Castillo de Santa Barbara

Like many towns in Spain, Alicante has a castle, Castillo de Santa Barbara. It is located in the center of the city on Mount Benacantil (elev. 166 m) and commands an excellent view of the bay and surrounding lands. The image of the mountain from the beach resembles a face and thus has been dubbed “the face of the Moor”.

The origins of the castle date back to the 9^th century and at the time of Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula. In 1248, the castle was captured by Castilian forces and was named after Saint Barbara, upon whose feast day the castle was recaptured from the Arabs.

From the 18^th century the military role of the castle declined and it was sometimes used as a prison. During the Spanish Civil War it was used by Franco in 1939 as a concentration camp for Republican prisoners.

From 1940 to 1963 it remained abandoned until it was opened to the public. Elevators accessed by a tunnel were installed to provide passage up to the castle from the beach area.

We, of course, climbed up to the top from the town, passing through the very scenic Calle San Rafael on the way up.

The castle is free to enter and you can purchase tours, workshops and access to other programs such as wine tastings, beer tastings and chocolate tastings.

Maureen tried to break up a fight while we were up there.

Standing on the ramparts, you can appreciate the strategic importance of the castle and enjoy some of the best views in Alicante.

Salud.

Photos around town

 Just a few photos from around town today. 

Advance team headed to the beach

Not available in the US!

Look closely, "cola" flavored antacid medication. Yum.

Mail motorcycles.

I believe this movie is called Freakier Friday in the US.  The title here translates to Put Yourself in My Place Again.  

Mr. Peabody anyone?

This is a small skateboard area dedicated to a Spanish man who tried to intervene during a 2017 attack in London - 3 terrorists set off a couple of bombs, included on the London Bridge, then drove along the street running over pedestrians, then getting out of their vehicle to stab several people. His actions allowed several people to get to safety. Sadly, he was killed. 

Sorry to end on such a somber note.  Only happy pictures next time.

Salud 

Miki

Bureaucracy! Damn Bureaucracy!

Spain is infamous for its bureaucracy. There are a myriad of registrations one must apply for in order to establish residency in the country and none of the processes are straightforward. On top of this, the government websites of the various agencies are difficult to navigate, especially if you are not a native Spanish speaker.

After our arrival in Spain, our first order of business was to find a long-term residence (defined as at least 6 months) in order to be able to start our registration process.

We were able to find a very nice two-bedroom apartment in the San Juan Playa area of Alicante. The complex has five buildings and includes amenities such as indoor and outdoor pools, a gymnasium, padel courts (similar to pickleball, but they use a slightly smaller tennis ball), and a multi-use court (basketball, tennis, soccer). The rent is very reasonable, and we are quite comfortable in our new abode.

To complete the lease we needed to open a Spanish bank account as the payment of utilities - gas, electric, water - are automatically deducted from the account. Once we had our apartment, we needed to register our address with the City of Alicante.  This required a pre-scheduled in-person visit (cita previa) at the town hall with the appropriate documentation.

We had retained the services of a lawyer to help us with the process, and she was able to set up the appointment and provide the application and list of documents we needed. The appointment went quite smoothly and efficiently, and we completed our registration within half an hour, receiving the necessary documentation.

Now we were ready to apply for our national ID cards (known as the TIE).  Full speed ahead!

Well, not so much. Getting appointments for the TIE proved to be a challenge.

You need to apply for an appointment with a local office of the National Police (who administer the national ID’s). Our lawyer was checking on-line daily for appointment slots with no luck. Each time it would respond that no appointments were available at that time.

Technically, we were supposed to get our appointments within the first three months of our arrival in Spain, but that date came and went.

We checked in with the lawyer several times and were always told that they "have not been able to book appointments in the province of Alicante for weeks". We were becoming quite discouraged by the process and looked into checking for appointments ourselves online. No luck. We noticed that there were two options for making appointments; with or without a CLAVE (?).

What the hell is a CLAVE? It is a digital registration obtained through the local government. We asked our lawyer about it and she said they had a CLAVE and were using it to apply with no luck.

We did Google searches for tips on getting an appointment and found a variety of suggestions (ideal time of day to submit request, contacting someone using bots/algorithms who then sold appointments, etc.).  For one week Maureen began obsessively checking for appointment availability multiple times a day to no avail. 

Finally, we decided to apply for a CLAVE ourselves in order to improve your chances of getting an appointment.

Dutifully we made an appointment with the city agency that issues the certificates and were told by the very nice lady helping us “Sorry, you cannot get a CLAVE because you don't have a TIE or national identity card”. Catch 22! Arrrrrrrgh! 

"... however what you need is a digital certificate". She helped us with that and we went home to try again.

