered our mother. So we didn’t have one of those.

Mum would want to let our current female cat have one litter before “having it done”. However our cats didn’t live much longer than a goldfish because the shop was on a road junction and a passing lorry had usually flattened it before it produced. We would bury it and shed a sincere tear before bombing off to get another one and thus we were never overrun by kittens so everything worked out fine.

I had hardly met a dog until I came to Spain. Well, there was Auntie Dolly’s dog “Dinkey-Poos”, a Yorkshire terrier who masturbated on our carpet or on my leg if I let it. I’m not counting her. I’m not even thinking about her.

I first met committed “dog lovers” when I used to do a daily run over the park at Clapton and along the river Lea. They were out petitioning for their “human right” to allow their dogs to run and shit – it was in the days before pooper scooping – on council Park lands. Hackney Council pointed out that a playing child falling into dog shit and wiping it into his eyes would go blind. It was no surprise that dog owners promoted the rights of dogs over the health of children. Some yapping slathering piece of vermin would stop me in my tracks, throwing itself at my crotch while its under exercised owner would waddle up behind it waving a petition and wheezing “Don’t mind him, he’s only barking” or “Look at him! He just wants to play!” . Let him play with his owner I thought or with himself if he can acquire Dinky poos’s dexterity.

Three dogs fuck each other while another two stand around uselessly and bark

When we first came out to Spain I was told that a love of dogs and a love of football were two things that united the English and the Spanish and I could see the connection, football being a game you can teach a dog.

It seems that everyone in Spain has a “house” dog. Why? What on earth are they for? They don’t lay eggs, you can’t eat them and they don’t work. On the other hand they eat meat – not affordable by most of the world’s human beings. They shit everywhere and there is no pooper scooping tradition in the village so I don’t even get a laugh from watching some ugly expat going on about immigrants in the middle of the road with a copy of the Daily Mail in one hand and a pile of dog shit in the other.

During the long exquisite silence of an Andalucian summer evening, cantan los perros. The dogs “sing” to each other according to our Spanish neighbours. In other words they bark all bloody night long.

This is a seasonal blog. I’m writing in May when the sap begins to rise in un-neutered dogs. It’s the month when dogs take their noses out of each others arseholes and plug in at the other end, sometimes in bunches of five or more – where on earth do they find suitable orifices? My mother would have thrown a bucket of cold water over them, as did her mother before her, but both women lived in a pre scientific age and were forced to rely on this ineffective folk remedy. It is now well known that the penis of a male dog swells in the vagina of a female during coitus. It cannot be extracted until ejaculation, so it is utterly pointless and painful for the dogs incidentally, to try to pull them apart. Pointless yes, but hugely pleasurable to watch them after a couple of buckets, pogoing around until they trip and begin to slowly roll down the precipitous narrow concrete street, finally disappearing from sight. At least for a short while.

Am I sounding a bit ratty? A couple of years ago our neighbourhood suddenly became inundated with dogs. Our cottage is down a little ally and I had previously managed to keep the odd strays at bay by collecting my urine and splashing it across the top of the road to disconcert those marking territories. Of course our place smelt like a nineteenth century French “Pissoir” , but believe me that was nothing to the Stench of Summer Spanish dogShite. Oh God, I’ve started to alliterate.

Our Spanish neighbours got a couple of tiny dogs of indeterminate breed that would screech uncontrollably at anyone who passed by. One looked like an unsuccessful firework with brown hair spurtling out of it. The other was bald, white with black blots. They could never be let out in case any normal sized dog took them for rats and killed them. Then our lovely neighbours moved back to England. I introduced myself to the new incomers “if there’s anything we can do” and so on, as you do. The bloke treated me as though I were something he’d trodden in and believe me he’d know all about treading in stuff. They had six dogs. Yes six. Five white poodles and a black thing called Bastard. Well, perhaps it was Buster? I don’t hear too well. Then the Mayor moved in next to them with what my grandmother would have called his “fancy woman”. He has a dog like a runt Alsatian with scrofula. It’s a wild and terrified thing. I had a small flock of guinea fowl I had reared from keets (chicks). Just as they were a year old and at point of lay, the damned thing tore them all to bits. The stench of dog shit in the street was suffocating, not that the “dog lovers” noticed of course because that was how their houses smelt. The street was strewn with torn up rubbish created by the Mayor’s mad dog. Every time I stepped out of my house the deafening yap of dogs made me feel unwelcome in a community I’d lived in a lot longer than they had. There is something about the servility of dogs that makes them irresistible to their owners, who sometimes fail to distinguish them from children. This excessive protectiveness unfortunately does not induce the owner to take responsibility for “the loved one”.

Of course I am aware that there are many dog owners who are good and decent despite their dogs. Take my brother in law and his wife for example. Neither of them like dogs but they are kind folk so have ended up with three. They found one tied to a lorry and took it home. Then a “dog lover” threw a puppy over their wall, then a third dog they were looking after “wanted to stay”. Now they can’t go away, or into shops or eating places or any house that doesn’t already stink of dog, my brother in law spends every morning of his life picking dog shit out of the drive gravel and if they do by chance manage to slip away without the dogs they do nothing but go on about “having to get back” to them.

We British are famous throughout the world for our love of dogs. Almost as famous as we are for our hatred of children. Go to Nerja market any Sunday and try to find a single Brit stall that supports children. Then count those that support dogs and add those that will claim to in order to sell you something. I except the Lyons club of Nerja whose Spanish and Scandinavian members organise the market. The Lyons have a grown up perspective on life. Their projects bring succour to the poor.

Finally, may I apologise to those who searched “dogging” not expecting to find an article on dogs. Here is an off colour cartoon for you. Better luck next time.

Spanish Law and “The customs of the Pueblo”

There are no police in Cutar, it’s a long long way from the law

There are no police in Cútar so you had better get on with your neighbours. Cútar can’t afford a policeman, so it will be your neighbours and their neighbours who will say what goes and what doesn’t go, who’s in the right and who is in the wrong and whether or not you are a nice person. Offend one person and you may have offended an entire village if they all happen to be related.

It’s not that village people here reject law – quite the reverse, it’s that they are law abiding by instinct. Just try pushing in when there’s a queue. Of course it never looks as though there is a queue. It looks like a mob, but every single person in it knows their place. This is because each new arrival instinctively asks “cual es el última?” Who was the last one to arrive? Law abiding foreigners don’t often get that.

There are two sorts of law in Spain. There is official law, which includes regional (Andalucian) law, the law of Spain and Euro law and we all know what that’s like. Then there is “El costumbre del Pueblo”, or “How we do things here”.

The problem with official Andalucian/Spanish/European Law is that there is so much of it. The law-abiding citizen would be wise to avoid it as far as possible and keep his head down. A Spanish solicitor once advised me never to offer information to the authorities if they hadn’t actually asked for it because “it would make them suspicious”. A Spanish Guardia policeman once told me that he could almost certainly find me in breach of the law if he just looked hard enough. He wasn’t threatening me, just chatting.

To fish in Lake Vinuela you have to enrol on a course, pass an exam, buy public liability insurance, pay a rod licence fee, join the Vinuela fishing club and pay them. Trout not included

If you want to go fishing for example there are five licences – freshwater, freshwater with trout, beach fishing, boat fishing and boat fishing in a group. You have to take a course, pass an exam and get public liability insurance. The laws are made by the Andalucian environment agency who see no difference in public safety between fishing for minnows with a bobble float and blowing wild boar apart with a double barreled shotgun. Locals advise you to ignore the fishing laws, and in many places there is simply no one to enforce this maze of regulation.

In fact, in many areas of everyday life it soon becomes apparent that if you obeyed every regulation you would never do anything. European legislation requiring domestic dogs and cats to be chipped, for example, is entirely ignored. People here in the white villages haven’t even got round to neutering their pets, let alone chipping them. The Town Hall pins up a notice, and people simply don’t admit to owning a cat or a dog. They say they just feed them, put a roof over their heads and take them for walks. The Town Hall doesn’t mind. No one can say it didn’t do its bit.

