There is an important hold-the-mirror-up-to-reality article in El Pais about the well-advanced destruction of the Spanish coasts.

You can read the original here in Spanish or try your luck with Google Translate, which gets things totally the wrong way round sometimes in its English version, e.g. “by 2030 the entire Spanish coast is untouched by human activities.” – Err I think the article actually says that by 2030 the entire Spanish coast will be affected/damaged by human activity – that’s if things continue at the current rate:

More than 50% of the beaches and 70% of the dunes belonging to the Spanish coast have been damaged or seriously altered; 60% of the wetlands that were present in 1950 have disappeared; more than 60% of the land immediately surrounding the beaches on the Mediterranean, southern Atlantic, and island coastlines, has been urbanised.

So by 2030, bye bye to the rest. The concrete necklace that separates Spain from the sea will be complete.

But wasn’t there a ‘Ley de Costas’ (Law of the Coasts) that was passed to protect this fragile ecosystem?

According to the article it is largely steam rolled by all-powerful corporations, with local councils (who need/want the cash) in their back pockets.

What’s the solution?

I suspect it has to be ground-up – people have to choose to look for well-established and/or environmentally conscious holiday locations, rather than booking into the big new resorts that have just landed on the latest bit of ‘pristine’ coastline…

Unfortunately we are due to spend some time before the season is over in one-such new beach urbanización on Spain’s southern Atlantic coast (visiting relatives there), and having read the above article, I don’t feel overly happy about that…

We’ll think more carefully about trips like this in the future, and try to keep to the kind of eco-friendly place we were lucky enough to find in Asturias.

My intercambio lead me to a wife, and a life, in Spain, so you can imagine I am a fairly big fan of the whole idea! So I was really happy when I got an email from Foster Hodge, with an excellent account of his intercambio experiences. I’ve included the whole article here, it’s a great read:

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Mi Primer Intercambio - by Foster Hodge

After spending more or less a month in Madrid, working on my Spanish, learning the ropes of the city, and falling in love with a new and exciting culture—I decided it was high time to take the next step. I had received quite a bit of encouragement from friends and professors of mine that I should get myself an intercambio, or a language exchange partner.

I decided to put my nerves aside and posted an anuncio in loquo.com, a wonderful website that offers a wide variety of things from renting and buying property, to citas de Internet and intercambios.

To my surprise, a couple days after posting my anuncio my inbox was flooded with responses from young Spaniards who were interested in meeting with me for a language exchange…

I quickly came to the realization that there are way more Spaniards in Madrid trying to learn English than there are native English speakers trying to learn Spanish. This boosted my confidence a bit, and prompted me to realize that my skills as a native English speaker were sought after and highly valued in Spain’s vibrant capital.

The next step was to choose one of the madrileños that had contacted me, get in touch with them, and set up some weekly meetings to begin our intercambio. I decided to contact a madrileña that was the same age as me, and also had some shared academic interests. We shared a series of e-mails, talked a bit about our interests and schedules, and we decided that we would make a nice fit for an intercambio. She suggested that we meet in a couple of days at the statue of the Oso y el Madroño in La Puerta del Sol, a place where apparently todo el mundo comes to meet for intercambios.

Let me first put a couple of things in perspective. In the days leading up to my first intercambio, I was quite excited about the prospect of spending some time with a young madrileña. I had only been in Madrid studying for about a month or so, but I was learning fast and was sure that a positive intercambio experience would drastically improve my Spanish, and that my friends and peers would be amazed by my progress.

Additionally, I had yet to meet a Spaniard that I wasn’t fond of. My host family, my teachers, any Spaniard that I ran into on the street seemed to be remarkably nice and interesting. I had already made a lot of comparisons between the Spanish and the Irish. They are both groups of people who inherit intrinsically likable qualities. They quickly make you feel at one with their way of life and their culture. They are the kind of people that you can have a brief conversation with and already feel like you have known them for a lifetime.

