The Tourist Season is Over

Since 1980, the United Nations World Tourism Organization has celebrated World Tourism Day with an international observance on September 27.

Monday was World Tourism Day.

We suspect that the date comes from when, in a Good Year (without bombs, disease, civil unrest or a better offer from Turkey), the tourists have filled up the souvenir shops and hotels with credit card transfers, and by now have largely gone home again.

Oddly, we don't have a Residents Day, when the Residents are honoured for spending their money all year long.

Our calculation is that just one resident is worth to Spain the equivalent of one hundred tourists (we buy a house, a car, pay taxes and drink and eat all year long). We also try not to be sick in the neighbour’s garden or stay up until five in the morning singing boisterously (good word, that!).

So, ten thousand of us, no more, would be worth a million tourists, yet take up a lot less space in the village fiesta.

Most of our money comes from outside Spain and, between one thing and another, we take few jobs away from the Spaniards.

The thing is, we don't spend our money in souvenir shops, or in all-inclusive hotels. Which is why the subject of the foreign residents is largely ignored.

So how much effort does Spain spend on attracting full-time residents?

Is there a department, a ministry, a budget?

No.

 

Away From It All (with olives)

We were out in the campo near Tabernas, the town famous for its cowboy films, desert settings and those folk who wish to get away from it all (while still being only 45 minutes from an airport). 

Tabernas is hot in the summer, but nice now we are in late September. Our friend was showing us his house and olive plantation. 

The place is for sale since he and his wife are getting too old to look after the 575 olive trees. The finca is on two hectares and has a balsa - a water-tank, with 19 hours fill every ten days. He also has his own well and a pump. Water is a problem in the desert. Roberto is well-prepared. 

There are sundry out-buildings and the house is 100m2 with three bedrooms, a sitting room / kitchen and a walk-in garage.  A small bathroom and a large terrace round out the living arrangements. 

The price is 135,000€. The tractor is extra.

Jeepers! Head for the Hills!

 The American embassy has sent out a warning: ‘News media report volcanic eruptions have occurred in La Palma, Canary Islands. Evacuations are underway in Cabeza de Vaca and El Paraiso. There are reports of ensuing forest fires as well. U.S. citizens are advised to monitor local news and government websites for detailed information, including precautions to take and possible evacuation instructions’.

The Canary Islands are a long way from the Spanish mainland, being in the Atlantic Ocean some 600kms off the Western Sahara. In the improbable event that the eruptions turn the island of Palma into an explosive Karakatoa, the resulting tsunami (says a concerned article at the NZ Herald), where ‘…anywhere between 150 and 500 cubic kilometres of rock could slide into the ocean at 100 metres per second...', adding that 'the immense force caused by such a landslide would generate huge waves, hundreds of metres high, that would spread across the Atlantic and hit the coast of the Americas at heights of up to 25 metres…’.  

Equally more concerned with the American East Coast than elsewhere, a 2008 clip from The BBC on YouTube explains what could – conceivably – happen. Another (better) hair-raising video from Naked Science with the notable quote ‘…It’s a new-born baby island, barely passed its four millionth birthday…’ can be seen on YouTube here. Both British-made documentaries – are more concerned with the US than with Europe (or even the UK). Even the ABC is more worried about Manhattan than Cádiz. 

Shades of Hollywood’s Roland Emmerich and his disaster film '2012'. 

The tidal wave reaching Spain – at least the Atlantic coast, would apparently be less severe and the tight entrance into the Mediterranean would stop anything much more than a heavy sea rising a few metres inland.

Volcanic eruptions are quite rare and can be dangerous – as the good people of Pompeii found out – briefly – to their cost (although the current tremblers in Yellowstone could herald something better described as catastrophic). However, Spanish volcanologists say the chance of such a scenario is infinitesimal. The Olive Press also looks at the rank improbability of a mega-tsunami here.  

In all, the likelihood is that the Palma eruption could continue for some time and, as the TV whimsically noted on Monday, the lava flowing into the sea will fortuitously cause the island to grow in size (!).

We read in El País in English that ‘The president of the island council, Mariano Hernández Zapata, called the scene ‘devastating’ given that the molten rock ‘is literally eating up the houses, infrastructure and crops’ on its path toward the coast’.

As the island of La Palma – really just a small portion of it – is in eruption, and everyone who lives or in holidaying nearby are hurrying across the hills to catch a glimpse of the treat (except of course the Americans), the President of Spain passed up a formal visit to the UN to meet instead with the startled neighbours while the Minister of Tourism is looking into the possibilities of making the new volcano a tourist attraction.

Not that it’s necessarily happening at all, mind – some negacionistas reckon it’s a fake.  

There's No Place Like Home

 

Goodness, there’s another row between the Daily Express and the EU. On this occasion, the Spanish – at the very least – have said that those Brits living in Spain, as we delicately put it on Facebook, ‘under the radar’ – that’s to say, without the appropriate paperwork – will be summarily ejected from the country when discovered.

If we might assume that this will be the case for all of the EU-27, not such a leap perhaps, then there will soon be quite a large number of tearful Brits waiting on the quayside for one of London’s fine destroyers to dock.

One can imagine the call from the captain: ‘Form an orderly queue please (they already had, of course). You can bring with you one small suitcase, no pets and no foreign companions’.

Bickering between themselves as to whether they were expats (or exexpats) or rather immigrants, the deported Brits shuffle slowly forward to the gangplank.

‘I suppose this is all to do with Brexit’, says one redundantly.

The problem doesn’t end there.

As they disembark at the other end, in some British port far away from the eyes of the press, they will wonder what will become of them. This isn’t a re-run of Dunkirk – nobody in the UK wants anything to do with this.

Neither their relatives, anxious about the spare-bedroom and the drinking problem, nor the Home Office who might wonder if they were in any way responsible for the 200,000 or so refugees who would be preparing themselves, in that British way we have, into making a fuss.

The UK is not the same as GB, as any number-plate enthusiast can tell you, because now it’s just another foreign country.