Then there’s the village shop. It has a bench outside. Sometimes a couple of old men with a can of beer sit on it. The “official” law requires it to have a bar licence and an off licence as well as a grocers licence.

But who is going to enforce all these laws? It’s cheap to write laws but expensive to enforce them and villages have better things to do with their cash than spend it on officials with clipboards. This sort of thing used to drive my old Dad mad. He was for ever complaining that the “Continentals” (actually he meant the French) said one thing and did another and this is quite true, they do.

Take the European directive on straight bananas. Actually we all know (don’t we?) that there was never any such directive. This was just a fantasy headline from the Daily Mail trying to trick the public into buying it’s arse-rag of a newspaper. But suppose it had been true? Well, someone here would have put up a notice and we would all have got on with our lives, straight bananas not withstanding. This is different from the UK, which would have set up straight banana eradication targets, a committee, prosecuted those caught on CCTV eating a straight banana and run straight banana detection vans.

The Guardia police station glares down on Almachar a symbol of the bad a old days and a reminder that there is still no truth and no reconciliation in Spain

When I say “Spanish Law” I am talking of course about everyday law – those domestic regulations that needle us all on a daily basis. I don’t mean burglary, assault and so on. These are serious crimes that call for a serious response and fortunately for us Spain has every imaginable sort of policeman to deal with them. There are local ones, national ones and the Guardia Civil who used to be Franco’s bully boys and now do the traffic. In Almachar you can see the biggest Guardia police station in the Axarquia. It was a garrison used to house the police and their families in the post Civil War days when this was called “Bandit country”. Every year or so they will stroll through Cútar village looking hard with their mirror sunglasses, gelled hair, automatic weaponry and handcuff and truncheon set. On the doors and bonnet of their cars is the hateful symbol of the tied rods and axe. This used to be the emblem of the Roman Centurion and was coined by Benito Mussolini when he became the father of Fascism in 1919.

Guardia badge. Fascist rods and axe in the background, royal crown of Spain above. And a sword

So local people have mixed feelings about the Guardia. You wouldn’t necessarily go and ask one the time. Of course they no longer get to break your legs just because they suspect you of something. But that isn’t because they don’t want to.

In fact all sorts of authority is mistrusted here. The police because historically they have not shown themselves to be on the side of ordinary people, the legislators in Madrid because Madrid is a long way away and Andalucia views Madrid more or less as Scotland views London.

So the Costumbre del Pueblo is the way neighbours solve problems. This avoids and sometime evades formal law, which is always operated by expensive third party “experts” – lawyers, solicitors, the local and regional authorities and the police. Spanish law recognises the “customs of the village” and will often has a coda that says “So long as nothing in this statute contradicts local customs”. These codas are especially strong in matters such as marriage and land disputes.

So the first principle of the Custom of the village is to Live and let Live. In other words, so long as your neighbour isn’t hurting you or anyone else, don’t shop them to the authorities. Endless petty land disputes that often break into tit for tat vandalism, noise pollution, use and abuse of animals, building development without permission, parking disputes, cleaning disputes, responsibility disputes are all best solved informally. Live and let live is an ancient and special thing that village neighbours can give each other and town neighbours cannot.

The second principle is “Deal with your neighbour”. Yesterday my neighbour’s dog slaughtered my flock of guinea fowl. I had five that I’ve raised for a year and they were about to breed. It was my duty to bring this matter to my neighbour’s attention so I did. My neighbour, who happens to be the Mayor behaved impeccably. He apologised, gave me a rather badly fried almond from the large bowl of nuts he was eating and a small Aspidistra, which I didn’t really want because we have Aspidistras coming out of our ears. More importantly, he wired bits of old bed head and scrap chipboard all over his patio wall “to keep the dog in”. It didn’t, but it did convince observers that he was making every effort to respond to my complaint. In my experience neighbours always respond to a reasonable complaint. No money changed hands. It would not have been costumbre.

The third principle is “Only get outside help as an absolute last resort”. When we first came here someone pinched our wheel barrow. I was going to report it to the police. The neighbours were aghast “Its kids” they said by way of explanation. So I did nothing and somebody’s rusty and battered barrow appeared outside our door a few days later by way of compensation. We duly found our new one down a ravine minus its wheel, which was no doubt on some one’s Go-Kart. What would I have looked like as the Guardia hauled away two children in chains? And they would have done – what’s the point of having chains if you don’t use them?

And the final and most important principle of the Costumbre del Pueblo is that “You can never win, so stop trying! ” Think about it. To bring a “village” action against your neighbour you first have to “denounce” him. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. Denunnciar means to report. So. You might lose the action, which would be the best outcome. But suppose you win and the entire village knows you have done their brother/father/uncle/cousin/second cousin once removed in the eye? They will make you wish you’d lost even when you haven’t!

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Posted in culture, History, Me in Andalucia | Tags: Andalucian culture, Andalucian white village life, Costumbre del pueblo, Custom of the villages, Ex-pat life, Spanish Fascism, spanish judiciary, Spanish Law

Posted by: puebloman | October 21, 2014

Chefchaouen and the gentle art of Haggling

Women selling mint and coriander in the medina at Chefchouen

Women selling mint and coriander in the Medina at Chefchaouen.(Photo by Jude Farrar) Every so often one sails into the square with a tray full of toffee sized soaps wrapped in cellophane and dubiously perfumed. One for 10 dirham (€1). Buy one and you get three for 20 dr (€2). Do that and your friend gets a special offer. And so on . . . these women are a lot sharper than they look!

When I was very young and lived in Portsmouth, me and mum would go to Charlotte Street market when she wasn’t at work or being a post-war housewife, and insult the market traders. She took me to the market to show me what would happen to me if I didn’t work hard at school. Mum worked at Marshall’s and at Woolworth’s and thought herself a cut above stall holders. “I wouldn’t be so thick with them” she would say, which I’ve worked out means that she wouldn’t help them cheat her. She was very sharp, loudly pointing out to me in my push chair, that the brilliant display on their stall was not what you got when you bought the fruit. You got the “pecked stuff” behind the counter. She would insist on the trader dismantling his display, although for all her bluster I can never recall her asking for a reduction in the price. She would feel demeaned. If she was buying something big like a ‘fridge and she had cash though, she would expect a bit off.

Taking the moral high ground and striking a threatening pose was enough to ensure that you got value for money in weight or quality or both and that the trader would be less likely to cheat you. If you returned to the same trader regularly, you could expect him to give you a special deal – “Ah Mrs Perry! I have something here you might like – kept some back for you!” and so on. It was up to the trader to add value to the transaction and keep his customer. As I got older, if I came back from the market with a “Rolex” watch powered by an elderly cockroach that expired in twenty-four hours, or a bag of overripe fruit that would yield under the weight of mother’s finger, she would look me in the eye and say “He saw you coming”.

Markets haven’t changed much since then, though there has never been a custom in English food markets for the buyer to try to haggle down the price of the goods. Can you imagine going to the poncy London Borough market today and saying ” A hand-crafted Cornish pasty with slivers of Dexter topside, small-diced French fingerling potatoes and “hand-shaved” Kentish swede for eight quid? I’ll give you two, and think yerself lucky!” I don’t think so.

The great British car boot and the old flea markets on the other hand, now sadly “cleaned up” by the general gentrification of the inner cities can still be still great theatres of British barter. My wife Judy is obsessed, and has hauled me along to them for decades saying “you never know!” And she’s quite right. I once went to a car boot looking for a second-hand cello bow and a 1960’s retro coffee grinder. I found both and knocked each one down for a fiver, on the first stall I came to.

My friend, my name is Ali, and you must buy from me today because tomorrow I am gone. In the morning I leave for Fez, then to Marrakech and thence into the desert sands to emerge, God willing, but when? Take a photograph my friend as a token, and buy today. For we may never meet again .