Naturally, when the day of my first intercambio arrived, all of this excitement and all of these positive thoughts quickly vanished from my mind. As I was making my way to La Puerta del Sol, my shyness and lack of confidence in my Spanish abilities began to take over. What are we going to talk about? What if I can’t understand her Spanish? What if she can’t understand my English? What if I forget all the things I have learned over the last month?

This is my first time really applying the Spanish I have learned into a real-life situation outside of the classroom. Why hadn’t I thought about all the potential things that could go disastrously wrong during a first intercambio?!

I arrived to the statue in Sol a little bit early, anxiously looking around to see if anyone fit the description. No one yet. I wondered if maybe I still had time to run into a bar and grab a couple of cañas to combat my nervousness. The moment the thought crossed my mind a young Spanish girl came up to me with a big smile on her face and said, ¡Hola Foster! ¿Eres tú?

I stood frozen for a moment, first taken aback by the fact that this girl was absolutely stunning. She had big beautiful brown eyes, a wide welcoming smile, and the slightly prominent chin structure that many Spaniards tend to have. In retrospect, I am not sure why I was surprised by her attractiveness, because about 90% of the Spanish girls I have met are drop-dead gorgeous.

After standing star-struck for quite some time, I fretfully replied that I was in fact the one she was waiting for and asked her in my most nervous Spanish where she wanted to go to chat for a little bit. She proceeded to give me dos besos and asked if I would like to go to La Latina, one of her favorite barrios in Madrid. Before we had even reached La Latina, she had used her inherent Spanish pleasantness to make me feel at ease. To this day one of my favorite things about Spaniards is how comfortable they feel around you and how comfortable they make you feel around them.

We arrived at Cava Baja, a street in La Latina that is literally composed of only bars! I would guess at least 60 of them. I frequented the area consistently throughout my semester abroad and I still don’t think I went to an eighth of the bars that are there. We walked around a bit, peeking into bars and people watching, and then finally decided on a sleek modern looking café that was less crowded than some of the others.

We had a couple of cañas (which got me speaking less nervously), and we talked about everything from our childhoods to jamón ibérico to health care reform in the US and everything in between. We spoke in Spanish for about two hours without realizing how quickly the time was passing. I still have trouble describing how good it felt to really speak Spanish with a native Spanish speaker for the first time. I was actually expressing my thoughts and feelings while maintaining a solid conversation, and it was genuinely one of the most positive and healthy sensations I have ever had.

As we were moving on to our third or fourth caña, a group of her friends happened to walk in. They all introduced themselves and were very nice, and they were incredibly excited about the fact I was a native English speaker. They were all in the process of learning English so I suggested that we should all switch to English for a while. I was impressed by how well they spoke English and they complimented me on my Spanish as well.

We spoke in English for a couple of hours, they continually asked me questions and I gave them advice and taught them as much cool colloquial English from the deep south of the United States as I could. Eventually one of the Spaniards suggested that we go to a discoteca. I was slightly hesitant at first as I had never been to a discoteca, but they all assured me that it would be a good time.

And they were right, it was an absolute blast! Although I am not much of a dancer, I danced all night and had an amazing time. On my walk home, I thought back to earlier that evening when I was nervously walking to Sol and truly couldn’t believe that my first intercambio experience turned out to be what I still consider one of the best nights of my life.

After my first experience with language exchanges I became obsessed with them. I met with several different Spaniards three or four times a week and I can honestly say that I never had a negative experience. Often I would meet their friends and I would introduce them to mine. On more than one occasion I was invited to their house and ate meals with their entire family (I will admit that a meal with an entire Spanish family can be a nerve-wrecking experience!).

Eventually I stopped considering my intercambio as language exchanges as thought of them as simply going to hang out with my Spanish friends. And all my intercambios are friends that I still keep in close contact with well after my return to the United States. Above all, my intercambios taught me an enormous amount about the Spanish language and about Spaniards, and my time in Spain was an exponentially richer experience because of them.

