Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Something to worry the Spanish public? Virgin Trains may move into Spain’s railways after being disqualified from bidding for new British contracts for refusing to take on pension liabilities.
- And surely something to worry British tourists to Spain . . . Many UK insurance companies are 'fraudulently' failing to advise you that you won't be covered for private emergency medical attention. Instead, you'll be sent to a public hospital you're already entitled to use under EU law. Or left with a huge bill for your treatment. Experts say that the rise of price comparison websites has resulted in a “race to the bottom” in which levels of cover are stripped away allowing policies to be advertised for only a few pounds.
- Here in Galicia during the summer, we have several rapas das bestas - round-ups of wild horses into corrals, where their tails and manes are cut by insane men and women who wrestle the beasts to the ground. I've attended a few of these with visitors and have never felt outraged. But now Ricky Gervais tells me that the people who do this are 'filth'. I wonder how he feels about the breeding of dogs that can hardly breathe. Or can't walk properly. Or are just smaller than cats, or even some rats.
- Up in Barcelona, neighbours of Gaudi's still-unfinished Sagrada Corazón have gone onto a war-footing. Personally, I've never much liked the bizarre construction.
- On the issue of post-prandial dish washing, my Madrid-based daughter thinks there are aspects of both Spanish and British culture which can't be explained except on the basis of That's just what we do/don't do. She also pointed out that some Spanish women won't allow you to help them in the kitchen, for whatever reason. Maybe that's why Spanish guests take me at my word when I pretend to decline their assistance . . .
- Talking of Spanish culture . . . Here's an interesting/surprising report.
- Trenitalia is another company gearing up to compete with RENFE from 2020. Should be a fun year.
- Meanwhile . . . Below, one unenchanted person's take on this week's events in Pamplona.
- Greece: Sure, the new government is a lot better than the populist, left-wing firebrands it will replace. And Greece is starting to recover from the longest and deepest recession since records began. Yet demand is still being sucked out of its economy by a dysfunctional monetary system, it is being punished by an over-valued euro and it is crippled by towering debts. The best it can hope for is to become the new Italy – and that isn’t really any kind of fix at all. . . . It will splutter along with tepid growth and perpetual debts - just like Italy - until either the euro is completely reformed, with a central budget that can distribute growth, or else it becomes fed up and leaves. Investors hoping to cash in on a sustained recovery will be disappointed, while the destruction of Greek living standards will remain an indictment of the failure of the single currency.
The USA/Nutters Corner
- Theresa May has expressed full faith in her ambassador to the US but rejected his description of Donald Trump as inept and insecure. As if. Not quite a ring of truth.
Spanish
- Word of the Day: El toples - Topless sunbathing
Finally . . .
- Given that youth unemployment is around 35% in Spain, I was rather surprised to read yesterday that Galicia's tourist sector will suffer this month from a shortage of 'qualified personnel'. I was even more surprised to then read this happens every year. Perhaps there just aren't enough South Americans to do the jobs young Spaniards seem unwilling to do.
THE ARTICLE
The day I discovered the grim reality of Pamplona's annual horror show: Chris Leadbetter, the Daily Telegraph
A few years ago, on an overcast October morning, I rose early, left my hotel on the grand square of Plaza del Castillo in the centre of Pamplona, and wound my way north to the narrow alley of Cuesta de Santo Domingo.
I paused for a few moments, took in a few gulps of clean Navarre air, and then turned on my heels and retraced my steps up the gradient – back into the little Plaza Consistorial, and left into Calle de Mercaderes. Then I picked the second turn on the right, and glimpsed the lengthy drag of Calle de la Estafeta, its cobbles damp and slippery in the autumn gloom.
Here, I could see, was the bulk of the 851-metre journey I was attempting – a long, self-contained strip with no obvious options for exit. It must have taken me four minutes to reach its end at walking pace – and by the time I had done so, I was wondering why anyone would try to follow the same route with a 1,400-pound bull careening along behind them in a furious frenzy.
They do, though – and hundreds of young men (it is almost always young men) will go where many others have sprinted and fallen over the course of this week, as the Festival of San Fermin (July 6-15) holds sway in what is one of northern Spain’s most intriguing cities.
You may well spot footage of them putting their limbs and lives at risk to take part in the encierro – the notorious “running of the bulls”, which takes place every morning at 8am across the eight main days of the fiesta.
Some would die for the “privilege”. Since 1925, 15 people have been killed in the process, gored or trampled under the hooves of these heavy bovines – the most recent fatality in 2009. Up to 300 people are injured every year. It is a brutal proposition.