So why are Brits so gauche and unconfident when it comes to bargaining and buying in a Moroccan Souk (arabic expression meaning “the market neighbourhood)? When I talk to friends they seem worried about “hassle” and many otherwise adventurous tourists are put off by “hassle”, but surely “hassle” is really only cultural difference? In the mother country we Brits are “hassled” day and night waking and sleeping, to buy things we neither want nor need. There is hassle on billboards, radio, television to buy buy buy – much more violently than any Moroccan street trader who invites you into his shop. In our country “hassle” doesn’t stop at the street either. It comes right into our living rooms and bedrooms. At the moment I am watching an advert for biotic (or is it bionic?) yoghurt. Five beautiful women of a certain age are discussing how they pass wind while enjoying a morning coffee in one of their kitchens . I begin to yearn to join that happy band, or at least to transform my kitchen into an ideal, cosy, fart free idyll by the simple purchase of a moderately priced dairy product. Hassle. I am endlessly slapped in the face by the orange and red plastic of hamburger joints – colours that make me drool for a slab of minced beef like an experimental dog. I’m not offended by this slurry of adverts because it’s normal life. We are hassled en mass. It is normal and ordinary, we buy and sell like mad things and that’s why we are richer than Moroccans. I don’t know what a Moroccan market trader would make of it though.

One difference is that for us shopping is a literary experience. The prices are all written down and we like to read them and read the product description. Shopping is also private. We have an internal private discussion with ourselves about whether to buy without the shop keeper interrupting. So when that market trader comes up to me in the Souk and makes me an offer I can’t refuse I feel “hassled”. Of course it isn’t hassle! Why shouldn’t I accept an invitation to go into a shop to drink green tea? Or into someone’s brother’s shop that just happens to be on the way to where I actually wanted to go? What’s wrong with meeting a young man’s mother, who is in fact a virgin? Well perhaps not . .

No photos! What do you want? Here is a man, there are fish. What more to say?

No photos! What do you want? Here is a man, there is fish. What more to say?

I lost my fear of being sold into white slavery when I turned sixty, so here are my tips for surviving the Souk.

My first tip is to SMILE. I don’t say this as an expert in smiling. My mother used to say “For God’s sake smile! It’ll change your life!” I didn’t and it didn’t. Mum was not renowned for her smile either so perhaps it’s genetic. When I was in the Navy I was called to the captain’s cabin to be told that my face was bad for morale. So before I go a haggling I practice smiling in front of the mirror.

Always smile when you are saying “No”. It eases the pain for both parties. Being offended is part of the salesman’s tool kit so don’t offend by expressions of irritation or tightness. Ideally, come across as a fruity old buffer who loves everyone and agrees with everything. If someone invites you down a side alley, smile wave and say something like “Of course dear heart!” as you walk in the opposite direction. Agree that the rug is beautiful, the only one of its kind, is made by a co-operative of starving women, and laugh charmingly when he asks you to buy.

Secondly KNOW YOUR PITCH. At today’s rate a Moroccan Dirham (MAD) is worth about €0.90, so if you estimate ten Dirhams to the euro you will be about right. If a trader wants 500 Dirham for a rug, he is asking for about €50. The convention is to offer just over a half of the asking price and settle at between two-thirds and three-quarters. The more you are pressured the more you laugh. “I couldn’t possibly pay that much”, “I simply can’t afford that” is a much better gambit than. “How dare you! Are you trying to cheat me?” Remember you are on holiday. You are not some scum bag ex pat in Africa to rip off honest traders, neither are you a fool who comes to Africa to be bullied into paying more than he would in Spain.

Travelling salesman with his brooms and brushes

Thirdly REMEMBER IT’S ALL A GAME. The stakes are much higher for the trader than they are for you. You are on holiday remember. The worst that can happen to you is that you pay a little more than necessary while learning to haggle. Look on it as a small tuition fee. He has to feed his family so he needs all the sales he can get. Very skilled traders can make you feel like a lifelong friend, or an imperialist interloper or a man who has traduced their honour, in a few minutes. Within a few more minutes they will have forgotten all about you and be on to the next customer. Whereas if you are inexperienced or like me you will cling on to the feeling of having been “done” and seethe all week.On no account give in to the temptation to feel guilty. Guilt is the first step to anger and if you get angry there goes your holiday

. Goat trading in the main square

PAY FOR HELP. You won’t know where everything is and you’ll probably ask for directions or need other minor assistance from the locals. It’s a good idea to have some ten and twenty Dirham notes in your pocket. These represent one or two euros. If someone physically takes you where you want to go, does some research for you, enlists other local help, guides you through the crowd to the restaurant you are looking for, a small tip completes the transaction and usually ends the relationship. It’s an efficient way of getting round a strange place and your generosity doesn’t actually cost you much.

Last of all,put yourself into the hands of God, even if you are an atheist. ITS NOT YOUR FAULT. You will win some and you will lose some. There is an element of luck and chance in the art of haggling, and you are never entirely in control. Enjoy your winnings and forgive yourself your mistakes. You can make a mistake just as easily in a conventional British store. When I think all that yoghurt I ate – and I still fart like a trooper!

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Posted in culture, History, Me in Andalucia | Tags: bartering in Chauoen, bartering in souks, Ex-pat life, how to barter, Moors and Christians, the art of bartering

Posted by: puebloman | October 11, 2014

Chefchaouen, a long weekend in the Blue City of Morocco

The original blue pigment from what I have read, was derived from a type of Murex shell, which is usually a shade of royal purple once prized by the Romans and Byzantine empires. Is was brought by the Jews, to whom it is sacred

The original blue pigment in which Chefchaoen is painted was made by grinding a special type of Murex shell. Murex also yields a shade of royal purple, which was prized by the Roman and Byzantine empires. The blue was brought to the town by Jews, to whom it is sacred

In 1970 I was an officer under training in the Royal Navy. In my second year I was posted to HMS Eagle, docked at Gibraltar for refit. Gibraltar is the Croydon of the Costa del Sol, boring as hell and remarkable only for duty-free fags. The captain decided to send us on “exped”. We were to walk the Rif Atlas mountains with no kit under the command of an army chap known as the “Mad Major”. He packed a heavy revolver but was better company in the open air than cooped up in a dry dock. We flew to Tangier in what felt like a motorbike with wings, and bussed to Tetuan. From there we walked into the hills, sleeping in the open under huge stars, hiring donkeys to carry our packs from village to village. In those days the towns were edgy and violent but in the villages we experienced the genuine and ordinary kindness of people much poorer than we were.

The blue washed streets are restful to the eye after the starker white villages of Andalucia

Well, that was some time ago. These days I prefer my holidays a bit less swashbuckling, so when we started to plan a weekend in Morocco with a couple of friends we looked for somewhere reliable that we could explore on foot for a couple of days. We wanted an exotic, African setting with enough home comforts to make the experience a relaxing one. These included having a nice bed to sleep in, some good eating places, and retail opportunities that didn’t involve getting chased down the street or “hassled” as our friends put it. So we chose to explore the Medina at Chefchaouen or Chauoen – the Blue City of Morocco, which lies about one and a half hour’s drive south of Tangier.

Chaouen is related to Andalucia and in some respects extends it because to this little town, tucked in a fold of the mountains and hidden from the world, many Jews and Moslems fled, persecuted and expelled from Spain by Spanish Christians in 1560. These refugees bought an additional level of skill learning and culture to an already mature civilization, and also an understandable hatred of Christians. No Christian was admitted into the city until 1920, when the Spanish army marched in and the it became part of Spanish Sahara. Since those times this deeply orthodox Moslem city has opened itself to foreign visitors while maintaining its traditional lifestyle. The Medina itself is populated by arab workers and, at a time when everything beautiful has its price, hasn’t yet been flogged off to rich foreigners.

As a tourist you are never sure how you will be received because the whole country is in a turmoil of transition regarding its attitude to foreigners. Tourism is a major source of income for Morocco and like Andalucia it knows that if tourists run roughshod over its culture it will soon have nothing left to to sell.