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Thanks Foster! Please feel free to reply to Foster, or to let us know about your intercambio experiences, in the comments below!

Also of interest for Spanish learners: “Top Ten Dead-Giveaways That You’re a Gringo Speaking Spanish, Even if You Speak Well …!”

There’s nothing like going on a holiday that leaves you with a feeling not just of relaxation and rejuvenation, but with a renewed sense of inspiration, purpose, and dedication all thrown in.

We’re obviously getting lucky with (or better at selecting) our Spain trips these days, because the last two places we’ve stayed have done just that.

First there was the extremely inspiring art retreat at Cortijada Los Gazquez, that left us convinced of the possibility of living with almost zero environmental impact (and left me better at drawing too!), and now we return particularly inspired from Posada del Valle in Asturias.

Like Cortijada Los Gazquez, Posada del Valle is the exceptionally well executed realisation of a brilliant dream. The idea is set out clearly in a well-worth-the-read document produced by the British owners Nigel and Joanne Burch, called What We Do And Why (PDF download link here). The “overall philosophy and aims of the hotel” are:

To be a viable business.
To offer an enjoyable high-quality experience for our guests.
To have a low environmental impact.
To co-operate with likeminded producers, especially in the local area.
To integrate our farm into the hotel.
To further our guests understanding and appreciation of biodiversity, nature conservation,
and food production systems.
To share our beliefs and experiences with others.

How many hotels have a philosophy, for a start? And one that aims to leave their guests wiser than when they arrived? Just reading the document above alone leaves you feeling like an expert in how to run an organic vegetable patch and a small, bio-diverse, sustainable organic farm!

And after a few conversations with owner Nigel (at my instigation, no preaching involved here), and strolls around the farm trail, I certainly do have a much greater “understanding and appreciation of biodiversity, nature conservation, and food production systems“. Plus I know all about the environmental dangers of chemical-based mono-cropping, and have lots of ideas about how I can make more simple changes to ‘do my bit’ for the health of the planet.

Philosophies aside, the location itself is also rather exceptional. Perched on the side of a steep valley a few kilometers from Arriondas, it is surrounded on all sides by the Picos de Europa, the Ponga mountains and the Sueve range, making for fairytale views – as I said in another piece about Asturias years ago:

The mountains are so fierce and sit so close to the coast that you imagine them put there by some imaginative storyteller, who would have giants sliding down them each morning for a quick wash in the sea. The foothills behind the cliffs are so green, the cows that graze them so picture-perfect and the woodlands and vegetable patches so ornate, that one would hardly be surprised to stumble across Hansel and Gretel, or houses made of chocolate.

All of this lies before you as you set out each morning from the hotel, or wander the grounds, exploring the farm, accompanied by friendly chickens, with the smell of wild mint under foot.

Our favourite trip was to La Pesanca, deep in the valley above Espinadero.

Travelling with our toddler, we had no chance of following the whole trail up to Les Vizcares, but the starting point of this, one of the hotels many meticulously detailed guided walking routes, was stunning in itself – just a picnic area above a raging mountain stream, beneath a dense forest of trees – pure green nature, of the kind it’s easy to forget exists any more when you live in Madrid.

So why was the stay so inspiring?

It was inspiring to see a business so well run – to be personally helped to choose your days activities over breakfast, and given a wealth of personal notes and guides as you set out each day, to be using hand-made organic soap in the bathroom made with the hotel’s lemon verbana leaves, to be drinking organic apple juice made from the farm’s apple trees, and to be eating delicious organic suppers from the farm’s fields (and to look from the supper table at Nigel chasing his horses away from a delicate tree in the field below the restaurant windows one moment, only to find him seconds later at your side asking what you’d like to drink with your meal!)