And for none more so than the bull. Six of them make this harried excursion to the bull-ring each day. All six of them are slaughtered on the tip of a matador’s sword at some moment in the ensuing hours. Blood pours onto the sand, the audience roars, the party continues.
There can be no doubt that Pamplona’s main annual extravaganza is one of the most controversial events to take place on European soil.
And there are plenty of voices which declare it to be a disgrace. The League Against Cruel Sports (LACS) is unequivocal in its condemnation. Of the encierro, it states that “each morning many bulls are forced to run a kilometre down the cobblestone streets of the town, chased by cheering participants and spectators. Once released, the bulls are frightened with gun shots[rockets?] and kicked and hit by jeering spectators, often down concrete or cobbled streets which they slip and slide on, occasionally suffering broken legs and other injuries in the process.”
The protest group has long placed pressure on tour operators who offer packages to the festival, naming and “shaming” those who facilitate access. Airbnb, Kayak, EasyJet, STA Travel and TripAdvisor are among those who have stopped promoting the event following pressure from animal rights groups, but others – the LACS website mentions First Festival, PP Travel, Festival Adventures, The Backpacker Tour Company and Stoke Travel – continue.
Their perspective is understandable. And yet, there is clearly a disconnection between those who consider bull-fighting an abomination, and the estimated one million carousers who throng the lanes of Pamplona for nine days each July – and thoroughly enjoy the process.
Pamplona, with its history and folklore, is a seductive city – and I speak as someone who has spent several days there, and found it intoxicating.
Perhaps you can blame Ernest Hemingway, that most boorish and yet brilliant of American authors, who first visited the capital of Navarre for San Fermin in 1923, and painted it as a decadent riot of late nights, long lunches, after-dark bed-hopping and Roaring Twenties glamour in one of his greatest novels, 1926’s The Sun Also Rises – but it is difficult not to be caught up in the febrile ambience.
Even on the autumn weekend when I was last there – three months after San Fermin had finished – it still felt, to an extent, like the festival was in swing. There were Friday-night revellers spilling out of Bar Txoko – where Hemingway loved to drink while staying in the city – onto the busy flagstones of Plaza del Castillo. The coffee at Café Iruna – a Pamplona institution on the far side of the square, where the hung-over characters in The Sun Also Rises regroup for breakfast – is excellent, and ordering a cappuccino here effectively allows you to sit within Hemingway’s prose.
Bar Gaucho is another landmark, serving mouth-watering pintxos at bargain prices amid walls covered in bull-fighting posters and matador memorabilia. The bull-ring itself, the city’s soul, is an architectural joy – the third biggest stadium of its kind on the planet (behind Mexico City and Madrid).
Did being so absorbed by this merry swirl make me an apologist for bloodsports? I didn’t, and don’t, think so. And I confess that I haven’t been in Pamplona for San Fermin, nor seen a bull cut down in its arena.
But I must also confess that I have watched a corrida de toros.
A few months after being in Pamplona, I found myself in Seville while a festival was taking place at its vast bull-fighting temple La Maestranza. Perhaps it was the bellow of the crowd which pulled me in, perhaps morbid curiosity, perhaps a stubborn belief that I should witness what is often defended as a Spanish tradition with my own eyes before being able to deride it. Whatever the reason, tickets were available, and I took my place under a blazing sun to gaze at a horror show.
The perceived romance and ritual of the corrida – the costumes, the carnival atmosphere – vanished almost immediately, replaced by the desperate reality. What seems – in those colourful images in establishments like Bar Gaucho – to be ballet; athletic combat between man and beast; a meeting of warriors – is more like a back-street brawl where a lone victim is severely out-numbered (seven to one), and softened up by henchmen (including picadores – men on horseback, armed with lances), before the gang-leader strides in to deliver the coup de grace. It is an awful spectacle, the bull staggering around the ring, its life squirting from its wounds. I left at the end of the fourth fight (there are six in a session), unable to stomach any more, illusions shattered.
Do I regret paying to watch this series of assassinations? No – I wanted to be able to comment from a position of knowledge.
Would I do so again? No, never.
But the problem for opponents of bloodsports is that, while there has been a growing rejection of bull-fighting in Spain (notably in Catalonia, which banned it in 2010; Barcelona’s enormous arena La Monumental is now largely disused), in corrida hotspots like Pamplona and Seville, it is still practically a religion, where mass is unlikely to be cancelled.
Maybe there is a middle-ground somewhere – maybe the French version of the activity, Course Landaise, in which there is no bloodshed.
But as Pamplona surges through another week of mayhem, few of those dashing down Calle de la Estafeta will question the morality, wisdom or correctness of what they are doing. Or perhaps they will once they have stared open-mouthed as another noble creature collapses, its back reinvented as a pin-cushion.
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