My wife Judy did all the work planning this. She booked a long weekend (2 nights) for four of us in two double rooms. You can extend to three nights for a bit extra. She used an agency called SMS vacaciones, and booked an “Escapada a Chaouen” holiday. Judy “upgraded” our accommodation for an additional €15 per head. We have found that it’s good value to do this. The entire package cost €703.12. That’s about €178 per head. The package includes return ferry ticket from Tarifa to Tangier, transport by car/bus to Chauoen and back, and two nights bed and breakfast in the “Dar Echchauoen”. “Dar” means big house, but it is in fact hotel like in the sense that it does have a permanently manned reception but has no bar. There are about ten hotels to choose from (slightly different prices) and one is called the Parador. It isn’t a real Parador. It has a bar serving beer and spirits at exalted prices, poor value food and possibly the filthiest toilets in Morocco so avoid it. We were very pleased with the Dar Echchaouen and with the whole package we got from SMS. This consisted of vouchers for the boat, transport and hotel plus Mapfre travel insurance and papers for passport control.

There are hundreds of little workshops honeycombing the narrow streets of the Medina. Carpenters, silversmiths, tailors, loom weavers, shoemakers and so on. This is a handcarver’s workshop selling walking sticks, honey pots, bowls, kitchen utensils and knife handles

Our ship, a turbo-catamaran called a “Jet” left Tarifa at 12 am and we had to check in an hour in advance. The journey from Velez-Malaga took three hours including a break for me. I was the only driver so I insist on a break if I feel even a bit sleepy. I always fall into a deep sleep immediately, and I am completely refreshed after 15 minutes. Then I can drive all day. The car trip including the break took three hours and cost about €15 in toll roads round Marbella. These roads are good value especially if, like me, you drive an elderly and beat up Kangoo that finds it hard to overtake.

Tarifa, though further west than Algeciras, it is a much nicer place to leave your car for the weekend. While Algeciras is a scabby port teaming with scum bags and wide boys, Tarifa has the genteel air of a broken down seaside resort. We parked for nothing just outside of its little port. The sea crossing lasted about an hour and on board you have to queue up to hand in your entry paper and get your passport stamped by immigration.We were picked up at Tangier by Luxotour, who I suppose were subcontractors. Being the only travellers for that trip, the four of us were driven across country in a people carrier. I fell asleep and am told I missed a lot – roadside markets, roadside displays of pottery and crafts, super rich and super impoverished urban and rural development, peasant ladies in eccentric straw hats and so on.

We were driven to the hotel at ChefChauoen where the driver arranged to meet us for the return journey. The hotel was very good. We were taken to a suite of rooms consisting of two double bedrooms each with balconies with a fine view of the city. There was a large lounge with a flat screen television and a fridge. We had asked for double, not twin beds. In Spain this request is always ignored and you always get singles. These rooms had linkable singles and they had been linked to create huge comfortable doubles. The walk-in shower was powerful with unlimited hot water. The room suits were set in gardens including a swimming pool and a large tent against the sun with loungers inside and out. At night waterfalls were turned on and lit and the gardens lit by oil lamps. Breakfast consisted of a variety of local breads muffins and pancakes with butter jam honey and savoury spreads. There was coffee ad lib and fresh orange juice. The hotel was five minutes walk from the Medina.

The main square of the Medina is an attractive place to have a coffee and watch the world go by. Animals are traded, sellers arrive and depart, gaggles of children make their way to school and columns of tourists trudge on led by an umbrella. To one side of the square is the Fort and its gardens enclosed by the old city walls , open to tourists. On the other side are the main square restaurants. Shop around to find a fairly priced coffee and use this bar as you meeting point. A coffee should be about 10dr or one euro – the same as in a cheap Andalucian bar.

There is very little “hassle” apart from the odd small boy selling key rings or with a single euro to exchange for local currency at an enhanced rate. “why aren’t you at school?” gets rid of them.

We sallied to and fro our bar/meeting point along the labyrinth of little winding streets stuffed with tiny workshops in which hand workers were producing a huge variety of traditional goods. Chaouen is famous for its crafts and it is said that the craftsmen of Fez and Meknes have trained in Chaouen. The people of are charming – reserved, courteous and helpful.

Two tips. If you are alchoholically inclined like me, take some booze. Chefchauoen is a city of 40,000 people and I have no doubt that alcohol can be got at a price somewhere, but not in the Medina, which is the specially holy part of the city. At the hotel they told us that they could do us a favour and “find” us some alcohol, but it would be expensive (not expensive for our sort of people of course said the receptionist). The alcohol had to be drunk privately in our rooms. Had I thought ahead, I could have packed half a dozen bottles (no! less than that) and had a quiet drink on my balcony before and after going for a meal. The hotel is fine about discreet drinking. You are not supposed to carreer into the pool singing “My way”. As it was I almost diluted myself beyond redemption with bottled fizzy water. We were forced into the hideous “Parador” for a tiny bottle of weak beer (wine only served with meals) or a miniscule shot of whisky for €4 and €8 respectively. The interior of the hotel reminded one of Hackney social services ( not that I’ve ever been there!). Some so called “designer” had hung railway sleepers from the ceiling by chains. If you feel you might have to avail yourself of its servicios, make sure you go to the lavatory BEFORE you leave your hotel.

If you are a dope head on the other hand you are fine. I have no idea where or how you would buy marijuana, but the fields around the city are literally bursting with it, and is called kif.

My other tip relates to the first and is also about the holiness of the Medina. The “call to prayer” does not respect your need for a good sleep or a siesta. The call itself blares out on speakers and happens all day and night but the call at 4.30 pm and 4.30 am were most memorable to me. They were recorded, not live. No doubt the Imam was in bed enjoying one of his mistresses.

Street children playing

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Posted in culture, Me in Andalucia | Tags: a weekend in Morocco, Andalucian culture, Chefchaouen, Moroccos blue city, the Blue City of Morocco

Posted by: puebloman | September 18, 2014

Mangoes at the Mayorista

Mangoes at the Mayorista. Three times last year’s crop

According to Keats, September is the season of “Mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Not here in the Axarquia though, where we small farmers dream every night of mists and mellowness. Any time of year will do.

Now in September we are experiencing the worst drought in 150 years and the hills, usually green all through the year are starting to fade under the blistering sun. Of all the mixed fruit of the little hill farms, almonds have suffered the worst. Many almond orchards are dead or dying. Muscatel grape, the absolute cash staple and icon of the region, has this year produced only half its expected crop. Thirsty avocados are wilting, the citrus is crisping and curling and it’s touch and go for any baby fruit tree that hasn’t, so to speak, got its feet under the table. Mangoes on the other hand, contemptuous of the weather, have produced record crops, three times the weight of last year’s, now tipping 20,000 tonnes, with an expected total of 25,000 tonnes by the time the late varieties have been gathered at the end of October.

Our little parcela of mixed fruit includes a couple of dozen mango trees and we are presently harvesting and taking them to market. They are our only cash crop.

We have a Kangoo van (of course) that takes about twenty five standard mango crates, so we can get about 150 kilos of fruit at a time to market. We would normally have sold them at the co-operative in Trapiche, but it has mysteriously closed down and the nearest now is at Algorrobo. So this year we decided to market our little crop commercially, at the “Mercado Mayorista” in Velez-Malaga.

We usually cut our mangoes in the evening when the sun goes down. We try to take the best and biggest first to offer consistent quality and hope that the whole “lot” will make a premium price at auction. You have to cut mangoes with three or four centimetres of stem on them so that burning sap from the cut doesn’t squirt into your eye or over the fruit, lowering its value. Mangoes are like pears – wonderful on their day but like wood if not ripe enough and rotten tasting if overripe. So you have to cut them when green and let them ripen together in their crate. The fruit needs a good week of ripening time left in it if the greengrocer is to show off the fruit in very best condition and ready to eat.

