Old Properties

Things to think about when buying a farm in Spain: On any old farm the property was measured in ‘fanegas’ – a sort of rule-of-thumb measurement - and every village had a different size ‘fanega’ so the size of one ‘fanega’ in Mojácar was, likely as not, different from that in Turre. Now things are measured in hectares or square meters so it is standardized but the old properties aren’t. This makes it complicated when trying to read an old property deed. Another thing is your boundary. Years ago a farmer might have traded a donkey for an olive tree on their land, the donkey will have long passed on but the olive tree now – at least in theory - belongs to someone else. It depends, of course, on whether somebody wrote it down. We ourselves, for example, have a reasonably clear and evident spread of land, plus, according to an old neighbour, an extra five or ten square metres, not existing on any document, about half a kilometer away. One’s land usually stops at the top of a ‘barranco’, a level of once-arable land supported usually by stones (the dictionary isn’t very helpful) and not at the bottom. As I have mentioned before, if you have an ‘era’, that is, a round threshing place, you should find out if it is yours or communal. Or better still, if anyone thereabouts still owns a donkey. Rights of way and animal paths are another problem. For example, we have a piece of land behind ours that gives the owners the right to pass over our land to get to theirs so we cannot fence it. It is just for the land-owners in this case and not the public but it is evidently something of a nuisance. The water or electric company also may have a special right of way so if you fence the land you must put in a gate wide enough for a vehicle and give them a key. An animal path, called a ‘vía pecuaria’ (or, in Andalucía, ‘una vereda de carne’), is for public use and may go right through the middle of your garden. They may not be used much any more but you may not fence or build or barricade it in any way. No, not even the notary. It is not just open to shepherds or farmers with land on the other side but it is in fact a public footpath. Get your property surveyed because the piece you were shown might not actually be the piece you are buying, you might be buying the side of a cliff. An old trick usually played on one foreigner by another was to get a ‘papel del Estado’ – a fancy-looking watermarked paper dripping with seals and everything on it from the ‘estanco’ – the government paper, stamp, seal and cigarette shop - for twenty-five pesetas and merrily write your contract on that. If you didn’t know any better it looks pretty damn official. I think now with the notary and lawyers that has pretty much gone out of fashion but a lot of people ended up paying a lot of money for a paper they could have gotten at the ‘estanco’ and then finding out they didn’t own a house. Check who has been paying the taxes for the last ten or so years because they might own the land now. Most old farm-houses or ‘cortijos’ have been inherited by a number of family relatives sometime along the way, so you need written consent from ALL members of the family in order to buy. Lot of times, there’s someone in Argentina, another in Barcelona, another dead or in prison and there is always one ‘clever’ family member that holds out and winds up still owning a room in the house. It may not seem like a problem if it is an old ruin but once you have remodeled and are living in your new house they can put pigs in their room or try and sell it to you for a vast amount of money now that the property is worth something. Does your farm come with ‘tandas’ or hours of irrigation water - from springs or the town fountain? If it does you need to know how many hours and what days your land has (it’s usually out of a cycle of ten days), then you go to the spring and change the water-ways to go to your farm and irrigate or fill a ‘deposito’ for use later. This can mean a very early start, depending on the timetable. Many farms have three or more springs that they are entitled to but it is a lot of work to walk down the water channels and move the gates so that the water reaches you. Another thing to find out is if your land is protected archeologically, meaning you can’t under normal circumstances build at all. The land is registered with the ‘registro’ and also with the ‘catastro’. These two offices are mutually exclusive. The first is the Property Registry - think old bits of curling parchment and lilac ink – and the second is the Tax Register. Often, the property is different in one from the other: the vital one – often as we have seen rather lost in the old pine-tree and the large rock which boundaries with Paco el Loco’s land – is the true record of ownership. An ‘escritura’ or the rather shorter ‘nota simple’ are the receipts of the ownership: copying the salient points from the Register.

A ‘Fanega de tierra’ – after looking it up – has the following distinctions. ‘In Andalucía, equivalent to 6,440 square metres. In Castilla y León, it measures 2,000 square metres. In Madrid it goes up to 3,330m2 and in Albacete, it’s between 5,000 and 6,000m2 of cultivated land, depending'.