Could this be the magic bullet? We could only hope. Alas, we checked and checked to no avail.

Maureen started obsessively checking again, this time clicking the box for "with CLAVE or digital certificate" and in just over 24 hours succeeded. Saturday at about 3 pm was the golden hour. Hallelujah!

We quickly made her appointment, then got one for me as well. Of course they were not on the same date, but at least we got appointments!

We notified our lawyer of our success, and she provided us with the list of necessary documents to bring.

But, one more snag. Checking the various web sites, it seemed our city registration form had to be issued within the previous three months. Ours was five months old. (Blood pressure rising)

We tried to get an appointment to renew the document, but were unable to do this in time for Maureen’s appointment. We decided to cross our fingers and hope that they would be lenient.

On August 6, Maureen emerged from the National Police facility with her approval in hand. Her actual ID card will take another month to get, but that is actually fast in Spain.

My appointment is not until the 27th of August, so a bit more of a wait, but at least we know what to expect now.

The lesson here is that while Spanish bureaucracy is complex and frustrating, the people who we have dealt with seem to acknowledge it and not be too hard-assed about it.

Salud.

 

Easter in Alicante

As we are sure our readers are aware, Spain is a VERY Catholic country and religious events are a big deal.

Easter, also known as Semana Santa (Holy Week) is one such major religious and cultural event.

The week is filled with processions where religious brotherhoods carry pasos (floats) through the streets. The floats are elaborate displays of religious imagery and usually depict either Christ or the Virgin Mary.

The floats are very heavy and the men, and sometimes women, carrying them must take frequent breaks during the long processions.

Along with the floats, participants dress in traditional clothes and are accompanied by marching bands which set the pace for the people carrying the floats. Some of the marchers hand out candies to the spectators as they proceed.

And then there are the Nazarenos (penitents) who are dressed in robes and hoods. Remind you of anything? The hoods symbolize a striving for closeness to heaven. 

The processions occur throughout the week and on a set schedule. This all culminates on Sunday when the brotherhoods march down the main thoroughfare in the city, one after another. Seating is set up along the sides as the processions last for hours and hours.

Kind of puts our celebration in the US to shame, don’t you think?

Salud!

Where the heck are we?

Well, first of all, we are in Spain. Some of you might remember your medieval history with the Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile) uniting their two kingdoms in 1469 when they married; the historical beginning of “Spain”.

Dating back to the 1830s Spain has been divided into 49 provinces (there are now 50).

After the dictator Franco died in 1975 Spain transitioned to a secular parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy (I’m not exactly sure what all that means). The new constitution was ratified in 1978. King Felipe VI is the current head of state. His daughter Leonor is his presumptive heir (only because he does not have a son).

With the new constitution the provinces were grouped together according to common historical, cultural and economic characteristics into autonomous communities (these are somewhat analogous to states in the US). In some cases, a single province became an autonomous community. For example, the province of Madrid is the sole province of the Autonomous community of Madrid, with the capital city being Madrid.

There are 17 autonomous communities (plus two autonomous cities Ceuta and Melilla which are actually located in northern Africa); you may be familiar with the names of some of these. They are: Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Balearic Islands (off the east coast, in the Mediterranean), Basque Country, Canary Islands (off the west coast of Africa, in the Atlantic Ocean), Cantabria, Castile and León, Castilla-La Mancha, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre, and Valencia.

Each community has their own president (which would be analogous to a governor).

We live in the city of Alicante, in the province of Alicante, in the Community of Valencia. The Valencian Community has three provinces – Castellón, Valencia, and Alicante. 

Alicante is on the east coast of Spain, on the Mediterranean Sea. Spain has a lot of coastline, with the Mediterranean Sea to the east and south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west (and a little bit in the southwest beyond Gibraltar).  The sections of coastline are named with our section being known as Costa Blanca (white coast).  If you zoom in on Alicante on google maps you’ll see a half circle shaped area facing southeast, overlooking the marina. That is the main downtown area. A separate area to the northeast of that, facing due east is San Juan Playa (St. John Beach) – that’s where we are. There’s a uninterrupted strip of beach about 5 ½ miles long. If we were to walk straight to the beach, this would extend about 2 miles to the south and 3 ½ miles to the north.

The longitudinal position of Alicante (0.49°) is almost directly in line with the borough of Greenwich in London, England, site of the prime meridium (0°). Yet England is in the Western European time zone (5 hours ahead of NH) and Spain is in the Central European time zone (6 hours ahead of NH). We have Francisco Franco to “thank” for this – he changed the time zone in Spain in 1940 in order to be aligned with nazi Germany and its occupied lands. This results in relatively late sunrise and sunset times for us (for example: sunrise/sunset times today in Portsmouth NH are 5:38 am/8:00 pm, and in Alicante are 7:08 am/9:08 pm;  Portsmouth is a bit further north, so has slightly longer daylight hours in the summer - and shorter in the winter). 