We sell our fruit to the Atencia Brothers, who ship it out in great articulated lorries

We cut fruit Sunday evening and set off first thing on the Monday for the Mayorista, rattling past serried ranks of baby mangoes that now cover the hills. In the winter these babies are wrapped in fleece because frost kills mangoes.That’s why the southern Axarquia is the only tiny part of Europe where it’s possible to grow mangoes commercially. God help the rural economy if we get a frost! In the summer baby mangoes each wear a smart green plastic sock to stop the sun roasting their little trunks.

A hill of baby mangoes in their winter fleece.

The Mayorista market consists of a massive warehouse with a cafe/bar on one end. Driving in from the direction of lake Vinuela it is unmistakable with its huge car park and great freight lorries. Surrounding it are smaller warehouses that supply all needs from those of agribusiness to those of ex patriot garden lawns. When we came here ten years ago, we thought that “mayorista” meant “elderly”. Of course “Mayorista” also means wholesale and this market is where the greatest as well as the tiniest farmers (us) bring their produce to have it auctioned. At this time of year the warehouse is a harvest festival of produce – you can find chestnut, cherimoya, mango, raisins, runner beans, almonds, melon, tomato, peppers, and so on and so on. The gateways are filled with small retailers and grocers filling their vans with the week’s stock of fruit and veg, while great articulated lorries at the other end are loading tons of produce to heave around the world. But this market is not just for wholesale buyers. You can buy as little as a single crate here, so anyone planning a vegetarian fiesta or any sort of fiesta would do well to drop by. Drop by anyway, the mercado is well worth a visit and browsers are tolerated so long as they don’t get them selves run over by farmers, barrow boys and hall porters weighing and stacking the fruit.

The” Atencia Brothers” are the Mayorista agents for mangoes. I enter the reception/weighing post. There are two administrative staff. The most important is a man who bears a moustache consistent with his authority. He does nothing but clap people on the back, shake hands with farmers and look sceptically at the fruit. His assistant, a young woman, is run off her feet. I wait in the queue until there is literally no one left.

Reception room and weigh bay at the Atencia Brothers

She throws me a venomous look.“Dime”. I blotted my copybook last week when signing for my mango crates. You have to sign on a triplicate pad, and of course when I got the bottom copy, it had no marks on it at all. I showed it to her, remarking in what I thought was a light-hearted and charming manner, that I hadn’t seen carbon paper used in business since 1984. She was not amused. She remembers me.

“Cuanto?” I am at a loss. How many? “Twenty five” I reply in my finest Castilian Spanish. “Twenty five mangoes?” she sneers, the hint of a grin playing on her thin lips. “Crates” I say. “YES. HHHHHOW MENY?” She tosses me the gob of atrocious English, spoken slowly and loudly, reminding me of a London bus conductor of the 1950’s addressing an Asian immigrant. “You mean the weight?” I say. “I don’t know what they weigh. You’re supposed to weigh them.” I say, indicating the huge weigh plate next to her. She looks past me, gesturing exasperation to the amused farmers gathering in the background. It transpires that I am supposed to guess the weight of my fruit. She then has it weighed and dispels my fantasy of what I think I have produced. She then writes down the actual weight in triplicate using carbon paper, giving me the bottom copy. Again it has no marks on it, so she writes the weight in very large numbers, so that my feeble foreign brain can grasp it. A hundred and forty-three kilos. They take 14%. I shall be lucky to clear 50€ for the lot. Pay day is in November. They require my NIE number for tax purposes.

When Maria and Antonio, our neighbours sold us our parcela of sub tropical fruit trees, they told us that they were the very first farmers in the Axarquia to grow mangoes. Well they would, wouldn’t they? In those days apparently you couldn’t market them – the wholesalers didn’t care for new-fangled ideas, so Antonio had to sell them from a van direct to restaurants and hotels for “enormous” amounts of money. It’s very different today. Five years ago farmers tipped their lemon crop into the Rio Velez saying it was cheaper to do that than to take them to market. Oranges and lemons were coming in from Morocco, Valencia was undercutting the Axarquia so farmers pulled up and burned their citrus groves and planted mangoes instead. Today grape farmers say that it takes as much work to produce a muscatel pasa (raisin) as it does to produce a mango. A raisin weighs next to nothing whereas a mango weighs a kilo. So where they can, they are ploughing up the grape and planting mango. Avocados need water now, just when there isn’t any but once a mango tree is established it can swell and set fruit even in times of drought. Obviously, where the avocado is dying, plant mangoes. Same with almonds. So this landscape of sub tropical mixed fruit is losing almost by the month the extreme beauty of its cultivated hills. The huge range of produce, the mixture of shape colour shade and texture is giving way to a vast uniform army of mangoes with their serried ranks of glossy palmate evergreen leaves. As the fruit floods and overwhelms the market the price it fetches of course, plummets. Farmers are very conservative and reluctant to take an innovative step unless it feels safe, but once their neighbour makes a profit, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Fashion in mangoes also changes as the competition hots up. Ten years ago our “Tommies” were the tops, but last years the Mayorista only wanted “Osteen”. Any fruit farmer will tell you that you can’t change your fruit trees like your underwear. It takes five years to rear a tree from sapling to fruit-bearing . And the price per kilo! Two years ago we got eighty cents per kilo for our best mangoes. This year we will be lucky to get fifty. Fifty cents? I’m going fishing for tourists. They are the best crop I know!

Sensation. Ready to eat and sweet as honey

Ready to eat late cropping variety called “Sensation”. The size of a man’s fist and sweet as honey

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Posted in Food, Hill Farming in Southern Spain | Tags: agri-business, Hill farming in Southern Spain, mango, mango farming in Spain, mangoes, Mayorista, Spanish food, Velez-Malaga

Posted by: puebloman | August 20, 2014

Almond time

Fruit of the Almond (Prunus Dulcis)

We are bringing in the summer fruit, Summer harvest, like the winter harvest reminds me of childhood Christmases in England. Our fig trees are heavy with higos, the second crop. These figs are the little sweet fruit, very different from the fat watery brevas of spring. Judy sterilizes them in boiling water for a few seconds, threads them on wooden skewers and hangs them from our clothes horse to dry. I remember summer figs as Christmas treats, squashed into a box and dusted with something white that wasn’t sugar. Flour I think.

Almonds are also ready and here in the hills they need to be picked immediately at the height of the summer heat when the caulk splits back to reveal a fat wet nut inside. If you don’t shuck almonds as soon as they are ready, even a little shower of rain will make the case roll back over the nut and stick to it like glue. Then it’s hell’s own job to get the nuts out.

My childhood memory is of the Xmas mixed nut bowl that consisted largely of almonds mixed with walnuts hazelnuts and Brazils. Pistachios and other posh fripparies were unheard of. A child’s hand is not strong, so you hoped for a walnut that would shatter satisfying under the crackers. Failing that a hazel nut, and finally you could try several Brazils in the hope that one might split and you could pick out the meat with a fork. Almonds were hopeless. You might as well try to crack a steel nut on the end of a bolt. If Uncle Fred came round on Boxing day, he might get your Dad’s four pound claw hammer and smash almonds in the kitchen, against one of your Mum’s delicate working surfaces, which never looked quite the same again. By the time you took the decorations down and everything had gone – the Cadbury’s selection box, Huntley and Palmers’ mixed biscuits, peanuts and raisins, dates, dried figs and the mixed nuts – the almonds at the bottom of the bowl remained. Mum would decant these into a smaller more decorated bowl and put them on the side until about June, where they attracted spare stamps, hair grips, paper clips anonymous keys and the like. She would then dust them down and slip them into a paper bag next to the spare crackers and serviettes, ready for next Xmas. Like people, almonds get harder with age.

The ancient almond trees on our parcelas however, are good as gold.