The Golden Years

A large number of people have joined a Facebook page called 'Mojacar Golden Years', where they post photographs of the times when the pueblo was still either 'interesting' or 'beautiful' (take your pick). You will find all the old 'characters' there, or maybe you can add your own.

The Milk Tooth

Barbara with her milk-tooth. Eating an ice cream many years ago on the Costa del Sol. Lenox' favourite picture.

Do You Want Grated Cheese With That?

It was a warm summer evening about fifteen years ago and Lenox had decided to take two new employees out to dinner. The couple evidently came from a deprived background, wore matching outfits and spoke a rather hard to understand English.

We arrived at the particular restaurant, a smart looking place with a terrace run by a Spanish couple. The husband is a great cook; although rather keen on fancy and peculiar combinations – the kind of food that no one in their right mind would ever think of preparing at home. The owners seated us and gave us our menus in Spanish and withdrew. We had never been there before (although we slightly knew the owners) and cast our eyes over the various peculiar dishes available. I forget now, but the simplest one was along the lines of lark’s breast stuffed with an olive. The faces of our guests fell as we translated the choices and it became clear they were more at home with the meat and two veg school of refection. To save ourselves from further discomfort, we launched into a melodrama of a forgotten child and an emergency with the baby sitter, all duly translated to Rocío, the owner’s wife; and with that, we left for the MacDonald’s around the corner.

Oddly, far from remaining under our wing, these days they eat lobster.

Two points more about this story. The first is that Rocío’s command of English is as good as or better than my own. The second is that our guests soon picked up a few pointers about expatriate life in Spain and shortly after, relieved us of a great deal of money. 

Our Romantic Trip

I was writing a special for our newspaper on romantic get-aways and contacted the head of tourism for the small town of Lanjarón, Granada. Lanjarón is a beautiful village, high in the Alpujarras and famous for its natural spring water and hot springs and old Moorish baths. After speaking with the head of tourism, he invited me and a guest to stay in his hotel and spend a weekend taking in all of the wonders of Lanjarón. It was late November and Lenox’s birthday so I thought it would be a wonderful surprise that would normally be out of my price range. We arrived at the hotel, having driven that day from Granada south over the top of the Sierra Nevada on an alarming and stony track, through little villages and hamlets at the very top of the Alpurrajas. Arriving in the town made famous from its bottled water, we found the hotel to our surprise to be chained, locked and bolted. The neighbors said maybe the manager (and acknowledged expert on tourism) had gone into Granada to go shopping. We spent the day wandering around the town and finally decided to take a room, at our expense, in the only hotel that was open. It turned out to be a hotel for senior citizens where the Spanish Social Security system brought elderly people by the bus-load. We checked into our room and were told that dinner was at seven. Our room was large, freezing and filthy. The view from our bedroom window was of snow; not a beautiful snowy landscape but of packed snow up against the window. We went to the dining room around 7:15 only to find that, in a most un-Spanish way, they meant dinner was served at seven not started around seven. Every course was a type of purée; soup, vegetable, meat and pudding. After a rather disgusting dinner we went out to find a bar and something to eat but along the main and indeed practically only street, everything was firmly shut; so we returned to the hotel bar. The only beverage on the shelf behind the bar was an elderly bottle of Licor 43, so Lenox ordered one and, to his gratification, was given a huge water glass full of this sticky liqueur. I asked for a coke and the bar tender had to leave the building and ten minutes later returned with a can of coke he must have got out of a friend’s refrigerator. Some of the other guests were gloomily playing dominoes while others were watching the TV. We decided to retire to our room. We were wearing every piece of clothing we had packed while all of the blankets and towels were spread on the bed and yet we were still freezing. Lenox suggested adding the rug on the floor but it was covered with heavy clumps of what appeared to be human hair.