And it was inspiring to learn so much (to see so much in action) about organic sustainable farming, and to come away with the inspiration to live more ecologically, and to have fallen into deep streams of thought like this, that I scribbled down in my notebook one afternoon as I wandered along one of the farm trails:

If all the world’s great minds and powers turned their attentions to improving the lot of the whole planet, its ecology, ecosystems, species, and biodiversity, instead of just the lot and comfort of humans as the ‘top of the tree’ species, I have no doubt that very quickly the quality of life, and health, of not only the planet, but of all those that inhabit it, would soon improve immeasurably, and not only for the poor, but for the rich too, whose material and spiritual health and conscience would reach new previously unknown states of welll-being in as little as one or two generations.

I’ll leave my further expanded thoughts on this for myself (or for a later date), but I certainly do like holidays that make me think, that inspire me in areas of thought that I’d long meant to investigate.

I’m also pretty sure that you can go to Posade del Valle to simply do some exceptional walking, and some extremely easy relaxing, and I highly recommend that if you have Asturias in mind, you do just that.

www.posadadelvalle.com

Things did finally calm down in Madrid about 4am, but I imagine the country will be wild with this great win for some time to come. What a great feeling, well done Spain!

Baby wouldn’t cooperate with his parents desperately needed siesta plan, so I take him for a walk around the neighbourhood, hoping some pram-(stroller)-time will send him to sleep…

…but it’s 38 degrees outside… and there’s only so much hill I’m willing to push him up and down in this heat… only 6 hours sleep last night… god I needed this siesta – we’ve partly gone out of the flat so Marina can get hers at least, and if baby sleeps from all this walking, well, that’s great too, I’ll deal with my rest-deficit later…

…too hot pushing him up and down this hill (even on the shady side of the street) though, so we dive into the local supermarket to get 2 bottles of water – it’ll be air-con at least, and we’ll kill 5 minutes.

So we get the water, and head to the front to pay… but something weird is going on… just as we approach the checkout, I see a female member of staff telling a male colleague to follow her ‘right now‘…

…they overtake us just as we reach the back of the short queue, and the male Supermarket guy goes straight up one of the two tall, young, barrio 20-somethings standing just in front of me, my pram and my baby…

Supermarket Guy to Young Guy 1: “Show me what you’ve got stuffed in your pocket…”

Young Barrio Guy 1 (moving to within an inch of Supermarket guy’s nose): “You want me to smash your face in?”

Me to Baby (reversing rapidly): “Let’s go and have a look at what’s at the back of the store…” (This was shaping up to be one PG scene I thought baby probably didn’t need to witness…)

So we head to the furthest corner of the store, as all the other male supermarket guys rush past us heading to the front following an emergency call from reception, and we spend the next five minutes at the back of the shop with me nonchalantly pointing out interesting hams and packets of milk and different kinds of butter to the baby, as all hell breaks loose at the front…

…how long till the police get here?! A few mums and young teenage girls are playing the ‘let’s see what’s at the back of the store’ game with me, until at last the commotion dies down, we give it a minute for safety, and I head back to the checkout, hoping to pay and get out before the bad guys come back… which, according to the scared-looking and 8 months pregnant checkout girl, is exactly what they have promised to do later.

Meanwhile the entire male staff of the store, and a couple of their female colleagues, are piling back in from the street, after the bad-guys made their get away.

A young supermarket girl: “They punched Juan in the face, and opened up his mouth.”

Juan then appears, looking pretty boosted on adrenalin, and shows everyone his split lip: everyone agrees ice in a plastic bag is in order.

Finally, just as we get our change, two young cops turn up, and the staff start telling them how the bad guys just left on a motorbike. The 3 more cop cars that turn up as we are on our way out, head off in search of the baddies.

Baby and I give up on the siesta and the stroll, and head home to wake mum up.

Thoughts:

- You know when you’ve had enough city for one year, and it’s time to get out for a holiday. Even if you weren’t sure, suffocating 38º heat and street fighting certainly drives the point home.