Cascade of flowering sweet almond trees

The trees are typical of the mixed fruit landscape of the Axarquia and stand out clearly with their soot black trunks. In January and February these are smothered in white or pink blushed blossom that shimmers and blows in the winter winds. The early blossom is vulnerable to hail and heavy rain bursts, however the Axarquia is more or less frost free so these cold-tender trees do well on more or less any terrain that’s well drained. They grow on the steep upper slopes where not much else will grow and while they respond mightily to a little TLC and some water, they don’t need it and once established will survive and produce on their own.

The almond is a tree of Chinese origin that spread into the middle east by merchants travelling along the ancient Silk Road.

Almonds come in packets, their shells, that keep them good for years and are highly portable and very nutritious, so were always a practical food for merchants on the move or nomadic tribes. They are a great source of vitamins and minerals if you more or less only eat grain – rich in calcium and vitamin E, high in protein and cholesterol free fat and mineral rich. Unsurprisingly in this era of celebrity fruit and veg., all sorts of superstitions abound regarding their status as a “wonder food” . These range from old wives tales to current medical fashion, all to be taken with an identically large pinch of salt, but here’s a list of the medically fashionable ones just for fun:

Almonds reduce heart attack risk, almonds protect the artery walls, almonds lower blood sugar, almonds aid weight loss, build strong teeth, aid brain function, moderate the nervous system and support the immune system. What a surprise. All you readers who aren’t stuffing yourselves with almonds must be amazed you are still alive!

Almonds may have come to Spain via the Romans (no not the Moors! They didn’t do everything!) who were very aware of their culinary merits and regarded them as an aid to fertility. Sugared almonds were given as wedding gifts and almonds were scattered like confetti at weddings.

Spain is now the second largest producer of almonds in the world, and Andalucia makes the largest contribution to that crop. Almonds are a drupe, which means that they are part of the family of plums and peaches and like almost all fruiting trees, they are cultivated by grafting fruiting wood onto more vigorous growing wood called root-stock. The growing root-stock on a modern tree is likely to be peach, but our old Spanish trees are grafted onto bitter almond.

Bitter almonds are produced by the wild almond tree, which is very vigorous. It is a sub species (Prunus amygdalus var. amara) of Prunus Dulcis and the little nuts taste bitter because they contain glycoside amygdalin. When eaten, glycoside amygdalin turns into prussic acid, which is hydrogen cyanide, the very theatrical and deadly poison popular in murder mysteries. We shouldn’t get carried away though, glycoside amygdalin is also present in apple pips and people who eat apples aren’t dropping dead. An adult would have to eat about fifty nuts to get ill, however it is illegal to grow or sell these nuts in the USA or the UK although they are very widely available in Spain.

Here in the village one or two bitter nuts are put into the mix of ground almonds for that added almond savour. Bitter almonds also figure in herbal remedies for spasms, pain and coughs. Volatile oils not to be taken by mouth are made from bitter almonds and these oils can also be produced from all the drupes that are the other members of almond family including apricot (Prunus armeniaca), peach (Prunus persica), and plum (Prunus domestica). Like the bitter almond, all these fruit stones contain glycoside amygdalin and the volatile oils made from them are considered poisonous.

Spain has a variety of sweet almonds. You can buy soft shell almonds these days but they are not Spanish. Spanish hard shell almonds are usually grown on dry farmed orchards and if, like ours they are on steep hillsides they are very difficult and dangerous to harvest. If you can find anywhere to lay an olive net, that’s the best way. Lay it round the tree and then beat the tree with a long cane. You always lose a percentage of the crop. Production from non irrigated trees is lower than on the large irrigated orchards, and sometimes our trees miss a year or produce every other year. But dry farmed almonds from the hills are of outstanding quality because of their high oil content which makes them moister and better flavoured. There are five main commercial types – Marcona, Largueta, Planeta, Valencias (Common Almond) and Majorca. The first three are native.

Our Marcona almonds. They are plump and very sweet. The darker ones are last years still hanging onto the tree

We have a big Marcona tree, and this yields our favourite almonds – five or six kilos every year with no water and no care. Regarded by the Spanish as the best dessert nuts, they taste like butter and make California almonds taste like wood. Marconas are ground up and mixed with Spanish honey to make finest nougat.

Foods and confections from almonds are almost too many to mention. Before they built the roads, ground almonds were a substitute for flour and as you would expect almond sauce is the ubiquitous dressing for any meat in the Axarquia, also the famous ajo blanco soup the “white gaspacho” is typical of this area. Many speciality almond biscuits and cakes are made here. Almond sweets with a hard white sugar coating called peladillas are a traditional Spanish Christmas treat. Spanish almonds are always used in the production of the highest-quality turrón and marzipan. At ferias and along the streets in winter arises the candy floss perfume of garrapiñadas, almonds coated with caramelized sugar. You can buy almonds roasted and salted on any street corner at any time of the year.

Grove of old almond trees in bloom

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Posted in Food, Hill Farming in Southern Spain, Me in Andalucia | Tags: almond blossom, bitter almonds, farming in Andalucia, farming in southern Spain, health benefits of almonds, Marcona almonds, Spanish almonds

Posted by: puebloman | July 19, 2014

Hill farming in southern Spain – Gallina Piñeira – a new race of chicken

These chicks are nine days old and live in a “brooder” – an artificial mother chicken

I thought you’d like to see these baby chickens. A month ago I ordered two dozen fertile eggs from Lugo in Galicia, north west Spain. They arrived the following day, 27 eggs packed tight in sawdust. I set 24 in an incubator, 5 were clear (unfertilised) and from the remaing 19, 14 hatched.

Gallina chick, Piñeira with full eye make up

Gallina Piñeira chick with full eye make up

Piñeira are a new race of chickens developed from the campo (countryside) chickens of Galicia, developed by a vet who has a special interest in poultry in association with elderly chicken farmers of Galicia, whose chickens were almost wiped out by the incursion of the Rhode Island Red – an American commercial chicken quicker growing and more productive than the Piñeira.

The breeding programme was started 20 years ago by a vet called Arzua Jesus Garcia Rodriguez who wanted to preserve a typical Galician hen. He wanted to preserve a non commercial, slow growing breed, a hen absolutely adapted to its environment, not needing special facilities to breed, nor a commercially fortified food.

Four chicks drinking from a dish. You have to put in marbles so they don’t drown

He aimed for a fertile breed that was a dual purpose bird, good for meat and eggs, capable of laying at least 150 per year with no special food or artificial lighting. Using local farmers he sought to use what remained of the existing gene pool to develop the rare breed that had existed before the arrival of the Romans 2000 years ago. So the chickens are a new breed and a rare breed and an ancient breed, which even in ancient times was on the verge of extinction because the size of the cock’s comb was an aphrodisiac symbol to the Romans, and the Piñeira has a small comb!

They are tough as anything – ballsy little birds already flying, which is unusual for domestic chickens. The cock bird when fully grown has a magnificent spectrum of colours from reds and yellow to the green sheend black, but the hen is patterned in brown and black and has the mottled feathers of a pine cone. Hence the name “Piñeira” – like a pine cone. The meat is supposed to taste like a cross between chicken and game. We will have to wait a while to find out!

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Posted in Me in Andalucia | Tags: Hill farming in Southern Spain

Posted by: puebloman | July 8, 2014

Wonderful carob

Carob (Ceratonia siliqua) is also know St John’s Bread or, in Spanish Algorrobo

In 1974, at the beginning of my working life, I joined something called a “co-operative” , based in Kentish Town. It was run by an elderly (we thought so anyway – he was in his 30’s) American gentleman who described himself as a Maoist. He paid University graduates £6 per week – but only if they needed it. No stamp no pension no holiday pay, real communism in action. He spent the day reinventing the world and we challenged it by debating, for example, whether it was acceptable for us to have our own clothes or whether a communal wardrobe might make life fairer. We thought we stood for life and liberty, but were really just another bunch of neo-puritans arrogant enough to think we could tell everyone else how to live.It was during that brief era of alternative careers.