After an unsatisfying breakfast of purée and with our hitherto benevolent opinion about Lanjarón firmly in retreat, we decided to leave the town, as even the hot springs and baths were closed for the season. We drove down the mountains towards the coast looking for somewhere beautiful and interesting. To our surprise, we came across a place called Orgiva – looking like the Santa Cruz Mountains of California wrenched directly from the 60s, with long-haired hippies wearing outsize velvet caps, a reek of patchouli oil, painted VW buses, the lot, all apparently moved in woozy bulk to the Alpujarras of Granada. We broke out trip briefly in another notable village, Yegen, where Gerald Brennan had lived for many years. Our conclusion? Don’t visit it in November. As we were arriving at the bottom of the mountains, still in search of a nice hotel, we coasted into Trevélez and came across a restaurant apparently famous for its trout so we pulled in to the parking only to find three bus loads of German tourists parking in mathematical precision in behind us. That would be a lot of trouts for one day, we thought, so we left. The only rooms we could find in the town – tourism evidently still not being a strong point from Lanjarón onwards – was above a gas station, so we decided to go home. When we regained the coast we chose not to let our romantic weekend be completely ruined so we went to a hotel on the beach in Aguadulce, Almeria. It was full of English and German tourists and, by chance, it was “Dress in Drag Night”. Nice to see the two nations coinciding for once – if only in complete idiocy. I have never been so happy to return to the beauty and comfort of Mojácar in my life, and until now, twenty years on, I never wrote the article about Lanjarón.

Note to the Lanjarón Tourist Board – please feel free to use this essay.

Promotion

December and January are probably two of the nicest months in Mojácar. The weather is beautiful and warm. You can immediately distinguish the tourists from the local residents. The tourists are all in shorts and flip-flops and we are all bundled up. Mojácar has never been properly promoted as a winter area yet we boast the best weather in Europe at this time of year. I see that our town hall has done a brilliant job on their promotional campaign and actually come up with a rather effective advert. But WHY ARE ALL OF THE ADVERTS IN MOJACAR????? We are flooded with the best campaign we have ever had but it is aimed at us and we already live here and love the place. It should be all over Norway and Germany and England; where they are all freezing and soaking wet. We would know that they had spent the advertising budget properly when we started seeing northern Europeans coming to visit, fill the hotels and restaurants and buying houses. No, we didn’t even get one advert placed in Turre, the town next door. While I am on the subject why don’t you listen to Bernard Cribbins' version of “Hole in the Ground” I think it is very appropriate considering what is happening in our village.

Escargot and a peach juice, PLEASE

When Megan arrived in Mojácar, I took her up to see the old village which towers over our house. We walked up the hill then up some stairs, through a narrow passageway which led to the shop of one of our daughters, Peque: I guess you have to be from around here to understand the family relationship. Anyway while Megan enjoyed the wonders of Peque’s shop, I played with my granddaughter, Luz. Upon leaving, Luz said she wanted to go with me, Mima. Peque said she would only stay a few seconds and would then want to come straight back. Luz had just turned three years old. Well, not only did she not want to go back, she wanted to buy things in all of the shops that we visited. Finally exhausted, after swinging her in the air all around town, I took her back to her mom. The sneaky little girl let me intentionally walk right passed her mom’s shop and told me she couldn’t find it. I knew better and tried to return her to her mother, but no deal, she was staying with Mima. We ended up spending a lot of time at Pasha’s Moroccan shop, next to the Taberna, smelling all sorts of incense and little blocks in colored bags. Megan, Pasha and I were all speaking sign language so Luz zipped her mouth and just started moving her hands all around and didn’t utter another word until we went to the Taberna for a drink. This tiny tot, climbed onto a bar stool, ordered Escargot with garlic and parsley with a peach juice; please, then she zipped her mouth again and watched herself signing in the mirror. Megan said “what did she order’” when I told her she was shocked because for an American two amazing things happened; one a three year old felt comfortable enough in a bar to sit and order a drink and second that she ordered something that to an American, only rich French people eat. We had a short conversation with the cook and then convinced Luz that upside down mushrooms with garlic and parsley were giant snails and she was content. Luz went home with a bag full of presents for her mother and left a big impression on Megan. I had lots of fun with all of them.