- Why on earth do supermarket staff have to challenge shoplifters – is the shelf-stacking supermarket guy’s split lip (and obviously the result could have been a LOT worse) – really worth the price of whatever can be stuffed into a stupid barrio kids pocket? Hey management, either put security in, or let the barrio guys get away with it, but don’t put your staff in the punching line (note: pregnant checkout girl said “those guys WILL come back later, this sort of thing happens here all the time, and I know when they mean it, those two were seriously crazy…”)

- One of the barrio guys apparently said he’d also bring his girlfriend when they came back later, so she could punch one of the supermarket girls for him. Nice couple. Honourable behaviour and all that.

- If this is meant to be a pretty nice barrio, and “this sort of thing happens all the time”, what’s going wrong?

- Happy Summer Holidays… We’re out of here soon, so this may be my last post for a few weeks.

- You never get a siesta when you really, really, really need it. When you want a siesta as badly as I wanted one today, it generally gets seriously shafted!

From the celebrations in the street, that went on from the final whistle around 10:30pm, until at least 4 am, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that Spain had already won the World Cup Final, not just the semis against Germany!

We live in a fairly residential ‘barrio’ near the Retiro park, but things were absolutely crazy last night. I think more people took to their cars (to drive endlessly round in circles hooting their horns) than to their feet – and I’m not sure which was the safer bet – to be in the careering cars, or trying to dodge them!

Spain is a deservedly very happy country today, and I’m very happy too. I knew they could beat the Germans, and I’ve got a good feeling about the final too!

Can’t wait until Sunday!

P.S. Doesn’t that Iniesta look like a nice young man? Whose your favourite Spain player?

(Flag image courtesy wikipedia)

As Madrid settles comfortably into the mid-thirties (day AND night in our flat – never buy a top-floor flat in Madrid!), I dream again of the green north.

A friend sent me an interesting link of different walking routes around Asturias – even if you think you might never do the treks, the photos are like a refreshing breeze on these hot summer days – click the numbers on the map here:

Asturias en imagenes

-Update: it’s raining here now! Getting more Asturian by the minute!

As the drumming got louder and louder, she got up, opened her shutters, and went out onto her small terrace overlooking the Plaza. Suddenly an entire troupe of drummers and trumpeters processed slowly around the corner into the Plaza, followed by ladies in full festive Andaluz regalia, and lastly, at the end of the procession, a vast, ornate wooden float with Maria on top, shouldered by a couple of dozen men underneath.

They marched slowly into the square and up to the church where the festivities continued into the night.

“It was like a dream”, she said, “like a film… right there at my feet.”

More often than not I’ve found these very special experiences of Spain happen in Andalucia, but we’ve stumbled across equally fantastic fiestas in La Rioja and Galicia, and there is something uniquely captivating about the way these things suddenly come upon you in Spain.

Have you ever experienced a ‘sudden magic of Spain’ moment?

Download audio file (nfs77_los_gazquez.mp3)
[Download MP3]

This past week we headed to Almería to polish up my art skills, and talk to Simon at the Cortijada Los Gazquez, an incredible restored country house in a wild Natural Park in Almeria.

The house is totally off-grid, has some amazing eco-enhancements making it almost entirely energy and resource-independent, and tremendous art projects on the go, including creative art courses and artist residencies.

Listen to the podcast above, see some more images from our stay below, and do consider a trip to check out the amazing Los Gazquez experience: www.losgazquez.com

These situations include everything from the truly horrendous (speaking in Spanish to morticians after the death of a friend), to the exceedingly-important-not-to-get-it-wrong (negotiating the purchase of a flat, as related here), and the truly fantastic (getting through the technical Spanish of my wife’s pregnancy and the birth of our son!)

Whenever I felt in over my head, I just remembered the mantra: “At least it’s good for my Spanish!”

Over at our sister site Notes in Spanish, we are giving away lots of free videos and special reports this week that will, without any doubt, be very very good for your Spanish!