Camden Council had moved the entire working class of Kentish Town out of their homes to build them smart new flats. The council subsequently discovered it didn’t have the money to do it and so had a load of empty property on its hands. Afraid of being squatted, it let houses go at a “peppercorn” rent to anyone who’d keep a building locked up and maintained. Terrible for ratepayers but who cared? We moved in, so did all sorts of other alternative types including purveyors of alternative food.

Just down the road from us was an “alternative” wholefood snack bar selling fashionable grey slabs of brown rice, lentils and barley, all cooked we were told with “kindness”, though how you can boil anything kindly defeats me. We were served by a person with yellowing skin and incipient herpes scarcely recovered from last night’s binge and trailing an unhappy two year old plastered with dirt and grease from a shop floor that smelled faintly of mice. In the shop window was a tray of Carob cake, touted as the “alternative” to chocolate which, we were told was “evil”. Don’t ask me why.

I was pruning our lovely Carob tree yesterday and all this came back to me, though I doubt the north London junkies ever knew where any of their their powders came from. The carob is a true native tree, not just to Spain but of the entire Mediterranean coast. It can grow right down to the seaside being salt tolerant. It thrives on drought, loves rocky terrain and will spring up to thirty feet high while your back is turned. I looked up to see its great shiny pods – hundreds of them among leathery glossy evergreen leaves that burn poorly and make the Carob tree the foresters’ choice when planting firebreaks in mountain forests.

Each carob pod contains a sweet pulp and several bean-like seeds. You eat the pod not the seeds, though the seeds have their use, being absolutely uniform in size and shape. This made them useful as a measurement of weight in antiquity. The word for “carob seed” in Greek kerátion(κεράτιον), evolves into the Arabic qīrāṭ (قيراط), which in the mid 15th century English becomes “carat” the unit measure for gold! Get it?

Carob pods, dried and ripened

Ground up Carob pod, raw or roasted is a very fine food, though its reputation has suffered partly because it is sold in “health food” shops as a substitute for chocolate. It is no more like chocolate than chicory is like coffee. It has its own flavour, more akin to caramel than chocolate, especially when roasted. Carob is also denigrated because here in Spain it was always the food of the poor peasant, resorted to in times of famine. Spanish farmers now feed it to their donkeys. Last year some enterprising mid European workers asked us and our neighbours for the right to glean the pods for animal food.

Processed and sometimes roasted and ground to a powder for human consumption it is quite expensive though you may think as I do that that life is too short to pick the pods, boil them, split them to take out the seeds, dry and roast them before pulverising them in a coffee grinder.

Bought or home made, carob is one of the finest and healthiest forms of sugar you can eat. The sugar content can be higher than 50 percent in varieties harvested for direct human consumption. Carob contains 7 to 16 percent glucose or simple sugar and 7 to 16 percent fructose or fruit sugar. It also contains 50 to 70 percent sucrose, which is like table sugar. The great difference between serving refined sugar and carob sugar is that carob is very rich in fibre and this slows the absorption into the bloodstream as well as contributing to a high fibre diet, making it a heart-healthy ingredient that can benefit your cardiovascular and digestive systems. One of the components of carob fibre is Pinitol, which has been shown to regulate blood glucose and therefore has potential value for diabetics. Carob flour has 41 grams of fiber per American cup — 2.4 grams per English tablespoon. To assess the difference between commercial sugar and carob sugar it’s useful to look at their position on the Glycemic Index. This tells you the speed with which sugar is absorbed into the blood stream. The quicker the absorption the worse the food is for you and the crankier the person eating it, because it produces a spike of high energy that suddenly goes out, leaving a depressive under energised person behind. The higher the GI number the quicker the absorption and the worse the food. Glucose syrup scores 100, carob powder scores 15.

Its worth mentioning micro nutrition in connecting with Carob – those ingredients which, occurring in miniscule quantities have created “wonder foods” out of fruit such as as pomegranate among the fashionably inclined urban middle classes. In 100 grams of carob flour there are about 200 milligrams of flavonoids and flavanols, which have anti inflammatory and anti oxidant functions in the body. They are supposed to benefit circulation and aid the burning of body fat.

If you want to buy carob flour and try it on your family before you discover that the public has read this, bought all the carob and put the price up, you can flavour milk with it, or add it to breakfast cereal or bake with it. It is useful wherever sugar, especially added sugar is required, though you will need more than if you used commercial sugar. Or what about the inevitable breakfast bar get say 100 grams of almonds, chopped 300grams of whole oats and 50 grams of sesame seeds. Roast them golden and let them cool. Then finely chop up 150 grams each of best Axarqian moscatel raisins and the same of best Axarquian figs. Add three or four tablespoons of carob flour and mix in enough softened butter to bind. Taste for sweetness and add a little honey if necessary. Press into a square pan and put in the fridge to set. Cut into fingers. Something like that!!

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Posted in Food, Hill Farming in Southern Spain, History, Me in Andalucia | Tags: carob tree, cheap spanish food, Hill farming in Southern Spain, Spanish carob

Posted by: puebloman | April 21, 2014

The little shops of Velez – Malaga

The Plaza Reys Catholicos looking south towars the Mercado Mayorista

The Plaza Reys Catholicos looking south towards the Mercado Mayorista

I grew up In Portsmouth in the 1950’s. In those days on each of the four corners of the street square was a shop – usually a family grocer. There you could buy everything you needed to live a respectable English life. Tea, butter, sliced bread from the “aerated” bread company (ABC), marmite, cabbage, smoked bacon bones, salmon and shrimp paste, black jacks, bangers, sprouts, sandwich spread, Bird’s custard, Daddy’s sauce, fruit salads, suet, malt vinegar, syrup of figs, salad cream, lard and so on. Rationing was only slowly slackening its grip upon our throats.

Although the corner shops were all groceries, they were nevertheless all different because they were all family businesses, each one with its unique profile for stocking, pricing and for customer service. The nearest thing to a supermarket was Marshall’s, where my mum worked. Sugar and flour were served in a cone of brown paper, orders were delivered by a boy on a bike with a basket on the front. Every Xmas a free tin of biscuits was delivered to each regular customer with a note thanking them for their patronage during the past year.

The American Empire changed all that. Modest grocery shop windows gave way to gaudy red and orange plastic frontages, to “Malls” and hypermarkets. The age of the bland ubiquitous “global” store had arrived. Private landlords and public councils saw the chance to impose swingeing business rates on small family enterprises and put them out of business. Only the moneyed classes retained their “boutique” butchers and “traditional”speciality traders. Today no Brit standing in a pseudo-American shopping Mall could tell if they were in Portsmouth, Birmingham or Aberdeen.

And that’s what I like about Velez Malaga and its surrounding villages. American shopping culture – if culture is the right word – has entirely passed it by. In the villages it’s easy to walk through a fly curtain and find you are not in the supermarket but in someone’s front room so modest is the frontage of the shop. It’s the same in Velez. You need to know where the shop is, because if you don’t it is not going to shout at you. And why should a shop blare out its presence? Everyone in their own communities knows where the butcher the baker and the candlestick maker are. After all, shops are for those who live around them not for tourists or passers by.

Velez itself is a glorious tumble of small family enterprises, each with its own character and unique quality. I am not being sentimental about this, it’s genuinely a relief to be able to choose what you buy instead of having the choice made for you by some remote marketing manager.

This is a description is of just one little nondescript street leading from the Plaza Reys Catholicos that I hope will demonstrate the texture and richness of the shopping experience here.

This little tile shop is crammed with hand made and hand finished objects ideal as presents

The street I’ve chosen is called Alcade Juan Barranquero and is best approached from the south. You park in or near The Mercado de Mayorista (the big wholesale market) and walk up the Explanada dela Estacion (see the bottom left hand corner of the map). You soon come to shop number 1, which is the rustic tile shop called “Rusticos Chamorro”.