The globally spoken Spanish language (what you might call Spanish, or español), is also known as Castilian (or castellano), originating from the Kingdom of Castile (remember Isabella). 

Spanish (español/Castilian Spanish/castellano) is the official language of Spain. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language (after Mandarin Chinese) and the 4^th most spoken language in the world overall (after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani).

While Spanish is the official language for the whole of Spain and is spoken by the majority of the Spanish people in Spain, several regions within the country also recognize other official languages within their respective autonomous regions.  There is Catalan which is a co-official language in Catalonia, Valencia (where it is called Valencian, though it is the same language), and the Balearic Islands. Aranese (a dialect of Occitan) is also co-official in Catalonia. Thus, Catalonia has 3 “official” languages – Spanish, Catalan, and Aranese. Galician is co-official in Galicia, and is also spoken in Asturias and Castile and León.  Basque is co-official in the Basque Country and northern Navarre.

As I mentioned, we live in the Community of Valencia, so Catalan/Valencian is a “co-official” language. However, in practice, the majority of what we see and hear is Spanish (aka español/Castilian Spanish/castellano – too bad the names Catalan and Castilian sound alike; confused me for quite a while). Public transportation is a common place where you might see both languages. The photo shows a sign in the tram with the top being Catalan/Valencian, the middle Castilian Spanish, and the bottom English. You can see there is a lot of similarity between Catalan/Valencian, and Castilian Spanish.

In Barcelona, the heart of Catalonia, it is more common to see and hear both languages.

Who lives in Spain besides native born Spaniards?

According to a Wikipedia list of immigrants living in Spain by country of birth as of 1/1/2024, the leading country of origin is Morocco (with 1,092,892). #’s 2,3,5,6,and 7 are all South American countries. #4 is Romania. #8 is the UK (285,093), #9 is Cuba, #10 is France, and #11 is Ukraine.  The USA is all the way down at #30 (69,171).  The Spanish government has implemented a program to provide temporary protection to Ukrainian refugees, granting them residence and work permits. As of recent data, over 200,000 Ukrainian citizens have been granted this temporary protection.

License plates are standardized across the EU and most of the rest of Europe unlike in the US where the states use a wide variety of designs with state symbols, scenic landscapes, slogans, color schemes, etc …

Most European countries have license plates with a vertical blue bar to the left with either the EU symbol (12 gold stars in a circle) at the top and a letter code for the country at the bottom or the national flag symbol (if not in the EU) instead of the EU symbol. The rest of the plate is a white background with the plate number in black.

The example photos show E (for España), F (for France), B for Belgium, D for Germany (Denmark uses DK), and UA with a flag symbol (for Ukraine).

Whew! That's more than enough for today.

Salud!

Guernica

This post is on a more somber subject than most of the ones that we will do.

During June we visited a town called Guernica. It is a small town in the Basque region of Spain founded in 1366.

By 1936 the town had developed an economy based on a combination of agriculture, trade and industrial factories.

This period was, of course, during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the years leading up to the Second World War.

On April 26, 1937, without warning, the town was bombed by Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe in a training exercise. It was bombed continuously for three hours and is considered the beginning of the Luftwaffe doctrine of terror bombing. It is estimated that 1,654 people were killed.

The bombing was requested by Franco and aided in his quest to overthrow the Basque Government and the Spanish Republican government. Most of Guernica was destroyed by the raid.

Franco denied responsibility and blamed “the reds” of having deliberately burned and dynamited the town. The Germans also denied responsibility.

Franco even offered aid to the town in an effort to convince the townspeople that he was their ally.

While there is some debate among historians about the events that led up to the bombing, the town’s museum places the blame squarely on Franco and Hitler.

Guernica quickly became a world-renowned symbol of civilian suffering resulting from conflict and inspired Pablo Picasso to adapt one of his existing commissions into his work called Guernica.

The painting resides in a museum in Madrid and a mural (seen at the top of the post) based on the painting was erected in Guernica.

There is also a sculpture called Gure Aitaren Etxea (Our Father's House) by Eduardo Chillida commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing. 

The museum dedicated to the history of the bombing in Guernica provides a thorough account of the events leading up to and after the attack. It is a detailed and sobering experience and one that couldn’t help but leave a deep impression.

Thankfully, the town has survived and rebuilt itself and stands as a testimony to the resilience of the Basque people.

A sad chapter in Spanish history, but one that needs to be preserved and retold.