It is a little family outlet for the typical “ladrillos” of the Axarquia. These range from the thick red “Barros” – typical floor tiles and bricks that are made locally and fired by the sun and in wood fired furnaces, to delicate hand painted tiles and Moroccan patterned tiles available plain, etched or painted. Many of the smaller, highly decorative objects sold here make nice presents. They are more original and better value than many market stall outlets and very much reflect the taste and interests of the people who run the business.

Walk to the corner to shop no 2. This shop belongs to José Berenguer Vigo who buys fruit and veg from Mercado de Mayorista (wholesale) down the road and retails it to the public by the box load.

Jose’s shop

Today strawberries and oranges top the bill but there are always sacks of spuds, big jars of verdiales oil and split green olives, fig bread, dried figs and raisins. This is a good shop to use if you are planning a party and need to make the occasional bulk buy. He is more expensive than the market but in my opinion better value. This is the point about small shopkeepers. They have unique skills learned from teachers in their family and we the customers benefit from that experience, particularly the skill to source the best local products and offer it at the best price.

Before turning left into Alcade Juan Barranquero, look across the street to shop number 3. It has an open front and is a wine bodega called Bodegas Magnums. It is quite small but offers a large number of regional and local wines. The typical wine produced in the villages is sherry like and sweet because of the warm local climate. However, the new wines of Almachar created by George Ordonez are rapidly becoming world renowned. He uses grapes from local growers in Almáchar on slopes too steep for any kind of mechanisation, which is farmed by hand and without irrigation in the traditional style of the Axarquia. The grape is the muscatel de Alejandria, from old, free-standing vines in slate and limestone soils. Many vines are between 80 and 100 years old. The muscatel grapes are picked in several stages for maximum ripeness. The resulting must is fermented in French oak and the fermentation is stopped by chilling. This is what produces a dry fresh table wine. Magnams stocks white, red and rose by Ordonez at about €13 a bottle. Reassuringly expensive, but you know you’re worth it!

Turning left into our street, we immediately come to the very flash shop no4 Bar El Rubio (Blondie’s Bar). It has a clean steel feel and a friendly engaged staff. Personally I don’t think much of their menu del dia, but they serve excellent fish and seafood, and are a good bet for a tubo y tapa.

Leaving that clean steely feel and moving on towards the Plaza, we realise with a shock we’ve gone from the sublime to the ‘cor blimey, with shop no 5 El reclamo, which is a great big old-fashioned pet shop of the sort that would be immediately closed down in the UK or anywhere in the north of the northern hemisphere. It has absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever and nothing you’d want to buy unless you eat millet. It sells canaries in tiny cages, dogs, chickens, ferrets, hamsters, partridges, quail, mice and cats all piled up on each other in cramped and barely sanitary conditions. It also offers haircuts for dogs and vetinary advice. I only include it because a) it is a genuine family business b) it reminds me of the 1950’s when I used to go to pet shops and buy great crested newts, slow worms and greek tortoises from a load packed into a crate like meat pies c) Because in the very middle of the pet shop street front is what I suppose is a sub let – what we used to call a “wet” fish shop called Pescados Pericos selling fresh fish. Not on Sundays of course and not on Mondays because there is no fishing on Sunday. Supermarkets by contrast don’t care how old their fish is nor were it comes from and sell whatever isn’t rotten six days a week.

Round the corner from El relamo is shop no 6 the Hal Hal butchers. This is also family. They have another branch on Torre del Mar. I use them for beef sausages, which frankly could do with a bit of pork fat in them, costilla de ternera, which my son, the celebrated London chef Stan Perry describes as “short ribs” – wonderful cooked slow in Rioja. Also rosewater and orange water, essential with mint and dates for cold orange salad, and salted black olives, a nice change from the split green ones that are local.

Hal hal butchers shop

Opposite El reclamo is shop no 7, my favourite vegetable shop ever, the Fruteria Vita. It’s a family business where mother and daughter work in the shop and brother is the buyer. Most of the produce comes from Algorrobo where the alluvial coastal soil produces top quality vegetables and salads. They source as far north as Zaffaraya and their main stock is strictly seasonal – strawberries now, cherries soon, then plums, peaches, mangoes in August with table and muscat grapes, then tangerines and a succession of citrus. They also sell “Cateto” (country) bread with a crunchy crust and heavy crumb and a range of (imported) dates, also confections of nuts. Sugared almonds are my favourite. As you can see from the photo, they also offer quality salt cod.

Shop window Fruteria Vita

Next to the Fruteria Vita is shop no 8 Bazar Chino – a truly grand family enterprise. I am assuming that everyone who works in the shop is from the same family, but what do I know? Last year I was accosted by a sophisticated Chinese female employee with impeccable English who explained the rudiments of LED lighting to me. I bought several bulbs, but unfortunately they were crap. All the little internal lights went out one by one. I should have gone to Leroy Merlin’s and paid 5€ a bulb. Nerertheless this is my absolutely favourite Chinese Barato (cheap shop). Jude and I buy all our cazuelas there and our son, the celebrated London chef Stan Perry took home bags of little tapas dishes last time he came out. Cazuelas are glazed red clay cookware. In the UK, in Heals a standard dish would set you back £15. Here they cost pennies. Also, if you want to go fishing, say, from the rocks around Nerja, you can set yourself up with rod, reel, line, keep net and lures for about €30.

Across the road is shop no 9 the Bar Capri, great for a pretentious del dia at only €8. Posh people from Nerja won’t understand, but up here in the hills, if we get a fillet of Dorada on the Del dia menu we think it’s Xmas.

Next to the Capri is shop no 10 a little butchers that specialises in fresh meat pattis, meatballs and burghers.

Next to Bazar Chino is shop 11 – a little Mercadona supermarket. I mention it only because the intrepid can park underneath and can get free parking if they buy anything. We recommend torrefacto coffee and white wine.

Since you have now arrived here at the fountain, three more shops come to mind. Look through the fountain and you can see shop no 12 Bar Niza, which opens at 6am so that other shop keepers, who open at 10, can have breakfast. And what breakfasts! A full Spanish, English, French or Norwegian is to be had. Churros and chocolate is available all day seven days per week and an a array of disturbing Spanish cake confections – whipped whale fat and sugar, glare at you through the cold counter. Niza has the air of faded, very faded Europe. What Donald Rumsfeld used to call “Old Europe”. Waiters in bow ties and faintly stained whites combine attention with contempt. pouring boiling milk into your cafe con leche until slightly after you screamed STOP! Judy and I hold it in great affection and always go there for a breakfast, or lunch or a teatime treat.

The Bar Niza for all day chocolate and churros

Shop no 13 the Albardoneria (which means the saddle makers) involves a two minute walk up the hill towards the town hall. It should convince you that you really don’t need to go to Malaga to buy leather. The front is all shoes, there are cabinets of leather cases and covers, a shelf of leather hats and at the back beautifully crafted stuff for horses and donkeys. It’s here I buy my Camper shoes for €30 because they have a continual sale of branded footwear.

For shop no 14 walk another fifty metres up the hill to find on your right the Charcuteria La Dehesa that sells fine jamon, cheese, a range of quality charcuterie and wine. Friendly expert staff are pleased to let you taste whatever you want.

This is a mere sketch of the variety and quality of produce and expertise available in little more than eighty metres of provincial side street, but what cultural richness! The shopping environment is not slick nor is it full of overt of subliminal instructions to buy. In fact it is quite a scruffy little area – not historic or special and yielding nothing to the needs of tourists or to the American delusion that to be “happy” you have to be constantly buying stuff you may or may not want. You have to do a bit of work to find what you need but it makes the shopping experience uniquely rewarding and very human. Get it now while you can. The slightest rise in prosperity will send the rent and rates through the roof, drive out the little people and let in the international chain shops and global thugs. Then Velez will be indistinguishable from Croyden.

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Posted in alcohol, culture, Drink, Me in Andalucia, wine | Tags: Andalucian culture, Andalucian food, Hill farming in Southern Spain, shop in Velez-Malaga, shopping in Velez-Malaga, Spanish food, Velez-Malaga

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The little shops of Velez – Malaga

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